Super-crew KAMM honors its Alland Byallo and his lower Haight legacy with final LP

“Your Honour,” the third track on Let The Light In—supposedly, the final album of Berlin-based producer crew KAMM—bangs on swimmingly, with a bossa nova-adjacent chart that addresses our current political state with all the intricacy of uptempo jazz. Burn through the rubbish? It does.

The track features the late Alland Byallo hitting those horn arrangements (yes, the techno producer played trumpet) Dave Aju laying vibraphone over the bass notes, Kenneth Scott working the synth on top, and Marc Smith on guitar to complete this moment.

How did these electronic music producers get to this point?

You can blame KAMM on “slower” Haight. That’s right, kiddos—the San Francisco neighborhood’s leisurely, “You got a smoke? Change, Spare some kombucha? My spaceship is in the repair shop” pace of life still capable of creating a less-busy atmosphere. Tech bros can’t kill everything.

Smoke-induced, edible-fueled, or perhaps operating off some randy psychedelic—powered by whatever alchemy of choice, there is an era of records from the early ’90s on Mo’ Wax, the British record label founded by James Lavelle, that gained prominence for their trip-hop buzz. These releases are loaded with Roy Haynes drum breaks and Grant Green funk-soul guitar chords.

Lavelle’s imprint featured artists like UNKLE, with Bay-famous DJ Shadow playing a key role in the brand’s early success, earning a reputation for a particular type of beat designation.

And jazz records, the source code for those sorts of rare releases, could once be found at the numerous Black-owned shops in the lower/slower Haight, where you could purchase the physical media and listen to shop owners expound on the science behind them.

Aju and Byallo, both former residents of the Bay Area and standout DJ-producers in their own right, hit those shops, and were influential figures in the local music scene. Byallo co-founded [KONTROL], the seminal 2000s monthly party at the EndUp, and played a key role in introducing the city to the minimal techno emerging from Berlin.

Meanwhile, Aju rose through the ranks of San Francisco’s DJ tiers, delivering sets that challenged the status quo of established selectors but that spoke clearly to the dance floor, every time. And of course, there was the blow-off party machine that was the Mag 7 at Madrone in the salad days.

But previous to all of that, both were hypnotized by fuzzed-toned, dusty-record, boom-bap culture.

In Berlin, along with Kenneth Scott and Smith, they joined together over a decade ago to create a project initially inspired by laissez-faire, low-slung Karl-The-Fog-type-adjacent production. The crew assembled a chimerical sandbox for producers and musicians seeking refuge from the bass thump of Berghain and other types of manufactured environments. 

With a bevy of label co-signs that included Poker Flat, Dessous, Circus Company, Moodmusic, Third Ear, Hypercolour, Rawax, and others, these in-demand electronic producers felt summoned to make something that was grounded in their musical origins. A return to center—be it jazz, indie rock, proto-disco, or post-rock—these brothers in sound were searching to create in their non-4/4 essence.

So KAMM was born, with its debut release Kick Drunk Love for Marcel Vogel’s Intimate Friends imprint. It consists of six tracks that play wobbly slap amidst loose-fitting bump.

The sense of a joyful community using live instrumentation seeped into the music. KAMM recorded guitars and trumpets and Damian Schwartz on bass, scoring downtempo climates to which picky, adventurous DJs would lick their lips and take on the challenge of making the off-the-cuff tracks work in a set. Incorporating jazz, experimental music, indie rock, and cutting-edge textures, KAMM drowned out the cynicism and the effort fed the creativity of its four-headed production crew.

That devilish, kicked-out-of-the-club mentality continued on their sophomore release, Cookie Policies, in which these compadres’ sound displayed great wit. Jokes about the name KAMM resulted in quips such as [Kinetic Abyss of the Micro Micro, Kill All Mediocre Music, or Kindly Ask My Mother], all while pushing through free jazz frequencies, indie rock outlines, and a squee bit of that electronic thump in the night.

Then, gravity hit. Byallo passed in his Berlin home in August of 2023, which took the air out of several electronic music circles from LA and SF to Berlin and back. In honor of his legacy, Marc Barrite a.k.a. Aju, Kenneth Scott, and Marc Smith marched on to finish what was started with the third KAMM project, appropriately titled Let The Light In.

The project in toll begins with planetary cover art inspired by Byallo’s last paintings and culminates in an uplifting trumpet performance on the final title track amid a chorus of Byallo’s inner circle of collaborators, friends, partners, and just plain old folks who loved the dude from around the world.

I dare anybody to hear this tribute without dropping a tear—it’s the heart of the crew’s last go-round. Byallo’s essence permeates throughout this record, which was completed under the leadership of Aju as a tribute to his late bandmate and friend.

Yet, it’s the mid-section of the release where KAMM flies its most distinctive flag to date.

With Aju giving the vox and all the slippery wordplay lines he could muster (“Soft spoken, but hard at heart/Childish riffs and old man bitchin’ in equal parts/It ain’t hoarding if your shit is cool/This fool”) against an upright-bass-led evergreen boulevard of variegated jazz-influenced ideas, he waxes on about a lost friend.

And with “How Long,” we get to the midpoint between half-time breaks and electro B-boy freestyle on the moon, which again, just begs adventurous DJs to hop in on those decks and get free. Or the left jab of “S.I.M.,” which peruses the empty existence of living via the algorithm and disappearing behind the screen with some hazy, Stevie Wonder-esque fusion.

Perhaps the late producer might have been grumpy about so much gushing over his passing. But for being such an influential figure to so many, dude had a hell of a sense of humor.

RIP, Byallo.

Pick up Let The Light In here.