‘New Vessels’ is the debut album from Ra Gerra – the Irish electronica / hip-hop duo consisting of electronic musician and producer Kobina and rapper and singer MuRli – and it’s out on Friday 16th July.
Today, Friday 25th June, Ra Gerra share new single, ‘Indecisive’ – a song that looks at how making a choice is often preceded by a sacrifice, but even when the decision is difficult, indecision is rarely ever bliss.
Despite being separated by about 2,000 kilometres, the Amsterdam-based Kobina and Limerick-based MuRli have forged a partnership to produce melodic, shifting music with emotive clarity and immediacy.
Singles ‘Terrified’ (November 2020) and ‘Pressure’ (April 2021) have already alerted music media to the project, with iconic Irish music podcast No Encore dedicating a stand-alone episode to the project, Leeds-based underground music bible Pretend.co.uk featuring a full-length interview with MuRli and Kobina, District naming ‘New Vessels’ in their ‘21 Albums We Can’t Wait For’ feature and Nialler9 writing about Kobina’s “melodic textured electronic production” mixed with MuRli’s “emotive words”.
The project also caught the attention of super-director P.O.B. of Motherland, who loved the Ra Gerra project so much that he asked MuRli and Kobina if he can direct the video for ‘Indecisive’ – a video that will be released next week.
MuRli (A.K.A. Mawuli Boevi) is a rapper, producer and songwriter, who is well known for his evocative lyrics, incredible technique, and is widely sought after for both his pen and production. His first two solo EPs, ‘Surface Tension’ and ‘Till The Wheels Fall Off’, have been lauded by critics both at home and abroad for being both catchy and flawlessly capturing the heart of moments and movements. He is also one of the founders of narolane records.
Speaking about ‘New Vessels’, MuRli says: “This is one of the most organic projects I’ve been a part of. It’s almost like a freestyle album. We had no expectations going into it, other than writing a bit of music together, so there were no rules. I was just laying down whatever came naturally to me wherever I’d find myself writing. There was no specific direction I wanted to go into with this project. I was exploring new ways of writing and performing and this is the result.“
Kobina is Dublin-born, Amsterdam-based musician and producer Seán Arthur. His work pulls together diverse and often disparate strands of music to create textured, rich and emotive sounds. After three well received E.Ps, the latest being 2019’s ‘Four Poems’, in 2020 Kobina released the charity compilation album ‘For Nora’ featuring collaborations with a number of his musical peers, as well as original material.
Speaking about ‘New Vessels’, Kobina says: “’New Vessels’ is all about pushing one another to dig deeper within ourselves and to look for new ways of communicating with and navigating our relationships with ourselves and the world around us.”
Bandcamp: https://ragerramusic.bandcamp.com/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/09iZZroko68P8Vjw8Cqxhk?si=iogit-u1SV2rL5RLF-NxEg
