Joe Armon-Jones returns with All The Quiet Part I (out now) and All The Quiet Part II (following on June 13th). Released on Armon-Jones’ own label, Aquarii Records, these two distinct but conceptually linked albums find the London-based keyboardist, producer, songwriter and bandleader expanding his sound into new musical and sonic realms, assisted by a wealth of special guests including Asheber, Greentea Peng, Wu Lu, Hak Baker and Yazmin Lacey.

You can trace the genesis of All The Quiet back to lockdown, when in search of a creative distraction, Armon-Jones decided to teach himself how to use a mixing desk, inspired by his love for the radical productions of King Tubby and the feeling of experiencing a live dub sound system in the flesh. Before long he’d built a home studio complete with reel-to-reel tape machines and spring reverb, and was experimenting with mixing his own solo and ensemble recordings, testing out the results on his friends’ Unit 137 sound system in nearby Lewisham. The methodology, he discovered, wasn’t so different from jazz improvisation. “I got really into exploring the soundworld of dub,” explains Armon-Jones. “Taking that process and applying it to jazz, funk, and all those other musics that I really love.”

The performances that comprise All The Quiet came together in four days of intensive recording at Livingstone Studios and Press Play, Armon-Jones working with a crack team of musicians including drummer Natcyet Wakili, bassist Mutale Chashi, percussionist Kwake Bass and a horn section consisting of Nubya Garcia and Ezra Collective’s James Mollison and Ife Ogunjobi. With those sessions captured to tape, he then entered a deep period of editing and production, adding his own vocals and synth, and tweaking bass and drums with hints of dub delay and echo to create a sound both fastidiously textured and infused with the freedom of improvisation.

As the music that would become All The Quiet began to take shape, he began to think of it in thematic terms, crafting a fantasy narrative of elite paladins of sound, battling to keep the soul of music alive in an age of indifference and hostility to the creative spirit. Fanciful, perhaps, but within it lies a serious point around the way that music has become commodified and devalued. “It’s an extreme end-game result of what we’re seeing at the moment,” says Armon-Jones, who worked with his long-term visual collaborators, Divya Scialo and Ralph Berryman, to turn his narrative into artwork and a comic book that will be available with All The Quiet’s deluxe vinyl editions.