Honour’s sisters had been frightened once they first heard his music. “They stated it was darkish,” the nameless producer recalled in a current interview with Crack Journal. “However it might get so much darker.” All through Àlááfíà, his moody debut album, the PAN-signee parses the lack of his grandmother in addition to their shared cultural heritage and spirituality. At instances sounding like a collection of warbled and crackling FM dispatches, Àlááfíà dips and weaves between jazz, gospel, trip-hop, and subdued rap manufacturing. The inclusion of subject recordings, burrowed deep into gritty and impressionistic digital sequences, give a way of recollections smudged by grief.
As he places it, Honour didn’t simply document Àlááfíà: He “constructed and destroyed” it through a time-consuming technique that spanned three cities—London, Lagos, and New York. Utilizing a demo model of Ableton, Honour was unable to revisit songs after he initially tracked them. “I’d need to screen-record it then take it again in,” he instructed Crack. Although arduous, the method yielded a layered, lo-fi impact that leaves the listener in a continuing state of anticipation, as if these simmering tracks will boil over at any level.
The fluctuating ranges and grainy end of Àlááfíà recall hypnotically dialing between radio stations, probably a nod to Honour’s grandmother, who had one of many first radio exhibits discussing Itsekiri tradition on the Western Nigerian station WNTV. The static that ripples and swells throughout the album does so just like the reminiscence of misplaced family members. However except for this familial homage, a way of ambient terror creeps by way of the core. It manifests within the echoed cackle and motorbike revs on “Hosanna (Greeting2MYPPL)…” and a loop of children singing “Ring Across the Rosie” rising in the midst of “First Born (Redeemed).”
The latter music is disrupted by gunfire, a cue for a sudden U-turn; what begins as a shadowy collage of discovered sounds liquifies and warps into splattered drum fills and pitched-up vocal bursts. The payoff is elegant—if short-lived. Various songs on Àlááfíà don’t make it previous the two-minute mark, however contemplating their eerie and mournful melodies, it may possibly really feel like simply the proper dosage. “Pistol Poem (Lead Stomach)” is a sort of grit-smeared rap that sounds as if it’s been submerged in earth and gravel for a decade. However curving round its tough edges are a weeping sax pattern and falsetto coos that might hint their form throughout a chapel ceiling.
