Black Decelerant

Booking Agent : Giorgio Salmoiraghi & Luca Ciscognetti

Black Decelerant (RVNGNL98) is an album guided by process and intuition. Since meeting in 2016, Khari Lucas (aka Contour) and Omari Jazz dreamed of a collaborative album that could utilize formless music in both political and poetic ways. They eventually cultivated the project in 2020 across six months of remote sessions (living in South Carolina and Oregon respectively), communicating through improvised instrumentals and sample-based production as reflections of their inner and outer worlds.

“It felt like a remedy to some of the existential stress we were feeling during the time,” says Lucas. “Simultaneously being in the height of lockdown and thinking about encroaching fascism and anti-Blackness, in the US especially. The making of the record felt very meditative and offered a dimension to ground us.”

Listening and responding to one another in real time, the sessions became a vessel to channel ideas around Black humanity, primordiality and ontology, and slowness as a cumulative technology for protection against violence and extraction. The album’s ten compositions configure vast, resonant landscapes with signals, weathers and spirits, suspended in memory and distilled in time.

The Black Decelerant machine recalibrates archival relics and acoustic impulses into collages of amalgamated timbres, where harmony exists not without discordance. Across the expansive space of the record, cadent storms of modulated sound ascend beside serene melodic spells. Piano keys and bass lines tumble in falls throughout the release, accompanied on tracks two and eight by the spectral trumpet improvisations of Jawwaad Taylor.

The duo arrived at their name upon reading Aria Dean’s Notes on Blacceleration, an article which explores Accelerationism within the context of Black being or non-being as a foundational tenet of capitalism. Coupled with the record’s intended effect, “Black Decelerant” references the music being an invitation to slow down, while hinting at the shared politics between themselves and the artists and thinkers who inspire them.

The record emerges as a portal and a mirror to a way of living, which as Lucas and Jazz explain, is about leaning into the mind and body’s natural inclination to do what is nourishing for it, away from commodified or virtuous iterations of rest and care attached to capitalism and white supremacy. Black Decelerant serves as both a tonic and journal in a tradition laid forth by musical and philosophical ancestry, a radiant offering and invitation.

Black Decelerant has been released June 21, 2024 in vinyl & digital editions. The album represents the second volume of Reflections, a new series of contemporary collaborations orchestrated by RVNG. The duo is already scheduled for performing at events as Boundaries Festival in the UK, FENDA Festival in Braga and NEXT Festival in Bratislava.

black decelerant on rvng
contour on instagram
contour on pitchfork
omari jazz official
omari jazz on instagram
 

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