Aho Ssan

Rhizomes

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Book

Boomkat Product Review:

Aho Ssan debuts on Other People with second solo album and book ‘Rhizomes’ featuring Nicolás Jaar, Moor Mother, Angel Bat Dawid, clipping., Blackhaine, Resina, 9T Antiope, James Ginzburg, Mondkopf and more.

Niamké Désiré to the feds, the artist aka Aho Ssan arrives at 2nd LP ‘Rhizomes’, for Nicolas Jaar’s Other People, via an acclaimed 2020 debut album on Subtext and the ‘Limen’ collab with KMRU, both of which built on a strong reputation fostered in the Parisian underground, and has since spilled into international acclaim.

Following a remix of Richie Culver and key performance at Berlin Atonal 2023, in which he debuted the ‘Rhizomes’ live A/V show with Sevi Iko Dømochevsky, the album lurches forward in bouts of disrupted ambient, post-industrial clangour and gnarled spasms of experimental rap with the sort of theatric sonic spectacle and distended, noisy, staggering dynamic expected of contemporary stages and production aesthetics. There’s little lush to shut your eyes to and get lost in; it’s more about witnessing the wreckage of late stage capitalism with eyes wide open, slightly detached and perhaps even numbed to it, with everything pushed up to the biting point, even in its quiet moments, in order to wrest some emotion from rinsed out nerves.

A co-commission by Other People, Donaufestival and INA GRM, the overbearing, sprawling nature of ‘Rhizomes’ was inspired by the artist’s reading of the concept laid out by Deleuze & Guattari, in which the idea of “an ever evolving structural model, constantly in motion and spreading out in all directions at once” informed the music’s structuring and temperament, said to have “no beginning and no end, but always remains in a middle, through which it grows and overflows”. Very Paris and Berlin, then, and as such with a fine grasp of the ideas that went into “deconstructed club music”, and were duly sloshed out with the bathwater in late 2010s by club goers who just wanted the juice, no fibre.

‘Rhizomes’ expresses its complexity of ideas and aesthetics thru 10 highly strung parts, escalating from avant-classical ambient-blues of ‘Ouverture’ with Nyokabi Kariũki to the industrially augmented seethe of Blackhaine on ‘Cold Summer’, reminding of the rapper’s Paith set, and the post-drill blow out ‘Till The Sun Goes Down’ with clipping., to relative respite of ‘Hero Once Been’, an air-shuddering ‘Tetsuo’ one-two with Emptyset’s Ginz, and the stately delivery of Moor Mother over the clash between Angel Bat Dawit’s jazz spirits and Ssan’s gristly sound designs with Mondkopf in ‘Rhizome IV’.

Book (10)

Back in stock. 160 page, French fold jacket art / lyric book created by Kim Grano, Aho Ssan and Maziyar Pahlevan. Comes with a download of the album dropped to your account.

Play All Book (10)