In All The Quiet (Part II), Joe Armon-Jones crafts a speculative narrative rooted in dub, jazz, and the urgency of improvisation. As the second installment in a two-part opus, released on his Aquarii imprint, the album concludes a dystopian allegory in which music has been all but extinguished, surviving only through the "paladins of sound"—a scattered few who resist algorithmic cultural flattening.

The seeds of All the Quiet were planted during lockdown, when Armon-Jones taught himself how to engineer and mix, drawing on the radical production of King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry. He built a home studio equipped with reel-to-reel tape machines and spring reverbs, sculpting early mixes on the Lewisham-based Unit 137 sound system. The result is an album that is meticulous yet raw; a futuristic yet deeply rooted body of music that is sometimes vaporous and haunting, and sometimes body-moving and militant.

"Acknowledgement Is Key" opens the album with Hak Baker's voice fraying at the edges of memory, singing "I miss the feeling when a song could make you cry”. "Lavender" recalls the modal stillness of early '70s fusion, while "Westmoreland" pulses with dub-poet gravitas. On "Another Place," Greentea Peng and Wu-Lu drift across a rhythm from a future Kingston-London continuum. "War Transmission" and "Paladin of Sound & Circumstance" are urgent, bass-forward tracks that treat jazz instrumentation like weaponry. The closer, "One Way Traffic" with Yazmin Lacey, reopens the journey with a residue of melancholy and defiance.

There's a strong Afrofuturist lineage running through this work. This isn't just in the narrative concept (the year 3999, music nearly extinct), but in its use of texture to chart alternate futures. Like Flying Lotus' Cosmogramma or Sun Ra's outer-space sermons, Armon-Jones uses speculative imagination as a tool for survival and critique. But unlike some of his forebears, his imagined world is not cosmic or cartoonish. It's eerily recognizeable that the existential threats to humanity are data-driven platforms and cultural amnesia, making All The Quiet a coded form of resistance. Like Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, it posits that dystopia is the inevitable consequence of our current conditions. And still, it also believes in care, listening, and community as radical acts.

Dub is the medium through which this care is expressed, with Armon-Jone living inside its architecture—echo and delay become metaphorical, space is political, silence is deliberate, effects are memory loops. Like King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown, the production evokes hauntology as much as history, using absence to speak volumes about sonic space being reoccupied, routed, and futured.

Meanwhile, the presence of jazz improvisation across the album—whether in Nubya Garcia's phrasing or the rhythmic elasticity of Natcyet Wakili and Mutale Chashi—communicates a politics of the present. Armon-Jones recharges jazz with the kind of grassroots urgency fostered in Tomorrow's Warriors and Ezra Collective, where the ensemble embodies the concept.

And yet for its theoretical ambition, All The Quiet (Part II) is indeed human, never obscuring its emotional core beneath abstraction. You can get lost in the mix or follow its breadcrumbs to a broader political statement. Or you can simply let it soundtrack a late-night walk through a world that feels increasingly dissonant. The album's ultimate beauty lies in its ability to allow for open, immersive, and embodied modes of listening. In the battle between the mechanical quiet and the human pulse, All The Quiet (Part II) takes its stand.