Scenery

before the noise my cousin is the debut album from experimental musician & artist Otis Mensah entirely produced by the intern following a longstanding Berlin-centred collaboration. Exploring notions of youth, its transience and malaise, ‘before the noise’ grapples for a deeper sense of kinship and home as it journeys artistic-tribulation and coming-of-age with dreamlike sonics and daring abstract-rap cadence. The album began inception over a six-year stretch during Otis’ time touring across Europe, sleeping on the intern’s dusty studio floor and crafts sleepless quarrel, wrestling on the line where desire for validation and recognition meets and contorts with the aesthetic and occupational pursuit of creative practice. The album therefore holds a disillusionment with the industry of performance under the brutalisation of capitalism but finds renewal, resolve and pride in a poetic will to express freely and vulnerably. The album features incredible verses from legendary emcees Blu, Speech of Arrested Development and Lando Chill.