Audiopile Review: Joseph Kamaru aka KMRU has been one of the most intriguing experimental electronic artists of recent years. When KMRU appeared on the scene, the fact that he came from Kenya was certainly part of the intrigue. But the consistent brilliance of his work meant that any spurious novelty value was quickly forgotten. In any case, these days, we’re used to all kinds of weird and extreme music coming out of Africa. It’s hard to be surprised, much less to harbour any reactionary expectations about what African music might entail. With 2022’s ‘Temporary Stored’, Kamaru effectively asserted that a uniquely African perspective was, however, central to his music. Utilizing recordings from the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, he showed that experimental electronics offered an ideal tool for interrogating the objectification and appropriation inherent in colonial violence. Given the depth and weight of this subject matter, it’s hardly surprising to see a second volume of ‘Temporary Stored’ appear. On ‘Temporary Stored II’, Kamaru invites a range of collaborators, including the very excellent Aho Ssan, to add their takes on the source material. The result is an intense, multi-layered album of ambient music, which feels like a stinging, but not unsympathetic, riposte to the exoticism of ‘fourth world’ music. One of the most important releases yet from one of the most important electronic music producers active today.

When KMRU accessed the sound archive of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, it catalysed an auditory response in the form of the album Temporary Stored. The album listened back to listen forward – to reckon with the collective inheritance of colonial (sound) archives. Temporary Stored II serves as an artistic and curatorial extension of the original album, inviting other artists to lend their critical ear to museum archives holding recordings of African songs, traditions and practices. With KMRU, Aho Ssan, Lamin Fofana, Nyokabi Kariũki and Jessica Ekomane draw upon their listening experiences as global contemporaries navigating a world in flux – ecologically, economically, and politically. Each artist brings a selection of sonic fragments out of dormancy, channelling (in)audible traces into a contemporary cultural and political paradigm.

Temporary Stored II sensitively responds to historical archives whose sounds have been restored and made more accessible through digitalisation, despite still being the copyrighted property of European institutions. It develops an emergent language to engage with the vocal, rhythmic and syllabic intelligence rooted in these sonic repertoires, grounded in reimagination of sonic records as seeds for a sounding future. Listening back to these recordings is one way to recover the loss of listening traditions, orality and modes of transmission. In these sonic mediations, Lamin Fofana, KMRU, Jessica Ekomane, Nyokabi Kariũki and Aho Ssan account for the archives with care and criticality.

Inscribed in this album are “black waveforms as rebellious enthusiasms”, which in the words of Katherine McKittrick “affirm, through cognitive schemas, modes of being human that refuse antiblackness while restructuring our existing system of knowledge.” The album asks us to listen to colonial pasts and imagine the sound of our epistemological futures. It is a sonic retort; a playback to history and its colonial processes of extraction and accumulation. Temporary Stored II is a reminder that the labour of listening back is a continuous process of reassessing what has been lost, captured and refused.