Joseph Kamaru was born in Nairobi and is now based in Berlin, and that distance — geographical, emotional, temporal — is what his music is made of.
Working as KMRU, he makes ambient and experimental music rooted in field recording, machine learning, and a kind of patient listening that feels increasingly rare. He is not making background music. He is making music that teaches you to hear differently, if you stay with it long enough.
His 2020 debut Peel on Editions Mego established him immediately as someone operating at a serious level. The album was built from recordings made across Kenya, layered and processed into something that retained the texture of specific places without reducing them to postcard. The sound of rain at a particular time of day in a particular part of Nairobi is not decoration — it is the point.
Kin, released on Editions Mego in early 2026, is his most personal record yet. It grew from conversations with the late Peter Rehberg, the label's founder and one of the most important figures in experimental electronic music, who died in 2021. The album is a dedication to Rehberg's memory, though it wears that weight quietly rather than as announcement. Guest contributions from Fennesz bring an additional emotional register — chromatic, slightly fractured guitar-into-electronics that adds colour to KMRU's more austere palette.
What Kin does that earlier releases didn't is let you feel the structural grief of the thing. There is an awareness running through it of the time between conversations, the conversations that cannot now happen. The field recordings are still there, still anchored in specific places, but they press against that absence with a new kind of weight.
Kamaru has talked about his process as a form of active listening — he does not go into a space to extract material but to understand what the space is already doing. That orientation shows in the work. The sounds on Kin do not feel captured. They feel given.
Editions Mego continues to release records that age well. Kin will be one of them.
