It sounds as though the LA beat-concréte producer known as Ahnnu is making the rounds on our favorite tape labels. Earlier this year he graced the radar with a Leaving Records/Stones Throw release entitled, World Music. This month he's linked up with East Coast sound collage afficionados NNA Tapes for the release of Battered Sphinx.
Like his previous release, Ahnnu's attached a statement to assist in the interpretation of his art. It reads as follows:
These songs are accompanied to a scenario where controversy defines history, and the relationship between nature and the ideal is exhausted by a tradition based on the exertion of refinement. Battered Sphinx is the dialogue of tension, divergence and fragmentation. Represented in its production, this an exercise of dissection left to embody the condition of the archaeologist in which the pursuit itself may be independent from its effectual merit.
Delving into Battered Sphinx, the modern transmissions are met with the muffled sound of machine gun fire, but the texture is natural, possibly to a point that it shouldn't be. When the rain washes out the overture, a pergatory of a broken loop keeps the composition in awkward rest, until it is once again met with the cleansing power of another rain. NNA Tapes views Ahnnu as an musicial anthropologist – couldn't agree more. There's the lingering sense that he's challenging us for the sake of observation. He's woven the familiar of LA-based electronic tapes, the sample-based world, into this fractured space that taunts our senses with sounds that could be as familiar as a Flying Lotus production or deeper in our psyche like the soothing twinkle of a nursery mobile. But with each sensory cue, he slices it into unsettling repetition or abandons it just when we've come to expect comfort from it. C'est la vie, Ahnnu.
Ahnnu's Battered Sphinx is out now on NNA Tapes.
