KWES - Kinds

Can twelve years be enough time for a second album? That's how long it took Kwesi Sey to follow up his curious debut "ILP", not counting a handful of EPs and the soundtrack for the TV series "Rye Lane", for which he won the "Best Original Music" award at the BIFA, the British independent film festival, in 2023. Quite an achievement, given the fundamentally reserved nature of a family man who works mainly as a sound engineer for a whole host of different artists, from Loyle Carner to Tirzah and Solange.

But it's from the intimate premises of domestic life that "Kinds" is now born, a listen made up of nine entirely beatless ambient tracks, grained with a production texture that mixes human and digital, soft but capable of turning growly beneath a veil of threatening clouds. It's no coincidence that the album was unveiled in the evocative setting of the Barbican's botanical garden, the famous socio-residential complex in central London known for its sturdy brutalist architecture - the contrast between the austerity of reinforced concrete and the tropical foliage is certainly striking, and can be seen in the full player of the event released on YouTube.

Kwes has synesthesia, a psychic phenomenon that gives the impression of seeing sounds and colors overlapping one another; weaving personal memories also inspired by his relationship with his children, who contributed to the cover artwork, the listen unfolds silently yet inquisitively through various shades of tone, as is already clear from the three opening tracks: from the hinted-at, bucolic drone of "Blue White Violet" to the more muted "Blue White Cyan" and then into the paranoid tear of "Blue Violet", Kwes traces a subtle sonic-chromatic progression, slowly turning his dial as if mimicking the darkening of colors, in the vein of the William Basinski school.

With the arrival of yellow and brown on "Brown Green Yellow", the listen indeed takes on an organic quality you can almost touch, then it retraces its steps with the hint of drama in "Violet", loses itself in the enveloping nocturne of "Black (Grey)", shifts with invisible slowness between "Yellow Green" and "Green White", and finally glides with "Orange Blue" into a sharper contrast than what came before, though never overturning the underlying calm that pervades the whole work.

A subtle listen, then, made to fill the room without overwhelming it, yet at the same time distinctly tinged with an intimate human lyricism, "Kinds" is definitely less "Music For Airports" and much more "Atlas", an album by Laurel Halo which featured Coby Sey, Kwes's younger brother, himself an independent musician active in the London underground, because this really is a family affair on more than one elective level. Don't expect major upheavals or revolutionary ideas, and yet, within the vast and amorphous field of ambient music, "Kinds" manages to carve out a tiny space all its own.

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11/03/2026