Black Decelerant, the duo of Khari Lucas, aka Contour, and Omari Jazz, explore spiritual jazz traditions through contemporary tone and texture, fostering sonic meditations on themes of Black being and nonbeing, life and mourning, expansion and limitation, and the individual and collective.
Their self-titled debut album, and the collaboration’s core intention, inspires a space for listeners to find stillness and solace, while providing a basis for a movement beyond “the moment”. Black Decelerant is an album guided by process and intuition. Since meeting in 2016, Lucas and Jazz dreamed of a collaborative album that could utilize formless music in both political and poetic ways.
They eventually cultivated the project in 2020 across six months of remote sessions (living in South Carolina and Oregon respectively), communicating through improvised instrumentals and sample-based production as reflections of their inner and outer worlds. Listening and responding to one another in real time, the sessions became a vessel to channel ideas around Black humanity, primordiality and ontology, and slowness as a cumulative technology for protection against violence and extraction. The album’s ten compositions configure vast, resonant landscapes with signals, weathers and spirits, suspended in memory and distilled in time.
modalities is a new collective entity comprised of Alias Error and Oscar Atanga. Setting themselves apart from the dominant club scenes in their current home city of Berlin, the duo provides sonic curation via hybrid DJ sets, live performance, music direction and bespoke composition with a focus on downtempo, ambient and experimental music. Having explored the intersections between music, contemporary art, film and fashion individually for the last few years, the two artists and good friends came together to focus on music and sound design.
