Okokon Turkson Side

Beautifully Designed 1LP, 180g Vinyl Just waking up and everything sounding slower. Holes in the wall. The unknown in the familiar. The shock of the new. Just-turned rubble. Thick clouds of recall. Muted high-life, de-centered hip-hop, and disparate conversation. Heavy, sinking jazz and dissected infomercials. Too much chewing gum? Not quite anything, or half of something. Reminds me of. Smells like…? Turkson Side is Africanus Okokon’s first album. It is almost entirely sample-based, made largely within a simple, custom-made playback software with each track recorded in one take with very little editing. “Wrake” is the only exception, a recording of him playing an Ethopian krar inside his house. Africanus is no stranger to the label. Primarily a visual artist with background in video, animation, and collage, he’s designed most of Other People’s recent site graphics and a number of release covers. In part, this album as Okokon is a translation of a developed aesthetic to an unfamiliar medium. Like his collage and animation work , it’s rough-hewn yet deliberate, consciously inclusive of digital processing and sampling artifacts for their unique texture and visceral affect. Throw the means aside, though, and what you’ve got is an evocative collection of craggy, trance-inducing concréte-poetry that act equally well as soundscapes for late-night or early-morning.