Tony Njoku’s aptitude for fusing emotions with electronic avant-garde soundscapes is a force to be reckoned with. Njoku is a multi-disciplinary artist, drawing on the visual arts as inspiration with which to express his sonic affiliations. After spending his formative years in Lagos, Nigeria, Njoku has worked on exploring the ever-changing boundaries of identity in his synth-heavy music, both elegantly and intensely.
His previous work H.P.A.C. hinted at enlightenment through powerful soundscapes, yet he now seems to have reached a point of complete equilibrium. Njoku’s second release with Silent Kid records is Your Psyche’s Rainbow Panorama, a title which quite fittingly conjures up an impossible mirage of the mind and its many hues, inflicting an alluring response in the subject. Like all experiments, the aim with Njoku’s new LP seems to be to rouse an effect in us both familiar and alien, the brightness of pop melded with an electronic iniquity.
The track ‘Confident’, which premiered a few weeks ago along with a video playing homage to Steve McQueen’s 1993 film Bear, grapples with its own spirit in the most eloquent of ways. Njoku has since spoken of the track as a portrait of himself sabotaging a situation, being ones own worst enemy. An off-kilter beat with layered snares aptly conveys this message; this is a figure vocalizing the internal monologue we’re all familiar with, in both a harrowing yet comfortable setting.
The vocals throughout the album are spiritual and uplifting at times, but this is certainly a mortal man, with mortal feelings. Speaking in the album notes, Njoku states the album aims to be “experiential rather than narrative”, and this sentiment is felt throughout the entire work. Like the myriad of emotions explored here, the album is itself explorative and ever-changing. The pursuit of these free flowing artistic values makes Njoku a rarified emblem in the R&B world. Your Psyche’s Rainbow Panorama proves to be his most rousing work to date.
