Since our session with Joseph, I have been fascinated by his work as it fits into what I am also interested in as an artist. Joseph’s work focuses on sound art, field recording, and noise! The latter is something I create a lot of in my own work. The way Joseph thinks about culture through sound and how he turns that into his own art is something I found particularly interesting. He takes these concepts and expresses the thoughts and ideas behind them through installations, performances, and other types of creative compositions. Personally, I like to do the same but with different ideas, I found the way he takes these ideas and transforms them into something people can experience something that will be very useful to me.
Joseph goes under the pseudonym KMRU, on his Bandcamp page you can see the mountains of work he has released thus far. I would like to focus on his cassette release Jar, which was released through Seil Records. KMRU describes the record as ‘Jar is a journey through the dust of time. Merging found sounds, analog warmth and granular dreams along the way. This perfectly sums up the record, the sound of the record is very warm and analog. This suits the cassette release perfectly as these types of sounds work best on tape. The album is very dream-like, for example, the song ‘ulmma‘ has this warm synthesizer pad progressing throughout the piece. With the use of percussion (xylophone) and what sounds like field recordings. It makes for a very peaceful listen. I really enjoyed the composition of this record in general.
Overall Joseph has become my favorite practitioner to date, a truly fascinating artist who is one to keep your eye on for sure.
References
KMRU. (n.d.). ulmma, by KMRU. [online] Available at: https://kmru.bandcamp.com/track/ulmma
KMRU. (n.d.). Jar, by KMRU. [online] Available at: https://kmru.bandcamp.com/album/jar