Subtext and Ici, d'ailleurs present Aho Ssan's third LP "The Sun Turned Black"

Paris-based composer and sound designer Niamké Désiré reaches into the depths of his soul on his third Aho Ssan album, determining a fresh sonic outlook that's more motivated by texture, poetry and intimacy than rigid structure or concept. It's a shift in approach that Désiré had already been considering for some time, even coloring the edges of last year's 'Ego Death', his acclaimed collaboration with Polish cellist Resina. But it took a trip to Ghana to confirm to Désiré that he needed to think less about concrete forms and embrace the raw, transformative physicality of sound itself. "What stayed with me most was the intensity," he explains. "An overwhelming, magnificent organization of noise." And it's this living, breathing chaos that surges through 'The Sun Turned Black', a suite of dense, impressionistic and often overwhelmingly beautiful abstractions that take their time to drift and evolve, never falling into an expected pattern. It's not an album that necessarily needs to answer any specific questions or arrive at a particular destination, Désiré instead prioritizes the experience itself, relishing the journey.

The trip also triggered Désiré to consider the friction between his ancestral homeland and the place of his birth, the state of "diasporic in-betweenness" that has its way of disrupting true connection. "It's a feeling of not being entirely at home in the country where you were born and not entirely at home in the land of your origins either," says Désiré. "That tension is not only personal, it's something historical, personal and difficult to resolve." So when he was commissioned by Paris's Maison de la Radio at de la Musique to write a piece for the annual Hyper Weekend Festival, these emotions were at the top of his mind. Working alongside internationally renowned violinist ASIA, he created '100 Soleils', a piece that provided Désiré with a blueprint for the entire album. He reflected on instability and erosion, using ASIA's performance not as an accompaniment but to provoke feelings of coexistence, pressure and fragility. "There is no real center of gravity, no stable ground, no fixed identity being affirmed."

And when Désiré later expanded the work into a full album, he used these ideas to fuel his creativity, imposing limitations on himself to focus the process. He prioritized slowness for a start, moving away from percussive structures and spending his time instead devising sounds and movements that defied obvious classification - not just ambient or noise or electroacoustic music but a more unstable form. If this shift isn't immediately obvious on the album's brief, euphoric opening track 'Sunrise', it's certainly evident on '100 Suns Pt. I', the first chapter in a four part epic that provides 'The Sun Turned Black' with its backbone. Désiré drifts through a spectrum of visceral emotions, juxtaposing symphonic digital synthesizer sequences with prickly, high-pitched interferences and booming, overpowering bass. Just as soon as the piece hits its dense, almost overpowering apex, it falls away, leaving faint details that are only revealed in its collapse.

Because 'The Sun Turned Black' isn't just about disintegration as the title might suggest, it's about transformation. Whenever the noise subsides, Désiré inevitably finds the space to make his most revelatory discoveries, unveiling lullaby-like synthetic chimes and strings after a deafening crescendo on '100 Suns Pt. II' and letting ASIA lead the charge through unsettling negative space on the album's operatic centerpiece 'The Children of Noise'. Even when Désiré counters the oozing drones and subtle interferences with jagged, dissonant staccato stabs on '100 Suns Pt. IV', they in turn burn away, swallowed by organ-like breaths that lead the album to its conclusion with surprising grace. Désiré describes it best himself: "It is not simply the image of collapse, but of a darkening that makes another form of perception possible - another way of listening, of feeling, of becoming.