Joseph Kamaru’s breakout album, Peel, might never have existed without COVID-19. He recorded its six long tracks of lightless drone at home in Nairobi in April 2020, after the sudden global shutdown had scuttled plans for a European tour. Peter Rehberg, head of Vienna’s Editions Mego label, received the demo while stuck in Berlin during the first quarantine period; he said that the unreleased album became his personal soundtrack for those featureless weeks.
Peel was released in July of that year, at a moment when the stillness of the world masked a deeper unease. Kamaru’s album, unlike more conventionally soothing strains of ambient music, reflected that thrumming sense of disquiet. It often felt like a million things were happening at once under the surface of the music, though you’d be hard pressed to pinpoint a single one of them: gravitational fields colliding, ocean currents flowing into one another, legions of bacteria mounting invisible wars. It was nominally an ambient record, but its outward calm seemed to mask wave upon wave of energy, surging toward a climax that never came.
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Since then, Kamaru—better known as KMRU—has put out more than a dozen releases, proving as versatile as he is prolific. He has explored Nairobi’s electromagnetic signature and quotidian soundscapes; undertaken critical histories of colonialist extraction; collaborated with noise musician Aho Ssan and dub bulldozer Kevin Richard Martin; and anthologized the work of his grandfather and namesake, a famed benga musician and political activist. But until now, he had not released anything that felt like a companion to Peel. More than any of his albums in the intervening years, Kin assumes that role. It offers a vision of ambient music as a vast matrix of overlapping vibrations, both meditative and galvanizing.
Kamaru began work on Kin early in 2021, while Peel was still new to the world, guided by conversations with Rehberg about what shape a follow-up might take. But when Rehberg died of a heart attack that July, a year after Peel’s release, the Kenyan musician stepped back from the project for a while, and he took his time completing it the following year.
Though Kin marks Kamaru’s return to Mego, he has said that he doesn’t see it as a proper sequel; if there’s one song from his breakout LP that sets the tone for the new album, it’s Peel’s “Klang,” whose rumbling expanse of diamantine feedback and helter-skelter throb made it a stylistic outlier among its duskier, more muted neighbors. Virtually all of Kin borrows its distortion and unstable vibrations, making the new record a far less soothing listen than its predecessor. It opens calmly enough, a lone synth fanning out in wavering fourths, like fingers tracing lazy circles through clear blue water. But soon, a foamy layer of distortion coats everything, blurring the space between the intervals as a high, keening melody—it could be whistling wind or a crying voice—cuts across the top. A sweetly charred amuse-bouche, the track is over in just three minutes, but the fuzzed-out textures return on “Blurred,” a 12-minute collaboration with Kamaru’s one-time tourmate Fennesz that sounds almost like an a wordless, hi-def take on the blissed-out noise fantasia of Flying Saucer Attack.
