@ys - no sane way to make money
- 1faaaast ft. mwami
- 2natural born killer
- 3js10 ft. nyah bear & pirimo hamza
- 4nolabels ft. adie & mwami
- 5who hurt you
- 6!!!808 ft. GIANNI
- 7unhinged ft. Hurricane Dan Fischer
- 8newmaprndr ft. Littlebabyangel
- 91_1_1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 ft. moltamole
- 10sloooow ft. mwami
001
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Open edition
No Sane Way To Make Money is a long-in-the-making post-genre debut shaped by movement, collaboration, and a refusal to follow familiar structures. Created by the artist working under the moniker @ys, it was pieced together across Berlin, Nairobi, Kampala, Milan and Poland. The album draws from nearly a decade of transient living, creative detours, and shared moments between friends, mentors, and collaborators. Neither journal nor statement, it’s a fractured memory-map-alive with presence, texture, and a quiet resistance to the algorithmic logic of modern music culture.
Beginning as daily piano sketches and vocal processing experiments between 2015-2018 in Berlin, the album took form across a series of creative residencies and sessions in Kampala and Nairobi during 2022– 2023. Its evolution was shaped less by planning than by proximity, rooms shared, impulses followed, conversations had late into the night.
Instrumentally, No Sane Way To Make Money blends cinematic deconstructed electronics with mutant jazz and spectral ambient soul. Rhodes, cello, saxophone, acoustic bass, and processed vocals emerge and recede through warped signal paths and nonlinear compositions. Dusty spoken word from Kampala, vocoder-filtered monologues, and analog synths rub against broken rhythms and vaporous textures. The result is a post-genre sound collage-thought-provoking and emotionally direct in equal measure.
What gives the album its weight is not just how it sounds, but how it came into being. Shaped by friendships, shared contexts, and extended periods of working alongside others, its layers carry the traces of shared time and creative alignment. The result feels less like a singular debut and more like a record shaped in dialogue. The title, No Sane Way To Make Money, lingers like a paradox - a half-joke, half-truth. It speaks to the collapse of sustainable creative life in an era obsessed with speed, visibility, and extractive platforms. In that context, this album stands as a quiet act of defiance. Rather than conforming to genre templates or marketable forms, the album unfolds on its own terms - slow, messy, human. Somewhere between sonic document and dream logic.
Beginning as daily piano sketches and vocal processing experiments between 2015-2018 in Berlin, the album took form across a series of creative residencies and sessions in Kampala and Nairobi during 2022– 2023. Its evolution was shaped less by planning than by proximity, rooms shared, impulses followed, conversations had late into the night.
Instrumentally, No Sane Way To Make Money blends cinematic deconstructed electronics with mutant jazz and spectral ambient soul. Rhodes, cello, saxophone, acoustic bass, and processed vocals emerge and recede through warped signal paths and nonlinear compositions. Dusty spoken word from Kampala, vocoder-filtered monologues, and analog synths rub against broken rhythms and vaporous textures. The result is a post-genre sound collage-thought-provoking and emotionally direct in equal measure.
What gives the album its weight is not just how it sounds, but how it came into being. Shaped by friendships, shared contexts, and extended periods of working alongside others, its layers carry the traces of shared time and creative alignment. The result feels less like a singular debut and more like a record shaped in dialogue. The title, No Sane Way To Make Money, lingers like a paradox - a half-joke, half-truth. It speaks to the collapse of sustainable creative life in an era obsessed with speed, visibility, and extractive platforms. In that context, this album stands as a quiet act of defiance. Rather than conforming to genre templates or marketable forms, the album unfolds on its own terms - slow, messy, human. Somewhere between sonic document and dream logic.
