"embracing dub, soul and paisley pop, A.R. Kane pushed boundaries most of their contemporaries completely ignored.” - Pitchfork

“the great lost group of the 80s” - Simon Reynolds

“arguably the most criminally under-recognized band of their era” - Jason Ankeny

“some of the 80s’ most extraordinary music” - The Guardian

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In the beginning there was only Black Noise.

That’s how the late music writer and art critic Greg Tate began his new liner notes for this issue of Americana. He took the scope of A.R. Kane’s musical project way back—all the way back to the origins of Black music—because the band’s musical explorations and accomplishments are just that massive, although you wouldn’t know it based on the reception they’ve had.

Rudy Tambala and Alex Ayuli, the musical minds behind A.R. Kane are “two barely legal art-damaged aristos of Malawi/ British and Nigerian descent raised in cockney-sprechen East London,” as Tate referred to them: “two dope boyz who’d telepathically claimed each other as best friends around age 8 and who, in 1986, claimed all the aforementioned hallmarks of Black Alienation, Black Rage, Black Silence, Black Noise and Black Ragga as their sonorous and luminous own.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that A.R. Kane was one of the most important bands of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s: They started the shoegaze trend, they invented dreampop, and they pushed the envelope of what the corporate suits (ok ok ok, Geoff Travis from Rough Trade and a few others, hardly THAT corporate) that repped them considered to be Black music. And yet, when it came time for the masses to rally around them—crickets.

The music industry is in an age of rediscovery—we’.......
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