Anthony Joseph took the title of his 2006 Afrofuturist novel and built a track around it. The arrangement features dub bass and smeared synth from Dave Okumu, alongside brass from Byron Wallen and Colin Webster that thickens and recedes. Joseph’s voice cuts through in Trinidadian nation language fused with surrealist imagery and jazz rhythm. The sound is wide in its atmosphere, heavy at the bottom, and completely unclassifiable.

The novel the title draws from is an afro-psychedelic noir, a time-shifting narrative that moves between ancient Trinidad, the present, and deep future space. It fuses science fiction, mythology, and genetic memory to ask what exile, race, and history actually mean when pulled free of linear time. That is the conceptual ground the track stands on. Joseph has described the wider project’s Afrofuturist thrust as using the future to correct the wrongs of the past, and the music holds that weight. Okumu’s production builds a sound that feels simultaneously archaic and unplaced, where the dub low-end carries the past while the brass and synth push outward into something unresolved and open.

The track sits fourth on The Ark, Joseph’s tenth album, out now via Heavenly Sweetness. It is the second part of an extended work begun with 2025’s Rowing Up River To Get Our Names Back, drawn from the same sessions and the same ensemble: Eska Mtungwazi, Nick Ramm, Richard Spaven, and Colin Webster, with Okumu directing and playing throughout.

You can stream and purchase your copy of The Ark HERE