The Sun Turned Black by Aho Ssan

For fans of Saba Alizadeh, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Pyur, electroacoustic, and loving the journey because it’s all you have left, The Sun Turned Black by Aho Ssan presents an ambient experience in constant motion with no destination, one informed by the internal struggles of diaspora. As a member of a diaspora community struggles to feel at home in both their ancestral homeland and the country of their birth, these sounds weave unpredictably between organized, symphonic grandeur and sparse, alienating environments, frequently snapping in and out of place within multiple cultures and contexts. All the time spent in between gives us disembodied pieces of each aesthetic, with powerful, rumbling bass frequencies supporting treble frequencies filled only with the occasional harmonic blip or with full, lush midrange sound and an unsettlingly open foundation, each moment highlighting that tension of uneasy presence within either cultural context. As climate change and political destabilization drive migration, these diaspora identities only become more common, making work like The Sun Turned Black increasingly representative of the entire human experience.