Barbara Panther & Matthew Herbert - Muramuke (2022)

More than a decade-long musical partnership takes on a compelling new form as Barbara Panther and Matthew Herbert return to the studio and emerge anew as Muramuke. Guided by twilight revelations, shifting moon-lit textures, and the racing thoughts that deny sleep in the still of night, the duo’s new name is taken from the Rwandan term for goodnight. Their new self-titled album, metabolises the night and day terrors of real Black life into a post-colonial cry of rage that’s both contemporary and ancestral.

The album was pieced together through back-and-forth exchanges between Barbara in Germany and Matthew in England during the height of 2020’s lockdown. Muramuke is lyrically defined by Barbara’s lived experiences as a Black woman displaced by the horrors of war, then unable to escape the poisonous global reach of white supremacist anti-Blackness, in all its literal and coded forms.

Through the visceral catharsis of this album, Barbara is more commanding and multiplicious than ever; she stalks through each of the album’s phases with acid-tongued back talk, comely harmonic choruses, schoolyard chants and sharp monotone commands. It is the culmination of her lifelong love for vocal expression, laced together with a past which Barbara self-describes as “complicated”; from her first Belgian choir at age 4 as a recently-settled Rwandan refugee; to her pre-teen rebellion in a band named Cannabis Sativa, to her home since the early 2000s, Berlin, a place where within electronic music, she says, “I can disappear if I want to.”

Maramuke marks the next aligned life cycle of two singular souls, and harnesses Matthew’s propensity for gathering and recontextualising organic sounds of mysterious origins. As one of most singular and prolific voices of visionary music experimentalism, and as the label head of Accidental Records, Muramuke finds him in new generative territory, forming shapes that are sharp-angled, sparse and brooding, or gleefully warped with whimsy, or towering overhead in full-throttle maximalism.

The throbbing beat of “Never Been Your Business” finds Barbara spitting out admonishments close to the ear; “Don’t stay quiet now / this is a real riot now” she commands, part Grace Jones and part Poly Styrene, atop a classic Herbert beat with a swollen bassline and regimented drumming. “Just One More” rides on the tension of a soft-hard dynamic, pairing deep industrial scrapes with woodwind pulses and a momentary glimpse of sing-song intimacy in the hopeful line “One day we’re gonna be dancing skin to skin.” “Hate” charges out of the gate with laser pulses, urgent hand claps and deep sub bass, with a clear message as it slowly backs its persecutor into a corner “You have no authority / You have no authority / You have no authority / Stop sitting on me!”

“B-side” regresses to the classroom, but one where the pendulum of power is finally swinging in another direction, and a chanting chorus of Barbara's promise, with increasing fervour, to burn it all to the ground and take us to the B-side. “Wagon” raises the spirits and the spectres of enslavement and spilt blood to find strength and fortification, accompanied by a stripped-back and digitally rendered version of East African rhythms, and departing with a final kiss off: “I don’t really care what you think about me / I’m nothing but a number…. You better watch your back.”

The deeply personal nature of an album that explores the roots of heritage and personal histories is reflected in the specially commissioned cover art’s combination of sacred and mythical imagery by Indian contemporary visual artist, Rithika Pandey.