AHO SSAN - The Sun Turned Black

Under the alias Aho Ssan, talented sound designer Niamké Désiré makes his return, and on his third solo effort decides to hone in on the most interesting, primal aspects of his music.
Exuberant and eclectic, the Paris-based artist of Ghanaian descent has, in his previous work, roamed across genres, creolizing his muscular, apocalyptic electronics first with hip-hop ("Rhizomes", Other People, 2022), then with the dark, alchemical viola of Resina ("Ego Death", Subtext 2025); and he has also set fire to the hyper-layered ambient of KMRU with textures so varied they sound like dubstep scores in super slow-motion (the gorgeous "Limen", Subtext 2022). An artist, then, well used to tuning his instruments to the key of the cyclone, orchestrating sonic furies and transfiguring them into majestic portraits of catastrophe.

This "The Sun Turned Black" heightens that apocalyptic streak and pushes further into the material possibilities of sound. Inspired by a trip to Ghana in search of Precambrian eons, it incorporates a commission for the Hyper Weekend Festival ("100 Sun", split here into four parts) and expands it with three tracks ("Sunrise", "The Children Of Noise" and "The Sun Turned Black") to deepen and define a poetics of instability. Through the majestic, foundational power of destruction, Aho Ssan digs into the darkest part of the self and pulls out music charged with an impetuous, primal energy.
His now-refined signature style takes shape as an unruly wall of sound made of glitches and electronic interference at a mood-swinging volume, made up of sudden tears followed by long, stretched-out descents; a simulacrum of an upended nature, the entire sonic architecture seems to breathe, swell into cataclysm, charge itself with lightning and thunder, seethe and unleash its blind fury in frenzied feedback that then, exhausted, glides into a placid, incandescent sea, barely rippled by the fleeting harmonies of pacified synths and the melancholy violin of ASIA, echoing through spent, drained spaces.

A sound built this way manages to reach spaces and regions of the human soul that connect directly to Alaya consciousness – the arcane existential residue underlying every reincarnation – and sets off, in that most remote part of the self, violent and intelligible upheavals. It is the celebrated abyss that stares back at whoever looks into it, and in whose impenetrable darkness sings, in an unknown tongue, a portent of eternal destructions and reconstructions.
This is Aho Ssan's mature statement, an album in which a rich, deeply committed body of work finds its finest expression: an intense, belated bombardment that turns humanity back toward its search for the archetype, tearing apart its most terrifying and unspeakable questions to induce the catharsis born only of an innate need for annihilation.

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03/07/2026