NON co-founder Chino Amobi announces debut album PARADISO

The follow-up to one of 2016’s best mixtapes.

Experimental producer and NON co-founder Chino Amobi has announced his debut album PARADISO, a follow-up to his recent minor matter vinyl record on VF and last year’s excellent Airport Music For Black Folk.

The album is described as “a musical epic set in a distorted Americana populated by a cast of sirens, demons, angels, imps, priests, hierophants, monsters and peasants” and features a long list of NON members and likeminded contemporaries including Elysia Crampton, Rabit, Haleek Maul and Dutch E Germ (aka Tim DeWit of Gang Gang Dance).

PARADISO is out May 5 via Non Worldwide and UNO NYC. Though no single has been released yet, Elysia Crampton has shared text from the release that reappropriates Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘City Of Sin’, which you can read below.

Tracklist:

01. ‘Law I (The City in the Sea)’
02. ‘Gænova’
03. ‘Blood of The Covenant’
04. ‘Negative Fire III’
05. ‘The Failed Sons and Daughters of Fantasia’
06. ‘Blackout’
07. ‘Antikeimenon’
08. ‘Nkisi (edit)’
09. ‘Eigengrau (Children of Hell II)’
10. ‘Law II (Demolition)’
11. ‘Polizei’
12. ‘White Mætel’
13. ‘Radical Zero’
14. ‘Paradiso’
15. ‘Law III (Adam)’
16. ‘The Floating World pt. 1’
17. ‘The Floating World pt. 2’
18. ‘Dixie Shrine’
19. ‘Kollaps’
20. ‘End (The City in the Sea)’

ELYSIA TEXT

“O! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city, Paradiso.
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
Time-eaten towers that tremble not
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free
Up domes- up spires- up kingly halls
Up fanes- up Babylon-like walls-
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers-
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye-
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass-
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea-
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave- there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide-
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow-
The hours are breathing faint and low-
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.”