Matthew Herbert & Barbara Panther - new album "Muramuke"
Muramuke is an album that explores the roots of heritage and personal histories
October 21, 2022
More than a decade-long musical partnership takes on a compelling new form as Barbara Panther and Matthew Herbert return to the studio and emerge anew as Muramuke. Guided by twilight revelations, shifting moon-lit textures, and the racing thoughts that deny sleep in the still of night, the duo’s new name is taken from the Rwandan term for goodnight. Their new self-titled album, metabolises the night and day terrors of real Black life into a post-colonial cry of rage that’s both contemporary and ancestral.
The album was pieced together through back-and-forth exchanges between Barbara in Germany and Matthew in England during the height of 2020’s lockdown. Muramuke is lyrically defined by Barbara’s lived experiences as a Black woman displaced by the horrors of war, then unable to escape the poisonous global reach of white supremacist anti-Blackness, in all its literal and coded forms.
Through the visceral catharsis of this album, Barbara is more commanding and multiplicious than ever; she stalks through each of the album’s phases with acid-tongued back talk, comely harmonic choruses, schoolyard chants and sharp monotone commands. It is the culmination of her lifelong love for vocal expression, laced together with a past which Barbara self-describes as “complicated”; from her first Belgian choir at age 4 as a recently-settled Rwandan refugee; to her pre-teen rebellion in a band named Cannabis Sativa, to her home since the early 2000s, Berlin, a place where within electronic music, she says, “I can disappear if I want to.”
Maramuke marks the next aligned life cycle of two singular souls, and harnesses Matthew’s propensity for gathering and recontextualising organic sounds of mysterious origins. As one of most singular and prolific voices of visionary music experimentalism, and as the label head of Accidental Records, Muramuke finds him in new generative territory, forming shapes that are sharp-angled, sparse and brooding, or gleefully warped with whimsy, or towering overhead in full-throttle maximalism.
The deeply personal nature of an album that explores the roots of heritage and personal histories is reflected in the specially commissioned cover art’s combination of sacred and mythical imagery by Indian contemporary visual artist, Rithika Pandey.
Listen to / get the album here.
