okokon

LP GENRE/S: Electronic / Experimental TRACKLISTS: > A1 / 1. Borga > A2 / 2. Mentor > A3 / 3. Judgement (feat. Okwui Okpokwasili) > A4 / 4. Principalities I > A5 / 5. Fruit Bat > B1 / 6. Lifted > B2 / 7. Principalities II> B3 / 8. Agnate > B4 / 9. Libate > B4 / 10. Bones SHORT INFO: Okokon returns to Other People with his sophomore album, 'Offering', delving deeper into the lush and cinematic soundscapes he first explored on his debut album, 'Turkson Side'. While primarily working in visual arts, Africanus Okokon, who records under his surname, bridges his artistic practices in 'Offering', using his masterful collage techniques to create his most personal work yet. Defying easy categorization, the album melds influences from dream pop, avant-garde folk, psychedelia, trip hop, and dub, with traces of field recordings seamlessly blended throughout to form a cohesive whole. 'Offering' sees Okokon confronting and negotiating a sudden and unexplained death that occurred in his childhood and the complex emotions left in its aftermath, acting as his main inspiration when making the album. This ambiguity is something that permeates throughout, with Okokon wanting to explore the ambivalence and sometimes uneasiness of contradicting emotions appearing simultaneously, alluded to in the album title. This is also reflected in how the album tracks each inhabit different narrators with varying perspectives on the same events. The result being a hauntingly beautiful album, with recurring themes of death, growth, sacrifice and spirituality ever present. VITAL SALES POINTS: Follow up to 2015’s Turkson Side. released on Other People, which garnered favourable reviews from the press “standout album with an electrifying mixture of modernity and tradition, with chimes, drums, and keyboards sparkling through a warm, nostalgic production haze.” PopMatters “Turkson side is by no means a dystopian epic, rather a gooey slice of lighthearted experimentation” The Wire

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: gpsr@wordandsound.net

Beautifully Designed 1LP, 180g Vinyl Just waking up and everything sounding slower. Holes in the wall. The unknown in the familiar. The shock of the new. Just-turned rubble. Thick clouds of recall. Muted high-life, de-centered hip-hop, and disparate conversation. Heavy, sinking jazz and dissected infomercials. Too much chewing gum? Not quite anything, or half of something. Reminds me of. Smells like…? Turkson Side is Africanus Okokon's first album. It is almost entirely sample-based, made largely within a simple, custom-made playback software with each track recorded in one take with very little editing. "Wrake" is the only exception, a recording of him playing an Ethopian krar inside his house. Africanus is no stranger to the label. Primarily a visual artist with background in video, animation, and collage, he's designed most of Other People's recent site graphics and a number of release covers. In part, this album as Okokon is a translation of a developed aesthetic to an unfamiliar medium. Like his collage and animation work , it's rough-hewn yet deliberate, consciously inclusive of digital processing and sampling artifacts for their unique texture and visceral affect. Throw the means aside, though, and what you've got is an evocative collection of craggy, trance-inducing concréte-poetry that act equally well as soundscapes for late-night or early-morning. "Asphalt" starts things, a near-fifteen-minute "multi-movement" (if you will) piece that moves through zones of blasted commercial intro FX, alien telecast High-Life, gibberish spoken word, and xylophonic skeleton dance march music, lingering at every interstice. Shorter, more singular pieces follow, each swathing and detailing a particular rhythmic structure with choice loops: the detritus of film soundtracks, warped conversation, gain-pumped jazz-shuffles, and old, mystic drum tapes that glitch and squeeze through the software's un-sanded synapses. Higher volumes are recommended to bring out the record's finer imperfections. Tracklist LP: A1. Asphalt , A2. Cushion , A3. Host B1. Flipcam , B2. Wrake , B3. Soft , B4. Perspiration , B5. Contelest , B6. Sargassum

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: gpsr@wordandsound.net