Right from the start, I kinda knew I was going to like this. It opens with a simple phrase of Eno-ish synth that repeats and develops, but then there’s this crackling sound — not a hauntological vinyl crackly, mind you, but something that mutates between the hot fizz of a campfire and more of a wet tearing sound as if the melody is bubbling up from another world — and it’s the crackling — which, incidentally, I think is mostly field recordings — which provides, if not the rhythm, then at least the closest we get to a propulsive through-line around which the melodies plink and plonk.
Things get a little weirder by track 4, Ex-Voto For A Shipwreck, where the melody is demoted to a distant call-sign and sounds of wind and creaking beams come to the fore. The structure apparently follows that of the Martinican write Aimé Césaire’s poetry cycle, also called Corps Perdu, if you’re into that sort of backstory. (Fofana, for the record, grew up in Sierra Leone and Guinea before moving to the US. If we’re doing backstory.) At any rate, there is something of a sense of evolution here. The lengthy title track is a mini-narrative all by itself. There is tension in here as well as warmth. And the closing track is a magical evocation that has a childlike simplicity on the surface and a mystery swirling in the depths. It’s cracking stuff.
I bought this from Boomkat. They call it Ambient.
