Honour - Alaafia - VINYL LP

Honour's debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora andbrushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. Ascinematic as it is painterly, Àlàáfíà is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from theunexpected poetic profundity of casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, or personal archives. Theresult is an impressionistic vision in Black and Blur that both exhausts and implicates language-substantiating a mythosproposed by Fred Moten that sublimates boundaries between everywhere and nowhere; history and the present; theindividual and the universal.Àlàáfíà delineates a gothic landscape cut by overdriven beats, swooping orchestral blasts, choral bursts and ear- splittingfuzz, where the fleshly and spiritual realms commune. Dedicated to Honour's late grandmother, the title track began totake form after their last embrace and remains steeped in her influence and spirit-a tape-saturated composition thatstarts in Lagos and ends in London's smoke-stained cityscape, the song's dream-like quality developed out of the artist'sgrief and PTSD coping with this loss. Beneath the stretched guitar drones and stuttering loops, their grandmother'sshared faith bubbles to the surface.InchWhen Angels Speak of Love,Inch borrows it's title from two works by Sun Ra and bell hooks, respectively. Sculpting echoesof praise music into disorienting spirals perforated with syrupy DJ Screw-inspired breaks and sharp splinters ofmelancholic guitar, InchWhen Angels Speak of LoveInch engages a conceptual dialogue with the spirits of both late thinkers,folding them into Honour's pantheon of ancestral guides. The album's ninth track, InchGiz Aard ($uckets),Inch is a dirge ofregimented drums which anchor this somber melody as it wh