Global Music Column – August

Lamin Fofana – The Open Boat

Across the eight tracks of Lamin Fofana’s latest album trilogy, the Sierra Leonean producer builds on his previous explorations in ambient music. He plays with a languid slowness induced by gradual shifts in tone, rustling field recordings and synth-based melody. The liner notes reveal a hefty ideological underpinning here: Amiri Baraka’s poetry and the pandemic warping our perception of time guide the opening instalment, Ballad Air & Fire; disruption of European colonial notions of art and rationality in Shafts of Sunlight; and the legacies of migration on The Open Boat.

Read the review in the Guardian.

[This piece was published on 15/07/22]