Black Decelerant are Khari Lucas, aka Contour, and Omari Jazz who describes their new album Reflections Vol. 2 as “an exploration of being/nonbeing, a wondering on the definition of ‘rest’, a meditation with one of my closest friends, a realization on the speed of darkness. 4 years in the making”. This is an album of supreme peace; an unhurried experience that unfolds over its 10 tracks and allows you entry to a serene musical universe. Imagine a galactic lagoon with crystal clear water on the edge of a vast landscape of stars.
The opening track ‘three’ rolls in like mist, gently pulling you out of your daily life ushering you away from the urban landscape to a secret garden behind the bricks and mortar. As your pulse begins to slow washes of heavenly sounds ebb and flow around you with soft splashes of keyboard notes drifting in an out. Like so much of this album it is not rooted in tunes or hooks; this is about mood, what Khari and Omari say is “resonant landscapes with signals, weathers and spirits, suspended in memory and distilled in time.”
The message behind the album is rooted in black history and culture with the name Black Decelerant coming from 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” with their music being, as Omari Jazz says, “about challenging the space that asks that you do more than your natural state and actively pushes you towards over-exertion or exhaustion, and all these late-stage capitalist ideas. Rest is so wrapped up in that, and the absence of it for Black people is something that needs to be challenged in multiple ways.”
The album contains the sense that we are ascending and descending simultaneously, like Escher’s staircase, never arriving but constantly moving. Even the track titles are understated in lowercase and not in the numerical order their titles assume. Only occasionally do solid objects float into view through the beguiling ambient warmth; like the repeated phrase “a kind inner self-realisation” on ‘seven 1-2’, the trumpet harmonies on ‘two’ and ‘eight’ or the muted roaming bass lines on ‘five’ and ‘nine’.
Reflections Vol. 2 is the meeting point between the natural world and the digital, a lush slow-motion universe spiralling under Black Decelerant’s influence. There are not many artists like Vangelis, Brian Eno, or Miles Davis on a A Kind of Blue, who know how to command the perfect moment, the zen of anticipation and the sense of space and tranquillity that this engenders. Reflections Vol.2 is music in harmony with the oscillation of your alpha waves; the mood is the journey and the journey is the mood.
Contour: X: | Instagram / Omari Jazz: X | Instagram
RVNG Intl. Website | X | Instagram | TikTok
Review by Paul F Cook
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