…Black Decelerant’s Reflections Vol. 2 serves as a timely reminder that music of resistance doesn’t have to be overly simple or one-dimensional. This is art as nuanced argument, challenging and often beautiful.
Black Decelerant – a duo consisting of producers Khari Lucas, aka Contour, and Omari Jazz – make a kind of music that they describe as improvisational jazz but which, in reality, ranges over a lot more ground than that tag implies. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with New York label RVNG Intl.’s previous releases (Sun Araw, Horse Lords) or with the first instalment in the Reflections series (an ambient collaboration between Steve Gunn and Bing & Ruth’s David Moore). Reflections Vol. 2 shares some superficial similarities with its predecessor, but here, the ambience is more highly charged with political, spiritual and philosophical overtones.
The tracks are essentially unnamed: each one is given a number (between ‘one’ and ‘ten’, but in a move that quietly destabilises the relationship between listening as an experience and consuming as a habit, the tracks are presented out of their numeric order. Rather than asserting authorial control over the listener, this serves as a reminder that control in itself is an illusory phenomenon in music: albums have the habit of evolving after their completion and of leading a life somewhere beyond that of their creators.
And this is important for Black Decelerant. Theirs is a music that actively challenges hierarchies, not through any overt presentation of political opinion but through subtle subversion of musical norms. The opening piece, three, possesses an ambience that is slaty and brutalist but grows to encompass an ambiguous melodicism and restless percussion. Jazz and Lucas are preoccupied with formlessness as a means of protest and slowness as resistance, and their improvisations are meditative cris de coeur against oppression and anti-black rhetoric.
They are also highly rewarding listening experiences. Although these tracks unfold slowly, the quickness of thought behind them is evident. one offers up a meeting of fluttering synths, neo-classical piano, melting-clock bass and widescreen ambience. The early parts of six sound like some gentle interplanetary radio transmission before some meticulously deployed modular synth makes things even more spacy. The short seven features a rare sample of the human voice, looped and warped, reminding us of the importance of being unsettled and decentred.
Two tracks – two and eight – feature Jawaad Taylor’s improvised trumpet. It’s here that Black Decelerant feel closest to their spiritual jazz forebears: eight does it through detached, modernistic minimalism, while two is a solo vignette that is surprising and heartfelt. Five has a cinematic feel to it, with a bassline that flows unexpectedly, like a non-Newtonian fluid. Four shimmers like a mirage or a street drying after rain, and somehow achieves a kind of sunny euphoria from limited ingredients. The glitchy loops and modular echoes of nine show the duo at their most contemporary: it has an unsteady, neonate beauty to it.
Theoretical in its conception and yet broadly humanist in its appeal, Black Decelerant’s Reflections Vol. 2 serves as a timely reminder that music of resistance doesn’t have to be overly simple or one-dimensional. This is art as nuanced argument, challenging and often beautiful. It exists in multiple ways at once: in the image of its creators as a kind of obelisk marking the point at which art can diverge from capitalism, but also beyond the narrative of its making as a stunning, serene musical document that grows and evolves with each listen and according to the mood of each listener.
Reflections Vol. 2: Black Decelerant (21st June 2024) via RVNG Intl.
Order: https://lnk.to/rvngnl98