Hawk Deh Near marks the return of MT Gemini with his most intense and uncompromising release to date.

The title draws from the Jamaican proverb “Chicken merry, hawk deh near”, a phrase balancing humour and warning, and encapsulating the album’s central tension between apparent lightness and underlying threat.

Leaning toward incantation rather than genre, Hawk Deh Near treats reggae as raw material. Fragments of rhythm, melody, and texture are pulled into abrasive hypnotic compositions where repetition, saturation, and warped psychedelia destabilise familiar forms. The result is a music of deconstruction: raw, ritualistic, and emotionally immediate.

The album was recorded, produced, and mixed by Yannick Franck using a process deliberately opposed to hyper-controlled digital production. Texture, imperfection, psycho-acoustic phenomena, and instability are foregrounded, allowing distortion, accidents, and ambiguity to actively shape the music.

MT Gemini is Franck’s long-running avant-dub project, fusing Jamaican forms such as ska, rocksteady, and dancehall with unorthodox electroacoustic practices. Rather than revivalism, the project operates through mutation and fabulation: obscured elements of classic rocksteady or popular dancehall tunes re-emerge from unfamiliar angles, reconfigured into dense, ritualistic sound environments.

Drawing from pataphysics, defined by Alfred Jarry as “the science of imaginary solutions to actual problems”, MT Gemini stages collisions between genres, techniques, and cultures that rarely communicate, embracing radical cross-pollination as a creative method.

MT Gemini’s work has been released by Sub Rosa and Antibody, the left-field imprint founded by Franck himself, and has been praised by The Wire and Brainwashed. His debut album Just Like A River was listed among The Wire’s “10 Records of the Year” (Dub).

Live, MT Gemini appears as a heavily psycho-active audiovisual performance, featuring visuals created by Franck, often in collaboration with performer Shayli Harrison and digital artist Olga Fedorova. He has shared stages with Nik Colk Void, Drew McDowall, Ghost Dubs, Croatian Amor, and Shit & Shine, and made his UK live debut at Café Oto.

Beyond MT Gemini, Franck’s practice spans sound art, film, performance, and research into audiovisual perception. He has collaborated with fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck through his former duo Orphan Swords, and his music has featured in the Netflix UK series Top Boy.