Disconnect opens like a pit slowly forming in your stomach. A featureless, windswept expanse emerges from the silence, and distant booms ring out on the horizon. The first sign of life is far from reassuring: a chorus of sighs and exhalations, the universal sound of hopelessness. “Differences” and the subsequent “Arkives” never really pick up momentum, only accumulating more shades of gray as they sprawl onward across double-digit runtimes. These two tracks comprise half of Disconnect on their own, and Kevin Richard Martin and KMRU spend the remainder of the album stripping them down and peeling back the layers in classic dub fashion—until they resemble errant puffs of smoke escaping from a Rhythm & Sound track.

Anyone familiar with the works of the two artists shouldn’t be surprised by how grim their debut collaboration sounds. Martin is best-known for the mind-melting dubstep he makes as the Bug, but he’s recorded much of his best work over the last decade in a more ambient register, including his nerve-wracking solo album Sirens and the great Concrete Desert with drone legends Earth. KMRU, born Joseph Kamaru, broke out with 2020’s Peel on the late Peter Rehberg’s Editions Mego label, and has since amassed an eclectic if generally monochromatic catalog. These are musicians who thrive in blasted, apocalyptic sound worlds; Disconnect is a natural extension of both of their repertoires.

What’s a surprise on Disconnect is the inclusion of Kamaru’s vocals. His spoken-word passages expand on a theme he previously explored on his 2022 album Temporary Stored: the theft of African artifacts by Western museums and archives. “African traditions are passed across through apprenticeship and other oral traditions,” the Kenyan-born artist explains on “Arkives,” as opposed to the Western emphasis on written documents deemed “ontologically concrete.” On both albums, Kamaru argues that the keeping of African artifacts in Western museums distorts their meaning and purpose, as many of these items are “more than just objects” in their own cultures.

Martin first discovered Kamaru through a documentary and was attracted to his musical sensibilities as well as the quality of his voice. Across the four versions of “Differences” and “Arkives” that constitute the album’s second half, Martin chops Kamaru’s voice into tiny fragments, emphasizing the “ark” part of “archives”: It’s an appropriate choice for a record that sounds like the first showers of a cataclysmic flood. At first, it might escape a casual listener’s notice that these are six variations on two songs, not because the versions are radically different from each other, but because the sound palette is so consistent and so subdued that it all eventually blurs into an amorphous miasma.

What’s curious is that Kamaru’s vocals on “Arkives” are smeared in megaphone filters and delay effects that occasionally make them hard to understand. That initially seems like a strange decision for an album that’s consciously trying to make a point about colonial violence, but by presenting Disconnect’s two core tracks as mutable materials rather than as treatises written in stone, the two artists honor the malleability of tradition through the very medium they work in. Dub treats songs as living, breathing, changeable entities. Disconnect gets its message across through Kamaru’s words and through the music itself, whose darkness feels less oppressive thanks to the creators who speak life into it.