Africans With Mainframes - K.M.T.

Pitchfork 75

Recently DJ and producer Jamal Moss appeared on a panel on Afrofuturism at Moogfest alongside Reggie Watts, Janelle Monáe, and hip-hop production duo Christian Rich. It was good company for him to be in, but even in that eclectic crowd he is an outlier. Whether as the Sun God, I.B.M., IAMTHATIAM, or most often as Hieroglyphic Being, Moss' abundant discography is filled with so many u-turns that it begins to resemble a Spirograph. For every CD-R of synth squalls there is another full of manic drum machine polyrhythms. And then there was We Are Not the First, last year's meeting with an ensemble of free jazz’s finest, suggesting an imaginary space where the AACM gigged at Ron Hardy's Music Box.

Working with fellow producer Noleian Reusse as Africans With Mainframes, now Moss swings from Windy City jazz to Chicago acid at its most caustic. While the duo have released a slew of 12”s dating back to 2001, K.M.T. is their first full-length. Kemetic Modulating Textures is eight tracks of Moss and Reusse at their most unrelenting and there’s a coarseness to every texture that at times might make you mistakenly think it was just slapped together. Yet the frequent references to Egyptology (Googling each track title reveals a profound knowledge of prehistoric culture) suggest a greater thought at work, and if you manage to survive the bruising BPMs of the album's first half, it becomes mesmerizing.

Opener “Anachronistic” sets the table for what lies ahead: everything in the red, a snare fill stumbling and slipping across the grid, the 808’s edges increasingly fuzzy with distortion. And then just when it verges on pure noise, that telltale acid squiggle worms through and the snare coheres into a visceral thrill. What might scan as sloppy and unfocused suddenly snaps into sharp relief and it’s effective throughout K.M.T., album highlight “Negroid Spinx” being a fine example. It too features overdriven snares that concuss to the point of delirium and then at the 3:30 mark, Moss and Reusse drop out the beat and give us a brief respite, a glimpse of an oasis in the midst of a haboob.

On the back half of the album, AWM relent and allow in more space. The epic “Qustal Artifacts” builds carefully, the track forgoing heavy beats for a heady array of arpeggios, the results not unlike Cluster, had they been Afrocentric rather than Germanic. “Naqada” and the title track sound like some tribal Folkways field recording rendered on machine rather than anything currently extant in electronic music.

Last year, Moss explained his first encounter with Sun Ra’s music as a shock to the system: “His music wasn’t about making sense: it was just about receiving these transmissions, this knowledge.” It’s a lesson that Moss carries forward with K.M.T., suggesting that while some of his tracks might scan as scrambled transmissions, continued exposure reveals a profound signal beneath the noise.