Bleep

Both ever prolific and having skirted each other’s realms of ambience, drone, and heavily textured sound design, Kevin Richard Martin and Joseph Kamaru seem like the perfect pair. Their first collaborative work and first release for both in 2024, Disconnect synthesises their abilities in “a powerful study of dread, hope, and profound sonics” stretched across three “core moments”. Martin’s dark dub-infused soundscapes and eroded textures meet Kamaru’s penchant for creating liminal space from field recordings and sonic experimentation, with Kamaru’s own voice awash in the dense soundscapes.

A billowing cloud grows on the opening ‘Differences’, inside it storms of reverberating stabs and echoing plucks, wispy sung vocals slowly mixing in, surrounded by the all consuming bass of the night sky. Snatches of spoken word emerge from and disappear into the loosely rhythmic lushness, expanded into a monologue on the following ‘Arkives’ that touches on philosophical, sociological, and anthropological themes while toying with language. ‘Arkives’ contrasts with its low growling strings and distant vocals of mythical weight, becoming more blistered, buzzing, and gritty as the track goes on.

These themes and sounds evolve and restructure throughout the record. ‘Difference’ flips its predecessor’s movements into a cautiously treading beat, amidst tolling bells and crackling tendrils of flames, further transformed on ‘Differ’ where the bells descend into endlessly deposited dunes of quivering bass and intoning vocals. The ghostly signature of KRM’s dub sensibilities is meanwhile thrusted into grainy, harmonically shivering ambience on ‘Ark’, while what was once an extended soliloquy is now a lone fragment of a word tiptoeing into the aether on ‘Arcs’.

The Bleep exclusive bonus Otherness EP cut from the same sessions amplifies Disconnect’s themes, with filtered spoken word forming a trickling atmosphere over tense plummeting bass plucks and minimal yet harrowing rhythm, as Kamaru repeats, “Black bodies and voices have been silenced.”

Disconnect brings the evocative and enchanting results you would expect from such a high calibre connection, an inspired link up from the Phantom Limb crew.