Irreversible Entanglements - Who Sent You? '2020

Tracks list

Stay on it! This is the future! This is the spectral dreaming, the reshaped
soundwaves of post-Katrina, post-Osage Avenue, post-Obamacare that we borrow
from to do this work, so stay on it.

Who Sent You? they said from their liquid cryo-chamber, from a low-light
induction field cobbled together with lithium rods, with melted down Romare
Bearden and Howardena Pindell paintings, stitched with chaos fibers and placed
in the center of the carrion husk of a burnt out shanty town. They took time to
scrape ashen samples of what was, their souls the residue thick and caked on,
that still climbs those new high-rise condominiums like moss—the only
evidence that they were once there, that they were baked into the fabric of this
planet—they were there fixing elevators and tossing wrenches into quantum
fields until they were stopped! frisked! and turned into weird, 100-foot martyr
murals on the backside, the north side, of supermarket walls—Who Sent
You? is how the matrix modulation works.

Dig it: Who Sent You? is the punk-rocking of jazz and the mystification of the
avant-garde, a sci-fi sound from that out-soul-fire jazz quintet Irreversible
Entanglements. Who Sent You? they asked and tried to lock us in their distress
chambers, and yet here it is: an album that functions as a heat-sealed care
package for the modern Afrofuturist’s pre-flight machinations. This
record weaves kinetic soul fusion, dreamy yet harrowing spectral poetry, and
intricate force-field-tight rhythms into wild, warmth-giving tapestries that
comfort and conceal, confront and coerce all at once, with the dark matter of
the deep, black all-consuming universe as its thread.

Where the band’s self-titled debut was all explosive noisy anthems and
glorious cosmic bluster, Who Sent You? is a focused and patient ritual.
Irreversible Entanglements take their time in between these grooves, stalking
the war-torn streets of the Deep South and post-Columbian
apocalypses—taking their time to add our DNA to the centrifuge, to dream
up an alchemical amalgamation that sounds truly euphoric, drenched in the epic
star-flung fallout of a nova only they can conjure. More than the sum of its
parts—Luke Stewart’s war-like basslines, Keir Neuringer’s
haunting saxophone, Aquiles Navarro’s cyberpunk brass, the unwieldy storm
of Tcheser Holmes’ drums, and the oracular phyletic incantations of Camae
Ayewa—Who Sent You? is an entire holistic jam of “infinite
possibilities coming back around,” a sprawling meditation for
afro-cosmonauts, a reminder of the forms and traumas of the past, and the shape
and vision of Afrotopian sounds to come.

Tracklist:
01. Irreversible Entanglements - The Code Noir / Amina (7:31)
02. Irreversible Entanglements - Who Sent You - Ritual (14:45)
03. Irreversible Entanglements - No Más (7:59)
04. Irreversible Entanglements - Blues Ideology (8:22)
05. Irreversible Entanglements - Bread Out of Stone (4:48)

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