Bleep

PTP (Bonaventure, Celestial Trax) have given us another fine work that synthesises thesis, practice and product. A collaboration between Liverpudlian sound artist Kepla and New York-based music writer DeForrest Brown Jr., Absent Personae is a forthright and powerful meditation on black subjectivity and identity. The work is helmed around spoken-word passages from Brown. Many of these were muttered under his breath in public places, and this whispered-in-your-ear feel provides extra weight to Brown’s erudite theorising. Kepla’s adjacent soundscapes are expansive and challenging in a manner that recalls an ambient Arca or Jlin. At other times Kepla seems to go it alone, such as the trap-in-a-washing-machine jam ‘Reflex And Bone Structure’.