0000+0000

0000+0000, the second album from ÌFÉ (pronounced Eeeh-FAY), is a companion piece to the critically acclaimed 2017 debut album IIII+IIII.

Like it’s predecessor, the numbers and symbols of the album’s title, 0000+0000 (pronounced Yay-koon May-yee), form a prophetic sign from the Ifá religious practice, this time heralding the birth of night and a fearless embrace of death.

The artist Otura Mun—working under the conceptual alias of ÌFÉ—wrote, performed, and produced the entire album, with an array of special guest contributors, including: Lex, a gifted, emerging vocalist from the New Orleans underground; Robby The Lord, a dynamic performer from the Congolese Sapeur culture of Paris; and the soulful young Yoruban guitarist Saint Ezekiel. The London Lucumi Choir contributes vocals to the album’s final track, “Closing Prayer”, with storied New Orleans percussionist Bill Summers—of Herbie Hancock’s legendary Headhunters— joining Mun on drums for the album’s finale. In addition, Polish American singer Lavoski, a steady ÌFÉ collaborator, contributes vocals to the majority of album’s eleven songs. 0000+0000 was mixed in Austin, Texas by engineer Stuart Sikes. Known for his work with Cat Power, Jack White, and Loretta Lynn, Sikes functions as a crucial collaborator on the album, bringing his own unique analog warmth to the electronic landscape created by ÌFÉ.

Explosive first single, "Fake Blood" - inspired in part by Adam Curtis’ HyperNormalization and America’s reaction to the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting - asks "Why do we like fiction more than we like the truth?”, powerfully asserting “Black lives people hear me, all lives people fear me”. The lilting "Wednesday's Child" is "about someone who feels they were born cursed - I come from a line of people abandoned by parents, this is generational trauma, but can it be turned around?"

At times it’s contemplative and dream-like, as in the unabashed, unabated cover of US soul trio The Invincibles’s raw 1965 gospel single, “Heart Full of Love”, which levitates the listener into its clouds of sound. Always that invisible world is connected to reality and real bodies: “Voodoo Economics (Wolf Man)” with its slow lope, dubbed out snares and multiple-personality vocal processing brings out all the complexities of reggae’s innate sensuality, while the extraordinary “Prayer for Chango” and its constantly accelerating tempo and complexity, takes dance music and DJ culture’s adrenalising qualities to a higher dimension. Finally, all of these elements combine and culminate in the heart-stoppingly beautiful seven minute choral "Closing Prayer".