Aho Ssan - 100 Suns Pt. III (Modern Matters) [Electronic Music / Experimental]

Aho Ssan is a French music composer, sound designer and producer with a Ghanaian family tree, who has been making powerful experimental electronic music for the last decade or so. He hit the ground running with some well-received soundtrack work, before moving out of the visual medium's shadows. In 2020, he started releasing his accomplished studio albums, some with heavyweight collaborations: Moor Mother, Angel Bat Dawid, KMRU and Nicolas Jaar amongst others, which have cemented his reputation, as well as gigs at some of the globe's top alternative festivals and institutions.

Since a trip back to Ghana and soaking up the intense, unintentionally produced, but physically affecting sonic chaos of its urban sprawls that, like all big cities, constantly morphs with the thermo-dynamic flow of millions of creators and conductors, he's been contemplating the nature of noise, coming to the conclusion that he needed to think less about compositional forms and embrace the raw physicality of sound.

Just that concept should have occupied most of his headspace, but the trip also got him mulling over the feeling of "diasporic in-betweenness" - that feeling that many descendants of immigrants have to come to terms with, in not just one but two countries; and it's these intriguing premises that have guided him during the creation of his new album, which comes out on May 22nd.

In the meantime, the first single, "100 Suns Pt. III" has just dropped, and it's tickling my audio recepticles and building expectation for the album a treat. As with quite a lot of Ssan's work, there is a future-classical vibe going on, often aided by string musicians, and in this case, violinist ASIA. The track starts easily enough - a playful, distinctly forward-looking duet between the not particularly obvious violin and the pleasing machine noises - whether via live effects or post-production I'm not sure; the pair flirting, wrapping their sounds around each other before rapidly unravelling them. Then, a third of the way through throbbing low-end frequencies herald the patient electronic build, and despite spirited playing, seal the synthesizer supremacy, before the track gracefully dissolves into the ambient ether. Bring on the album. Now.

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Playlist Companion

Find Ssan in the Slowtronic Playlist.