- The Paris-based sound artist assembles a star-studded guest cast for his second album, celebrating community and collaboration in the face of looming crisis.
- Niamké Désiré, better known as Aho Ssan, is a French experimental composer, filmmaker and aficionado of French philosophy. His first album, Simulacrum, was inspired in part by Jean Baudrillard's seminal work Simulacra and Simulation, and in part by his own grandfather's life story. Désiré's second album—and debut for Nicolás Jaar's Other People label—Rhizomes follows suit. Philosophy mingles with personal history in harsh yet contemplative post-industrial electronics.
This time around, Désiré takes the titular concept from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Rhizomes are a model for a nonlinear and decentralized society, openly opposed to hierarchical Western science. They are—just like their botanical counterparts—a network growing in all directions simultaneously. None is better than the other, and there is no one defined truth or direction to progress. Rhizomes also, to cite Désiré himself, "foster connections between various organisms and allow them to flourish collectively."
To achieve this collective growth, Désiré invites a diverse slate of seasoned experimental musicians. Jaar, Resina, Angel Bat Dawid, Moor Mother, clipping., Nyokabi Kariuki, 9T Antiope, Exzald—it's as if he was trying to remind us that there is so much interesting, genre-bending music all over the world, and that each culture offers a distinct and worthy worldview on it. The collective output is as diverse as it is cohesive. Spanning deconstructed club music, slam poetry, avant-garde jazz, sound art and ambient, Rhizomes is driven by sounds evoking frail structures on the verge of collapsing, perhaps mirroring endangered civilization in the face of climate catastrophe or post-pandemic tensions.
When Désiré paints the image of decaying society, the music on Rhizomes is dark, earthly and solid. It's asphyxiating and depressing, like on the full sonic despair of "Cold Summer I," featuring Blackhaine, who delivers a lament over the mournful, stripped-down track that calls back to Simulacrum's majestic synths. The two-part "Tetsuo," with Emptyset's James Ginzburg, is full of high-pitched, distorted noises and bursts of sonic chaos.
Taking a more personal angle, Désiré delves deep into his own experience of growing up Black in France and touches on the question of identity. There's a sense of uncertainty, anxiety, of feeling in the wrong place throughout the album. Here Désiré also takes inspiration from the field of philosophy, this time citing Black French philosopher and writer Edouard Glissant, who took rhizomes from Deleuze and Guattari and transformed the concept into a symbol of complicated, multicultural and multiracial identity.
There is hope, too. You can hear it in anti-violence statement "Till the Sundown" featuring clipping. and Resina's angelic vocalizations, or in "Fermeture," where mantra-like repetitions of the album title start sounding more and more like a call to revolt—"rise on." With a guest cast of collaborators and the concept of rhizomes in mind, Désiré builds the opposite to our over-individualised 21st century: a comeback to community.
The physical copies of the album—it was released in the form of an artbook that explores the rhizome concept further—feature a sample pack to use freely, implicitly inviting the listener to take part in this project. To stress that rhizomes are an infinite, tangled structure, it also contains extended versions of a few tracks and an additional three collaborative compositions. This sense of open-ended communality makes Aho Ssan's an LP a spiritual successor to Unsound's Weavings, helmed by Jaar in 2020. The parallels are obvious: a collective collaboration, a relay race, a concept of a decentralized, web-like structure. The effect on Rhizomes is denser, rawer and more emotional, using the community structure to express the deeply personal.
Tracklist01. Ouverture feat. Nyokabi Kariũki
02. Cold Summer Part I feat. Blackhaine
03. Le Tremblement feat. Nicolás Jaar
04. Till The Sun Down feat. clipping. & Resina
05. Hero Once Been feat. 9T Antiope
06. Tetsuo I feat. James Ginzburg
07. Tetsuo II
08. Away feat. Exzald S & Valentina Magaletti
09. Rhizome IV feat. Moor Mother, Angel Bat Dawid & Mondkopf
10. Fermeture feat. Nyokabi Kariũki