Duval Timothy – Help (Black Vinyl)

The following text is an essay on Duval Timothy and the album Help, by our friend Josh Kun. What are pure art aims? That music is primarily a combination of tones Painting a combination of colors Dancing a combination of movements. Let us say this in artistic terms: we want more. Composition Combination Construction Dynamic and static Weight and qualities Rhythm and balance and so on. -Josef Albers. This is not piano. This is dreaming. It’s dreaming. - Duke Ellington. The last time Duval Timothy released an album of songs, on 2018’s 2 Sim, he was surrounded by voices. They were intimate and eloquent and everywhere. Sourced from personal voice notes and field recordings that he pulled from his WhatsApp and captured with his digital audio recorder, they belonged to friends and family in Sierra Leone where Timothy’s father migrated from and where Timothy, born and raised in South London, has been returning to— making films, making music, painting, and learning to weave. They talked of passports, rainstorms, and beaches, and ruminate— over acoustic piano, layered electronics, and the occasional avalanche of beats— on being West African in London and being Afro-British in West Africa, on living a life with two SIM cards, a diaspora life of proximity and distance and family mirrors that don’t always reflect neatly back. On Help, the voices are fewer and more inscrutable. They are usually allowed only a word or a phrase. They are clipped and panned, time-stretched, and pitched up and down. They are treated like discrete units of matter, strategically drawn in and let go. There are only two voices that are given full sentences.