Ruins Era A-Sun Amissa

Drifting between brooding minimalism, creeping plumes of feedback and charred electronics Ruins Era clocks in at 70 minutes in length and is doubtlessly A-Sun Amissa’s most ambitious work to date.

While 2020 brought the cinematic and melancholic Black Rain, Ruins Era is a return to the sort of diverse avant-rock that featured on 2019’s For Burdened and Bright Light. Weaving between broken, doom-ladened chords and a more experimental sprawling sound.

A-Sun Amissa is the primary project of musician and artist Richard Knox who also runs the independent label Gizeh Records, and has been involved in countless musical endeavours over the years including; Shield Patterns, The Rustle of the Stars, Of Thread & Mist, Glissando and more. After being involved in underground, DIY music for some 20 years now it’s natural to continue to see Knox’s vision and involvement in the project extend to designing artwork, silkscreening sleeves and merch, booking shows and making videos.

Ruins Era has been almost two years in the making and found its roots when Knox was asked to develop an A/V installation for a festival close to his home in Glossop, Derbyshire. Three hours of new music entitled As Below So Above was written in just a few months and performed live as one whole set at the festival. Knox commissioned filmmaker Owain Paciuszko to create the accompanying visuals. Some of the key musical themes developed for the installation formed the building blocks for Ruins Era and, as with As Below So Above, Knox is joined by Luke Bhatia (Tutherun, From the Kites of San Quentin, Profane) on guitars and Claire Knox (Shield Patterns, Bleaklow) on clarinet, voice and synths.

The dense, layering of sounds offer hidden sonic details and the production here is clearly key. Favouring a gnarled, overdriven sound that feels on the edge of blowing out altogether, it develops into a truly unusual palette of noise that pushes into new territories. Hovering drones are interlaced with clarinet, guitar and piano motifs, distorted synths and rhythms creep in and out of consciousness while the album’s central movement; A New Precipice features vocals from Owen Jones of Gizeh labelmates and London post-metal-noise quartet Wren.

As with much of A-Sun Amissa’s output, it’s hard to pinpoint references and influences and throughout Ruins Era they prove to be as elusive and engrossing as ever.

Some words from Richard Knox on Ruins Era: “A-Sun Amissa is very much a forward-looking project. I’m not interested in repeating what we’ve done before and with this record I wanted to take the production to a new level and really play around, experiment and break sounds until the source material became unrecognisable. I was looking to create sounds I’d never heard before, something new that could barely, if ever, be repeated. So many elements of this record were fed back through pedals and re-amped and torn apart via aux sends in the computer. I took this approach from the off so it was a core part of the writing and development of the record. This one is a real journey and easily the longest amount of time I’ve spent on making an album.”