In Harmony / Balance, we’re in the midst of a battle. The battle can never truly end – only be held in place or calmed until it resurfaces. The struggle is between two armies: one representing virtue, and the other embodying the most selfish parts of humanity. Through a time-dilating collection of ambient compositions, Lagos musician Ibukun Sunday plays with this duality of experience, introduced to him by reading the Bhagavad-Gita. The song titles and the record cover place us in the heat of the struggle, while shifts in texture depict the changing balance between the two sides.
Take ‘Arrayed On The Battlefield’, where perfect harmonies and piercing synths rise together, armies charging in slow motion. The reflective pace gives plenty of opportunity to soak up the nuance in how sounds form and break apart.
While 2021’s The Last Wave worked with harrowing sound fragments, Harmony / Balance is freer with melody and lightness. Its melodic phrases might be sedate, but they complete, loop and resolve. There’s a feeling of inevitability to how these songs are constructed, so when a dissonant element does arrive, like the queasy rising synth passage on ‘Enemy of My Enemy’, it jolts and discomforts.
These are often beautiful songs, where the goodies win the war far more than the baddies, but you don’t mind when the sounds are so heartfelt. ‘His Order’ balances throbbing low frequencies with icy rhythms. What’s most joyful hearing its creator on the controls when the volume suddenly rises or the feedback is altered on the fly. The song moves from hypnogogic to immediate in these moments.
Other moments pass by more easily. ‘Of the Armies’ is a pretty pentatonic improvisation with notes blurring into each other, but there’s little tension in how it’s presented. While the track doesn’t necessarily need bloody viscera in the form of noise or disharmony, the gauzy presentation does place us oddly at a distance from the feeling being searched for. ‘The Chariot’ is more surprising, with quick and intense movement and the bite that’s missing in what’s just come before. Made on solo synth, its scope moves from personal to cosmic across three minutes.
Welcome tension is reintroduced on ‘To Fight With’, as sour and stretched notes stain the air around them. It’s a crawling panic attack of a piece, which effectively sets up the two-part closer of ‘Brothers’ and ‘O Fallible One’, which bounce eternally between two chords. Here, the record’s subtle approach is mesmerising, especially as the songs transition and we hear what difference in mood can be created when the phrase is played on a new, brighter organ. Ibukun Sunday’s work stands out for how much character he is able to pull out of minimal elements. At his best, he can pull a lineage of human experience into view with a chord change.
