Confined to his home after a pulmonary embolism and two heart attacks, Ibrahim Alfa Jnr. had only music to sustain himself. The Brighton-based producer, whose roots go back to the blistering techno 12"s he released in the ’90s alongside Cristian Vogel and Tobias Schmidt, had already weathered substantial adversity—including a prison stint during which he read about footwork in The Wire magazine and, unable to actually hear any tracks, tried to sequence it in his mind. His health problems were his most serious obstacle yet, as well as a motivator to reorient himself toward his passion. His latest album, Infinite Black Inside, is a thorough exploration of the ideas—evasive rhythmic switch-ups, jazz melodies, busy textural interactions—that have often lingered in the margins of his more functional output. Its hybrid analog-digital approach allows Alfa free rein to actualize his impulses, while the meditative atmosphere prompts reflection on where those impulses come from.
The insoluble character of Alfa’s best records is reflected in his biography, which is difficult to neatly summarize. From a young age, he played piano and perused his guardians’ extensive record collection, drawn to Stephane Grappelli and Peter and the Wolf. His father and namesake was an associate of Nigeria’s military dictatorship in the ’70s and ’80s, and the younger Alfa would be dispatched to Nigeria or the U.S. for weeks at a time. Alfa started a promising career in leftfield Brighton techno and launched his own labels, but the challenges of young parenthood, grief, and his eventual incarceration on drug charges derailed it—until longtime friend Move D serendipitously unearthed a batch of 15-year-old files for what in 2016 became Alfa’s debut album, Hidden by the Leaves. Since then, he’s put out two albums on the revived Mille Plateaux and dropped countless Bandcamp experiments. Even in recordings from the ’90s, Alfa displays a reserved but expressive personality, and a talent for fusing disparate sounds fluidly together.
The production on Infinite Black Inside might be considered an evolution of the exploratory Brighton sound developed by Alfa and his peers, shored up by live and sampled instruments. Every texture is an independent agent with its own membrane in the mix; percussion rubs and scrapes against your attention, while mutating synth patches burble in the periphery. “Latent,” the closest thing to straightforward downtempo on the album, still has a strange, oozing texture lapping at the rim of its main beat, while the more rigidly sequenced “Inwards Reverse” has all sorts of stray clinks that could metastasize into patterns. The queasy psychoacoustics are fitting for an album informed by illness and its effect on creativity. In a single track, Alfa can capture the feverish sensorium he’s stuck in, communicate the effort of his labor, and synthesize the two. On “Ikoyi,” he hammers away at a few breakbeat fragments under a jumbled vocal and an idyllic clump of chimes, evoking the consistent pressure of working against limiting circumstances; as these elements gradually slip out of their arrangement into more relaxed ambient dub, it’s sublime, even if it never quite stabilizes.
Alfa has the most fun with the album’s freehanded rhythmic ideas. He shows a clear affinity, on “Subutrax,” for the polyrhythmic drum rolls of American footwork. But jury-rig them to a wonky kick pattern, mark the bar lines with random drum machine hits, shake the metallic percussion into new phrases every so often, and contrast it with twinkly keyboard figures that wrinkle at the touch like flower petals floating in a pond, and any sense of familiarity is quickly crowded out. Despite the track’s clear forward momentum, it challenges your mind-body intuition—in headphones, the BPM can seem to lurch up or down, depending on where you focus. The acoustic timbres compound Alfa’s sound design on “Marine” and “Drum Slinger,” where clarinets and manipulated hits of the Ghanaian djembe wriggle around the basslines. Alfa’s jazz background shines in the album’s disorienting moments. Against a palette of frequently stringent, turbid sounds, each live strike of his keyboard activates a rush of feeling and potential.
Infinite Black Inside is one of those introverted electronic records that puts the soul and intellect of its producer at its center, eschewing genre conventions out of emotional necessity. You could slot it alongside Jana Rush’s depressive jazz-footwork journey Painful Enlightenment or the world-spanning percussion workouts of Jlin, which Alfa has long admired. Unlike those acts, or even Alfa’s older analog material, this album doesn’t rely as much on stark negative space or an eye-popping sample vocabulary. The underlying songwriting is impulsive, but many tracks adopt a deliberately sedate mood or sort through dense clusters of cut-up loops, and Alfa’s spatialization gives the album a pallor that can resemble brain fog. This, you might say, is the sound of disability—of the ambient restriction on one’s exertion. It’s a testament to the vitality of Alfa’s ideas that he still makes them feel so freeing.
