Sault are an anonymous and highly mysterious collective in the UK, creating R&B filtered through house music and disco. They released two albums (5 and 7) in 2019 and another two albums (Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise)) in 2020 which were huge critical hits despite the act doing zero promotion.
Clues as to who is involved are thin on the ground, although Inflo is listed as producer and has previously worked with Little Simz and Michael Kiwanuka.
The mystery has deepened even further with the news on 15th June that they were releasing a new album called Nine, thereby carrying on the odd numbers theme from 2019. On the 16th June they posted an image on their Instagram that read, “Nine will only exist for ninety nine days.” It added it could be downloaded from their official site and would also be available on vinyl as well as on streaming services.
On their band site, there was a message that read, “108 days left of nine.” It was widely accepted that this meant the album would come nine days later (i.e. on 25th June) and be available for ninety-nine days after that.
There are echoes here of the situationist media pranks of the KLF who announced in May 1992 that their entire catalogue would be deleted. (They slightly reneged on that this year after Domino started putting out themed compilations but not full replications of their albums from the late 1980s and early 1990s.) There are also echoes of how Radiohead announced the arrival of In Rainbows in 2007 on their Dead Air Space blog.
Against the common arguments about the economics of streaming – namely that music is available on-demand for the duration of its copyright and can, theoretically, keep earning micro royalties until then – the band have decided to make its imminent unavailability the selling point.
Of course, nothing ever fully disappears online: inevitably there will be rips shared on torrent sites and uploads to YouTube. Whether or not Sault choose to police all this is almost irrelevant as the entire point is to make an artistic (as well as an economic and political) statement about accessibility, availability and impermanence.
