SOUND

Simulacrum is the name of the debut album by French producer Aho Ssan. The title is inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s semiotic theory: And his music also deals with how signs structure our reality and whether a world outside of the simulation and simulacrum is even imaginable. Or more precisely: Is a world without the semiotics of racism possible? Aho Ssan grew up as a Black person in a French banlieue; his music employs electronics to simulate an update of the Afro-futurist jazz of Sun Ra; and he plays together with the Mensah Imaginary Band: a group of Ghanaian jazz musicians from the 1950s, whom Aho Ssan modelled as avatars in the programming language Max/MSP.