Otis Mensah - Come Beautify The Night Otis Mensah

Come Beautify The Night by interdisciplinary artist and musician Otis Mensah combines avant-garde musical-form with traditional elements of rap-flow & cadence, reflecting on the body as landscape across seven movements. The album marks a seminal evolution as Otis' compositional debut, with an abstractionist approach to sound and form that obscures the borders between self and place. Beginning inception in the North of England and drawing to a close in Berlin, the colliding dark / light textures and tonal shifts of Come Beautify The Night inhabit the nature of transition and the rewriting home - teetering between rurality to metropolarity.

The album unfolds with Otis leading on piano and voice, breaking into untamed, nonlinear jazz-signatures that erode its seemingly classical form, the album remains in constant pursuit of autonomy. The seven tracks move through dusk, dawn, and nightfall, representing the body's liminal journey in dislocation, to chosen kinship/belonging, and collective resistance. Each song begins with piano & evolves into grand textured soundscapes and improvisational dialogue with a vast array of musicians and artists from Georgia Anne Muldrow to LIE NING.

The ""Night"" refers to that which is subdued and erased whilst the act of ""beautifying"" exists as a ritual of resistance. The adornment of one's self, the queering of gender, and the encryption of written and spoken language present themselves as oppositional modes of fierce defiance when one's identity and sense of home are at stake.