Dawuna's 'Love's Arp' Filters Black Music History Through a Haze

Ian Mugerwa, who records muted, experimental R&B as Dawuna, built his fourth album, Love's Arp, in the aftermath of a traumatic brain injury sustained in a car accident shortly after moving to Baltimore three years ago. The record follows African Family Laptop Musick, released this past summer and written while an undiagnosed amnesia allowed him to commit only fragments of the music to memory.

Where that earlier release was a semi-conscious catharsis, Love's Arp is a deliberately ambitious statement. It attempts to place Dawuna on a continuum of Black music stretching from spirituals through to R&B, and to sketch a roadmap of future-soul marked with what he calls "diasporic twists." The claim is large. The music, mostly, is not.

Despite its explicit references to extroverted historical music, the album is often remarkably quiet — as though, in the critic's phrase, all that history is being filtered through a thick membrane of cerebrospinal fluid.

How quiet is it?

Concretely: only on the fourth track, "Love Jaunt," does the skin of an acoustic snare drum break through the mix, and nearly half an hour passes before it happens again. The first single, "Love's Ekongo," built on a beautifully arpeggiated thumb harp, opens space and light; the following track, "Love Wants a Family," immediately closes it. The percussion on "True" is compressed to the point of sounding industrial. This is music made at and for midnight — a rhythm still thrumming through the body while it resists sleep. Dawuna's voice croaks and crackles on "Love Wants a Family" and "Love Is…" as if he is singing inside a reverie.

What does this change for the artist?

The distance is new. On "Govinda P," a deeply melancholy soul song from 2024's Naya, Dawuna sounded crystalline, his voice cutting through a spartan arrangement. On the first side of Love's Arp, the arrangement wins out over his lead vocals. His backing vocals stay prominent instead — particularly the wordless, monastic lines that close "Love Wants a Family" — his voice succumbing to itself.

The lineage here is gospel: the all-encompassing choir, many voices (even from one man) consuming a soloist. But where artists like Pastor T.L. Barrett channeled the voice of God directly through human lungs, Dawuna hears the sound of those lungs through layers of tape fuzz — and revoices them in a dimly lit room. The ambition is a place in the canon of Black music; the method, for now, is burial.