Namir Blade used quarantine time to finish his concept album Aphelion’s Traveling Circus, a ruminative, otherworldly soundscape of a hip-hop project, mostly on his own in his East Nashville home.
He says he often had the sci-fi movie Blade Runner and some of his favorite Japanese anime films playing on his TV on mute for inspiration. The songs he shaped tell a story of people trying to not only survive, but thrive in the future. “When we’re in grim circumstances,” he reasons, “it’s good to look towards the future, because the future can kind of just give you a semblance of hope. I feel like as a Black man, in order to be able to maneuver through our current circumstances, and even our circumstances for the longest time, we had to look to the future.”
Blade put his sci-fi fascination to use, alongside technical skill and mischievous freestyling, but he also made his storytelling feel emotionally revealing. Listen to some of the lyrics, and the pensive way he delivers them, and you hear someone worrying that he’s ruined his chance at closeness. “That’s a big step for me,” he allows, “because, yeah, I come from where you just hide all your vulnerabilities behind all of these complex metaphors and multi-syllable words and all of that.”
- Format: Vinyl
- Genre: Hip Hop, Funk/Soul
- Remember, for our lowest prices, always order directly from our official JocoRecords website!
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Track Listing:
1 Foreword
2 Aphelion's Travling Circus
3 Pace (Feat. Jordan Webb)
4 Biowaretech
5 Patlabor
6 Science
7 Spanish Web
8 Space Ghost
9 Stay
10 Rrn In Space
11 The Head
12 The Mind (Feat. Brian Brown)
13 The Holy Mountain
14 What I Miss About Earth
15 Homesick (Feat. Jskodiak)
16 Dragunov
