Anthony Joseph - The Ark

With each new recording Anthony Joseph presents an imaginative, personal vision of contemporary black culture, and The Ark is yet another compelling album by the award-winning Trinidadian poet and musician. This second part of a sequence of two albums launched with 2025's Rowing Up River To Get Our Names Back, there is a specific thread running through the glorious offering of sounds. "I was especially interested in the idea of using Afrofuturism as a means of using the future in order to correct the wrongs of the past," explains Joseph. "And so a lot of lyrics reimage or imagine an alternate black history. At the same time there are elements of autobiography." The aforesaid cultural phenomenon, a view of the black experience through the prism of science fiction and ancient Egypt and Africa, as mapped out by visionaries from music and literature such as Sun Ra, Parliament-Funkadelic and Octavia E. Butler.

The Ark is produced by Dave Okumu, the prodigiously talented guitarist-vocalist-composer known as the leader of Mercury Music Prize-nominated The Invisible. Joseph knew Okumu was the ideal producer for this latest project, which has a freewheeling, almost black psychedelic thing. After sifting through demos and loops the guitarist made on pro-tools the poet started to live with the music. Many months later words began to take shape. Joseph then went into the studio with Okumu's band and set about creating a magnum opus.

Boasting a stellar cast such as vocalist Eska Mtungwazi, drummer Tom Skinner trumpeter Byron Wallen and keyboardist Nick Ramm, saxophonist Colin Webster The Ark is a highly intricate musical mosaic framed by simmering funk grooves, wily jazz improvisation and haunting dub effects. Through the use of many genres the music has simply become its own genre. The Ark can be perceived as a vessel or means of transport to new worlds, along the lines of Sun Ra's Ark or Funkadelic's Mothership, and the material it contains is a unique blend of who Anthony Joseph is and how he sees the world and society in these stimulating, challenging times. "It balances the personal with the universal in a much more vulnerable, accessible way than on previous albums," Joseph explains. "It has become less about a personal experience and more about a collective, communal experience in which the artist is conduit, messenger, urban griot."

Tracklist:
1. James
2. Blue Susan
3. Transposition of Space (Glissant)
4. The African Origins of UFOs
5. The Ark
6. Your Bird & I
7. Baron Samedi