Mt Gemini
Hawk Deh Near
Hawk Deh Near marks the return of MT Gemini with his most intense and uncompromising release to date. The title draws from the Jamaican proverb "Chicken merry, hawk deh near", a phrase balancing humour and warning, and encapsulating the album's central tension between apparent lightness and underlying threat. Leaning toward incantation rather than genre, Hawk Deh Near treats reggae as raw material. Fragments of rhythm, melody, and texture are pulled into abrasive hypnotic compositions where repetition, saturation, and warped psychedelia destabilise familiar forms. The result is a music of deconstruction: raw, ritualistic, and emotionally immediate. The album was recorded, produced, and mixed by Yannick Franck using a process deliberately opposed to hyper-controlled digital production. Texture, imperfection, psycho-acoustic phenomena, and instability are foregrounded, allowing distortion, accidents, and ambiguity to actively shape the music. MT Gemini is Franck's long-running avant-dub project, fusing Jamaican forms such as ska, rocksteady, and dancehall with unorthodox electroacoustic practices. Rather than revivalism, the project operates through mutation and fabulation: obscured elements of classic rocksteady or popular dancehall tunes re-emerge from unfamiliar angles, reconfigured into dense, ritualistic sound environments.