Echium & KMRU - Peripheral (2021)

On "Peripheral", Manchester's Echium teams up with Berlin-based Kenyan sound artist KMRU. And although the two artists have markedly different sonic approaches, it didn't take them long to find harmony between their respective methods. Echium's glacial, rave-literate dubscapes are blurred into trace elements, layered into KMRU's expressive environmental ambience, and dematerialized into a dream space that mirrors the atemporal void of the last years.

"It was more like a psychic collaboration," KMRU explains. He was still living in Nairobi while they worked on the material, and after they completed 'Switched' - a viscous flow of processed scrapes, birdsong and humid synth tones - the next track they wrote, 'Fain', took just a single day. They shuttled material back and forth as they worked, sending each other old and unfinished tracks and fashioning their individual ideas into a psychedelic collage of texture, drone and subtle articulation.

Across eight intense tracks, "Peripheral" pulses with humanity, from the bucolic hum of opening track 'Scarlette' to the vibrating, low-end throb of the album's daintily euphoric closer 'Christa'. It's music that's struck through with cautious positivity: there's hope and transcendence in 'Unending' and 'Nascent' that buzzes with the cloudiness of those brief moments as you wake up from a dream. Echium and KMRU make abstract electronic music that sounds as if it's bursting free of the digital world: they ink a utopia that's verdant, fertile and teeming with life.