LAMIN FOFANA Vinyl & CDs

Review: Honest Jon's assembles a crack team of dub heads here for an experimental foray into the outer edges of the genre. Holy Tongue kicks off with three versions of 'Dey Sey' with its darkened electric and soot black dub sounds echoing through a desolate urban landscape in the dead of night. Beatrice Dillon's '2020' then takes a totally different approach with icy and glistening synths over more stripped back and crisp rhythms and percussive patterns and then there is a tribal approach to Caprices mix of Lamin Fofana while Itinerant goes for something more cosmic and airy. LABOUR's 'Etu Keur Gui' closes out with a pair of clattering reworks to cause real dance floor destruction.

Review: There is a sense of nominative determinism with this new album from New York-based producer Lamin Fofana. It is a dark, beautiful and bleak cinematic soundscape with long-held drones and misty pads offset by tinkles of water, the hiss and crackle of vinyl and static electricity and plenty more. These grainy textures and beautifully dread-fulled sounds were inspired by "recent readings on climate emergency and its specific implications for Black life, from hurricanes in the Caribbean to mudslides in West Africa. There is a tension to the work and the way it subtly shifts, tears and teases apart to real new ideas that very much hypnotises.