"Alfa's album transforms a genuinely harrowing medical bodyhorror experience into an auditory tranquilliser—an illusion-inducing anaesthetic that calms, loves, soothes."
Thirty years in and a legacy of critically acclaimed releases behind him, Brighton’s Ibrahim Alfa Jnr. is no stranger to the underground music circuit. The self-taught practitioner has built a career on handmade setups, assembling whatever tools he could access—a process that is purely intuitive, arising from an innate lust for creation. His artistic vision, which has had several mutations in the past, now proudly inhabits Brian Foote’s very own FO label. With Infinite Black Inside, Alfa opens the door to the dungeons of his consciousness.
The artist’s discography brims with scientific and abstract fascinations—specifically to the semi-automatic, the point where human instinct and machine magic fuse into something neither could produce alone. The result is nuanced rhythm architectures of hyper-percussions, glitching synths, and infectious basslines; alien cartography rendered in sound. Records like Messier87 and Sirius A for Frankfurt-based Mille Plateaux paint vivid sci-fi landscapes of a fictional world: sometimes minimal, sometimes chaotic, mostly hypnotic, and very mathematically sound in construction. Thematically, though, each record has tracked a different stage of a life that has been anything but linear.
Infinite Black Inside arrives from the most extreme of those stages. A diagnosis of pulmonary embolism, two subsequent heart attacks, and a compromised immune system jolted Alfa into total isolation—completely severed from the outside. One could have imagined this to be a career-crashing incident, but instead Alfa cracked open a different type of creative infestation within and out crawled his most interior and vulnerable record to date.
While the narrative still explores the unknown, the alien terrain is now the self. Twelve tasteful tracks reflect qualities of techno, jazz, broken beat, dub-wise ambience, and yet never quite settle anywhere; clearly embracing disorientation as a sustained, enigmatic state. ‘Latent’ and ‘Iyaka’ press on narcotic low-ended rumbles and chiming, wobbly synths oscillate between sedation and groggy half-awakening. ‘Drum Slinger’ is something else entirely: percussion splatter across like muscle memory, jazz inflections flickering at the edges, the body relearning its own coordinates.
The record’s most arresting moment is ‘Naked Lunchbreak’. It’s hard to believe the Burroughs reference is purely coincidental. Naked Lunch—the novel or Cronenberg’s film adaptation—occupies adjacent territory: the body as a malfunctioning organism, consciousness hovering at the tip of its own dissolution, reality cycling in and out of focus. Alfa’s album follows the same logic, transforming a genuinely harrowing medical bodyhorror experience into an auditory tranquilliser. An illusion-inducing anaesthetic that calms, loves, soothes.
With Infinite Black Inside, Ibrahim Alfa Jnr. feels newly exposed. In close quarters, he charts fear, survival, memory, and creativity locked inside the same room with mortality close by. He has made the most human record of his career.
‘Infinite Black Inside’ is out now via FO. Buy a vinyl copy from Inverted Audio Record Store.
TRACKLIST
1. Subutrax
2. Latent
3. Naked Lunchbreak
4. Marine
5. Ova Abi Yard
6. Ikoyi
7. Drum Slinger (Other Version)
8. Capture
9. Black
10. Iyaka
11. Inwards Reverse
12. Localised Absentia