The talented man presents himself under the pseudonym Aho Ssan sound designer Niamké Désiré, who in her third solo performance decides to exploit the most interesting and primordial aspects of her music.
Exuberant and eclectic, the Parisian artist of Ghanaian origin, in his previous efforts, has wandered between genres, creolizing his muscular and apocalyptic electronics first with hip hop (“Rhizomes”, Other People, 2022) then with the dark and alchemical viola of Resina (“Ego Death”, Subtext 2025); and also setting KMRU's hyper-layered ambience on fire with texturess so varied that they resemble dubstep scores in super slow motion (the beautiful “Limen”, Subtext 2022).
An artist therefore accustomed to tuning his instruments to the tonality of the cyclone, to orchestrating the sonic furies transfiguring them into majestic portraits of the catastrophe.
This “The Sun Turned Black” accentuates the apocalyptic vein and pushes on the material possibilities of sound. Inspired by a trip to Ghana to discover the Precambrian eons, he incorporates a commission for the Hyper Weekend Festival (“100 Sun” inserted broken into four parts) and enriches it with three songs (“Sunrise”, “The Children of Noise” and “The Sun Turned Black”) to deepen and outline a poetics of instability. Through the majestic founding capacity of destruction, Aho Ssan digs into the darkest part of the ego and extracts music innervated by an Adamic and impetuous energy.
This perfected stylistic feature of his presents himself as a madman wall of sound Of glitches and electronic interference with a meteorological volume, made up of sudden jerks followed by long and dilated descents; simulacrum of a distorted nature, the entire sound sector seems to breathe, swell to cataclysm, fill with lightning and thunder, boil and release its blind fury in feedback tarantolati who then, exhausted, glide into a placid and incandescent sea, barely rippled by the fleeting harmonies of synth pacified and by ASIA's melancholy violin, which resonates in exhausted environments.
A sound constructed in this way manages to reach spaces and regions of the human soul that connect directly to consciousness Alaya – the arcane existential residue at the basis of every reincarnation – and triggers, in that most remote part of the self, violent and intelligible tumults. It is the famous abyss into which one looks and which sends one's gaze back, and in whose impenetrable darkness sings, in an unknown language, an omen of eternal destruction and reconstruction.
It is the album of maturity for Aho Ssan, who through a very rich and involved work finds his best proof, an intense belated bombardment that turns man in search of the archetype, destroying his most terrifying and unpronounceable questions to induce that catharsis that arises only from the innate need for annihilation.
03/07/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
