Bubblegum Club

Author: Christopher McMichael

  • “Death has reared himself a throne”- Chino Amobi’s PARADISO

    Capitalist modernity needs hells for the many to build heavens for the few. The great palaces and mansions of Europe and America were built off the backs of African slaves. The skyscrapers of Dubai from the sweat of construction workers penned into trailers in the desert. Or as Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk put it “monstrous paradises, indeed, presume sulphurous antipodes”.

    In his exceptional debut album PARADISO, Chino Amobi explores this infernal dialectic.  Speaking to me from his home in Richmond, Virginia, he described the concept of the album as “moving through the fire to get to paradise”. It’s an hour long epic, placing brutal synthesisers next to beautiful melodies, plateaus of noise with unexpected peaks of folk ambience.   The diabolic hip hop of ‘WhiteMÆtel’ (“signals dropping, no god, bodies dropping”) sits next to the elegiac  ‘The Floating World Pt1’.   Amobi himself calls it an act of ‘’hypersition’’ aimed at “carving out a speculative reality that hovers above the America that we know now and rests below the America that we know now’’.

    Along with his solo work, he’s also the co-founder of NON records.  Since 2015, the label has earned a reputation as one of the most sonically radical electronic imprints, including powerful releases from local artists FAKA and Angel-Ho.  Fittingly, PARADISO is full of guest appearances, including a series of dense spoken word appearances which give the album a sense of archaic, Miltonic grandeur.   He encouraged the guests to improvise. “It was not all under my control. Rather, I’d take on the vibe that they brought.  My role was like a journalist framing the response’’.

    One of Amobi’s key reference points for the album was Dante’s epic poem Divine Comedy, a work which used the grotesque and surreal to map late medieval European society.  In a similar vein, PARADISO is steeped in what he calls the “ghost of history, and how colonial spirits impact on contemporary city space’’. As an artist working below the Mason- Dixon line, he consciously engages with the tradition of the Southern Gothic, but expands this sense of forbidden history and monstrosity to the global South.  ‘Dixie Shrine’, for example, takes inspiration from both the Confederate memorials which still blight the US and the Biafran war in Nigeria.

    With a warm heart beating under the carapace of alienated noise, PARADISO feels like a more appropriate Blade Runner sequel than Denis Villeneuve’s forthcoming effort. Unafraid to confront the darkness of the present, it lights a path through the wreckage.

  • FARAI- Warrior Sounds

    The post-punk of the late ’70’s and early 80’s fused dystopian politics with danceable music. Artists like Talking Heads, Wire, Joy Division and Gang of Four tried to push guitar rock to its very limits, channeling inspiration from the outer regions of reggae, disco and Afrobeat. Conceptually the dominant mode was of fear, a reaction to  living under the long shadows cast by reactionary politics and the threat of nuclear war. Albums like Cabaret Voltaire’s Red Mecca and This Heat’s Deceit could easily soundtrack the   disturbing headlines of 2017. Sometime after 9/11, there was a brief media hype about a post-punk revival, embodied by indie bands like Interpol and The Strokes. But while such groups made a lot of good music, they lacked the sonic and political confrontation of their predecessors. Instead, it’s hip hop and electronic artists who have carried the gauntlet. In the last two years alone, for instance, Danny Brown and Vince Staples paid homage to Joy Division with their album titles and cover art.

    The NON collective, home of artists like Faka and Angel Ho, has been at the forefront of this aesthetic. Their latest release, Kisswell by FARAI, is a feast for lovers of deep synths, dark bass and defiance. The 4-track EP is a collaboration between Zimbabwean born singer Farai Bukowski- Bourquet and producer Tone. Farai is best known for her 2015 single ‘The Sinner’, a menacing piece of fire and brimstone future dub. Kisswell, inspired by the spirit of her late father, is lighter in touch, but not by very much! Over the keyboard stabs of ‘Lion Warrior’ she announces “I’m friends with the Hells Angels”, and her conviction sells the boasting. ‘Inhale Exhale’ twists words so that exhale sounds like “in hell”. It culminates in the disorientating ‘Vagabond’, a storm of distortion and effects. I have only complaint about this great project- it left me starving for more!

  • Shongwe-La Mer- Daydream/Purgatory

    Over the years, Joburg has acquired a formidably dangerous cinematic image. Local crime films like Tsotsi, Jerusalema and iNumberNumber are built on scenes of hijacked buildings and explosive violence.  International sci-fi such as Dredd, the atrocious Chappie and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter extend this visual mayhem to the future.  But as film historian Alexandra Parker argues in her book Urban Film and Everyday Practice, the suburbs have generally lacked such a definitive sense of place. Its main role is as a placid façade, contrasted with the apparent disorder of the city around it.

    But for director Sibs Shongwe-La Mer, the “daydream/purgatory of suburbia’’ is a source of profound inspiration. His feature production Necktie Youth, released when he was only 23, follows its cast through the sprawl of manicured gardens, anonymous car parks and ominously quiet streets which cascade out around the inner city. Atmospherically filmed in black and white, the story follows a social group of privileged youths snorting, fucking and generally losing their damn minds. While the film can often be raw, and its protagonists unsympathetic, this is an accurate representation of their  state of terminally arrested adolescence. For Shongwe-La Mer, who also acts in the film, the project was a reaction to his own experience of growing up in the city- “I think Johannesburg is very much a part of my DNA and  psychology, whether  I like or not. It informs a lot of my observation and  feelings and then quite naturally seeps into my cinematic sensibilities.”

    His work is informed by a rich knowledge of cinema history, drawing inspiration from European masters like Pier Paolo Pasolini, and contemporary auteurs like Wong Kar-Wai. Wai’s lovelorn Hong Kong nights are an obvious touchstone. But above all, he regards French director Jean-Luc Godard as a primary influence. The imprint of Godard films like Breathless and Bande à Part is all over Necktie Youth, particularly with its portrayal of hyper-consumerist, nihilistic characters.  The film elegantly reapplies techniques from the 1960s French New Wave into 21st century Johannesburg. Its most striking feature is the use of black and white, which it uses to capture the long shadows of life under the Highveld sun. The film excels at capturing the eerie stillness that you can often find in Johannesburg- an empty park, the deserted streets at night. As the director himself describes it, his work aims to capture “that sense of blissful alienation”.

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    His jaded characters are representatives of a cultural shift in South Africa, as the ‘born free’ generation enter their twenties. But such focus on what he astutely calls “the decadent world of the noveau rich” has a global pertinence.  And he has been noticed abroad with a frankly dizzying array of international projects lined up.  As he told us:

    “There’s a lot happening at the same time right about now. We are blessed to be working on a US television debut with Charles King and the good folks at Macro in Hollywood.

    The series shoots in eight different capitals across the world and features subculture influencers such as Grimes, Justice, Prayers and others. It’s a cross continental love affair So we are busy casting and packaging that. We have a feature film, The Sound of Animals Fighting that shoots in Brazil later this year starring Yung Lean and other talent that I’m really excited about. Our new feature company is also working with Mille Et Une in Paris on a really ambitions South African epic, Color Of The Skull, and some American writers on a Chicago gang story that we are looking at executive producing as an American series.”

    Having already achieved a confident directorial voice at a young age, his next projects are poised to take a vision honed in the Northern suburbs to the world.

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  • Simunye Summit 2010- The Futuristic Past

    Bogosi Sekhukhuni is an artist whose previous work has explored the creeping dominance of the virtual over daily life.  Projects such as Consciousness engine 2: absentblackfatherbot, a simulation of a conversation between a father and son, echo classic science fiction themes of artificial intelligence and post-humanism. He is actively conversant with these genre tropes- “I  approach science fiction as a narrative style. And  as a way of developing hypotheses, imagined  environments or simulations of circumstances that speak to various conditions of human nature, usually specifically within the lens of a black body in a pre singularity world”. But, he is equally aware of these tropes limitations , saying “ I’m really not interested in the future in the sci fi sense; science fiction or discussions on technological progress tend to be projected through a western capitalist linear vision that anticipates and packages novelty. I’m more drawn to Bantu philosophical interpretations of space time that acknowledge a cyclical nature of time and in turn, the history of human progress.  Our present popular understanding of technological progress is supported by the notion that our time represents an unprecedented height of human intelligence, which is easily refuted by the immense archeological record left all over the world, especially in southern Africa”.

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    His current solo exhibition Simunye Summit 2010, reverses engineers the past, with a “  a sci fi dystopian reading of Apartheid history and society”. The show presents “ the brand of Simunye Systems; a fictional biotech and genetics research company who offer insurance plans that include treatments that focus on genetic markers responsible for various human ailments. I’ve modelled the nature of Simunye Systems on front biochem companies formed by apartheid military intelligence that were developing experimental chemical warfare directed at the Black population in the 80’s. Its a fascinating part of our history that needs more light shed on it”.

    The visual components of the exhibition come with a written backstory, which imagines an alternate reality South Africa, complete with cosmic messages and transformative genetic technology.

    The real life history inspiring the show is wild in its own right. Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s the Apartheid government embarked on various deranged weapons programs, from attempts to weaponize MDMA to a secret nuclear bomb test in the Atlantic Ocean, referred to by historians as the Vela Incident. Although much of this history has been forgotten, it has had a strange half life in science fiction film. The 1987 classic Robocop begins with a news story about a South African made neutron bomb. The Vela Incident is alluded to in the ultra- tacky Alien Vs. Predator (2004). While these are just stray references, Sekhukhuni is confronting the nightmares of the past head on, generating visual fictions for our disturbed present.

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  • Jakinda – Storming Heaven

    The first time I opened the Soundcloud link to Jakinda’s  Afrika 3000,  I felt a powerful surge of the uncanny. And by uncanny, I don’t just mean mysterious. Rather it was the sense of what Freud famously called ‘ the unheimliche’. That is the sensation of a strange familiarity, the jolt of déjà vu. Or, as Jack Nicolson put it before the Overlook Hotel drives him insane in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining  ‘When I came up here for my interview it was as though I’d been here before. I mean … It was almost as though I knew what was going to be around every corner’.

    Indeed, the epic Intro reminded me of the cosmic soundtrack of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey– both disconcerting and awe-inspiring. After bursts of ambient noise the track naturally takes a turn into driving gqom and trap inspired beats.  The following three songs deepen this epic vision. As with Dokta Spizee’s Gemeni mixtape, it’s as if the grimy intensity of SA electronic music is being broadcast out to some alien civilization.

    The artwork for the EP highlights the Pyramids against a sea of stars, against people in majestic robes and face paint.  A pure distillation of the aesthetics of Afrofuturism. The vast body of Afrofuturist literature, music and visual art mixes Science Fiction with historical reality to explore the experience of the African diaspora, through metaphors of alien invasion and technological shock. The mixing of the ancient and the futuristic has an important utopian component, a yearning to both redeem and escape from the horrors of history. As jazz great Sun Ra once put it ` I`m playing dark history. It`s beyond black. I`m dealing with the dark things of the cosmos’.

    Afrika 3000 cosmic focus speaks to a broader futurism within contemporary dance music. Artists like Gaika and Fatima Al Qadiri have focused on the dystopian sounds of today, making beats out of bullets and broken glass. Jakinda holds things down for the utopian end, using the cosmos as symbol of future freedom and possibility.  His music hums with a palpable yearning to storm the heavens.

  • 2016 – The Year in Dread

    The dominant theme in the innumerable ‘best of 2016’ lists is disappointment, failure and despair. A year categorised by the rise of the Far Right, war, random acts of violence, hate speech, death and the ominous cracking of the polar ice caps.  In the parts of the world that weren’t already in social crisis, this was the year in which the chickens of the 07/08 financial meltdown finally came home to roost.  In South Africa, the year was characterised by sleaze as the rich and powerful continue to plunder the state, militarized campuses and a general sense of social stagnation.

    In such bleak times, music is even more important in expressing anxiety, resistance and hope.  Of course, culture is no substitute for political struggle.  (Just look at how the Clinton campaign held the delusory idea that a few celebrity endorsements would win against Trump.) But art can help us find our bearings, even if just to say how fucked up things are. So here is my highly subjective list of the releases which best captured the tone of the dystopian present.

    DJ Lag– DJ Lag EP. A few months ago, a video was leaked from the US Defence Department which predicts a future of high-tech militaries fighting low tech insurgents in the favelas, shacks and townships of the global South. This futuristic EP from KZN is the sound of the South fighting back, an off-the-shelf laser pointer taking down an imperial drone. Lag is an architect with his beats, using snatches of missing sound to ramp up the intensity.  Furthermore, this release highlights how Gqom, and its numerous offshoots, is the most significant music currently coming out of this country.

    David Bowie-  Blackstar.  Bowie did about as much as person can in one lifetime.  And rather than facing his trip to death’s undiscovered country with fear or mewling resignation, he brilliantly stage-managed his exit. The black star of the title stood in for the cosmic terror of space, the personal terror of cancer, even the brutality of ISIS.  But most importantly, it was a final artistic triumph.

    Danny Brown– Atrocity Exhibition. Many critics this year seemed overly enamoured of the saccharine positivity of Chance the Rapper’s gospel sound. Instead of singing with Jesus, Danny Brown was laughing with the Devil. Completing the trilogy which he began with XXX and Old, Brown released his masterpiece.  And for a schizophrenic,  post punk inspired trip through personal dysfunction it’s also surprisingly fun, with Brown offering all kinds of wayward life advice. My single favourite musical moment of 2016 is  when the beat drops on ‘When It Rain’, a tribute to his hometown of Detroit which oscillates between despair and nihilistic pride ‘’ whole damn city probably got a couple warrants.’’

    Radiohead- A Moon Shaped Pool. After the pleasant, but underwhelming King of Limbs, Radiohead decided to go back to doing what they do best- grand statements about the terrors of late capitalism. This beautifully orchestrated album is rooted in personal heartbreak but also glances at global warming and populist hatemongering.

    FAKA – Bottoms Revenge. This year was full of terrible things done in the name of religion. In stark contrast, FAKA offer an alternative spirituality of metamorphosis and transcendence. The entire EP is orchestrated like a ritual. Occasionally disturbing, sometimes confusing,  always revelatory.

  • At The Drive-In: Back for The Chaos

    I feel an intensely personal connection with the mighty Texan punk band At The Drive- In. Let’s go back through the fog shrouded mists of time- October 2000, to be exact. I was up late on a school night, listening to the Barney Simon show on 5FM, trying to record songs from Radiohead’s Kid A onto cassette tape. Without warning, I was suddenly hit with a blast of guitars and a passionate singer hollowing unhinged lyrics about space stations and scalpels. It was my first introduction to ‘One Armed Scissor’, off their third and final album Relationship of Command. It took me months to track down the actual album, and when I finally did it helped to bring on early onset tinnitus with my incessant listening. That band meant everything to me. They came out at a time when rock music was in a dire state, dominated by nu-metal cretins like Limp Bizkit and easy listening dullards like Travis. In such a bleak time, ATDI were a shining beacon of hope. They were unabashed in their love of brash hooks and guitar abuse, but their William Burroughs inspired lyrics retained a powerful enigma. Much of this derived from their home town of El Paso, at the border of the US and Mexico, with one member telling Spin Magazine in 2000 ‘ it’s the dichotomy of a Third World Country and a First World Country living together, breathing together, separated only by a bridge.’  Viewed from 2016, their lyrics seem elliptically prophetic, painting a barbaric desert of prison camps, killer machines, masked judges and whispered threats.  A perfect soundtrack for a time in which wealthy countries and indivuals are trying to violently fortify themselves against social crisis.

    In their initial heyday, ATDI were hailed as the next Nirvana, a group who would break out of the US underground on a massive scale. In reality, by late 2001 they had broken up amidst personal acrimony and drug problems. But like Nevermind did a decade before, their work proved a key portal to discover other subterranean punk and post-hardcore bands. Over the years, I have met many friends who share the same formative experience. The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

    But after a brief reunion in 2012, they have released their first song in sixteen years. ‘Governed by Contagions’. It comes out swinging with ragged guitars and Cedric Bixler-Zavala now wailing about narcs on every corner and cannibalism. While not an earth shattering release in itself, it leaves you hungry for more of their untitled fourth album, set to drop next year. At The Drive-In broke up at the absolute pinnacle of their powers, but dark historical irony means that they may be even more relevant in 2017.

  • Bateleur- First And Final

    The Bateleur eagle is a ubiquitous traveler above African skies. Its name is French for street performer, referring to how its wings bob and glide like a tight-rope walker as it stalks its prey. Like their animal namesake, Cape Town experimental collective enjoy the high places. Their newly released “first and final” full length self-titled album was both recorded in “mountainous hideouts’ and was initially made available via an installation placed on Table Mountain! Dubbed ‘The Nest’, it allowed intrepid fans to download the album for free by following directions to a USB port buried into a rock on one of the mountain’s lookouts. It included the unusual instructions of reminding potential listeners to not overstep the ledge.

    Unfortunately, the project was mysteriously vandalized, but the full release is now available for less physically adventurous listeners. Titles like ‘Mendota Sky’, ‘Blossom/Unfold’ and ‘Seaverb’ hint at the pleasantly elegiac sensation created throughout. The group’s six members function work as a pocket orchestra, bridging post-rock, math sharpness and jazz together. The eight compositions cast their spell like watching a warm summer sunset hazily settling in over a mountain.

    Promoted as their final album, the release and its promotion bring things full circle for the band. Their debut 2010 EP was called Mountain, establishing their naturally focused and experimental project. They subsequently dropped Cargo Cults, which included the addictive ‘I’m Further Away Than I Usually Am’. This was paralleled with a remix EP, with artists like Christian Tiger School reinterpreting their songs. The latest album is the product of three years of recording, and honing their stagecraft on tours around Southern Africa. It’s also accompanied by a short film for ‘Mendota Sky’, a work which suggests at darker themes in their work . But for the most part, Bateleur has built up a sonic collage to get happily lost in.

  • The Weeknd- Depravity Market

    The career trajectory of The Weeknd aka Abel Tesfaye is almost unbelievable. Just five years ago he was a fairly mysterious Canadian singer who spent 2011 dropping an awesomely debauched mixtape trilogy. I distinctly remember reading an article in 2012 which anointed him as the next Michael Jackson, which seemed hilariously optimistic at the time. That comparison doesn’t seem so ridiculous now! Tesfaye is currently one of the biggest pop stars in the world, after dominating 2015 with the Jackson-in-an-opium- den ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ and the David Lynch inspired ‘The Hills’. An avowed film nerd, The Weeknd’s project has always been to reconceptualize R&B as a shadowy film noir, or a nocturnal horror. By slightly tweaking his sound, he has managed to fill stadiums with audiences eager to hear operatic tales of being a bad person. While in interviews Tesfaye’s appears to be a thoughtful and mild individual, his roguish persona has been a wildly successful money spinner.

    The new Starboy doubles down on this formula. In both lyrics and length (18 songs ) it’s totally excessive. He both shamelessly brags about being a cad and seducer, and then offers to ‘Die For You’. While making songs to get the kids buying, he also carefully mentions that he is a wildly inappropriate role model ‘I’m like goddamn bitch I am not a Teen Choice’.

    Some reviewers have criticized Starboy as treading water, suggesting that the Weeknd is fast seeming redundent when compared to more woke contemporaries like Beyonce (who he collaborated with this year), Kendrick Lamar (who pops by to drop a verse on this album) and Frank Ocean. Certainly, this album is way too long and drags in places, but it makes up for it with vivid production and huge choruses. In fact, criticizing The Weeknd for being unedifying seems to miss the point. In an earlier song from this year, he set out his mission statement- ‘ I’m always reppin for that low life’.When you listen to The Weeknd, you are not looking for sociopolitical gravitas, humanity or artistic depth. You want to hear borderline ridiculous tales of the low life, and taken on these terms, Starboy is another win.

  • Angel Ho- Energy Without Restraint

    In the comic book series The Wicked + The Divine (written by Kieron Gillen, illustrated by Jamie McKelvie) ancient gods return to Earth in the form of modern pop stars. The series wittily bases its super beings on real life icons. Lucifer is a riff on David Bowie, Odin is essentially a member of Daft Punk and so on. The story shows the extent to which the contemporary consciousness is stalked by the fame machine. In the same way that our ancestors projected their hopes, desires and fears onto mythological beings, we worship at the altar of sound and vision.  Look at how Michael Jackson and Prince have effectively being deified in death. Under the screens of daily life lies a harsher and brighter world of wild emotion and uncontrollable dreams.

    South African musician Angel-Ho is an artist who profoundly understands this collective cultural unconscious, and how to manipulate it for their own ends. Through their recordings, image and performances they conduct the iconography of pop into transgressive realms. A key example is the blistering ‘ I Don’t Want Your Man’, a mutation of  a Keyisha Cole sample into the national anthem of  dread post-human robot empire.

    The Cape Town based producer has become an acclaimed global underground figure over the last year. With their brutal music and assertive non-binary queer image, Angelo Valerio was identified by many publications as making the perfect soundtrack to the tumult of Rhodes and Fees Must Fall. Their musical output is combined with intense live performances. Dancing on glass and a carefree attitude toward pyrotechnics. They is also a founder of the NON Collective, one of most visionary, intense electronic labels out there. NON has also been blowing up this year, with one of their most recent releases being his spiritual allies FAKA’s mind expanding Bottoms Revenge. They share personal visions of glamorous extremism- glitter and tinnitus, gold paint and bloody wounds.

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    Angelo’s first brush with musical glory occurred at the Manenburg Jazz Club when they was a little kid- ” little did I know the song I loved the most ‘ I love you Daddy’ was going to be performed live by Ricardo Gronewald himself. So he called me on stage, and I had stage fright throughout the whole performance, omg! All I do now is laugh because it was embarrassing, but it was funny because it happened at his gig!” The former child star sadly passed away last year, but as Angel-Ho notes ” he lives on”.

    This charming anecdote may almost seem out of place with Angel-Ho’s dystopian and sexualized work. But while they deals with intense subject matter they sees their work as embodying a hard-won optimism. In response to a question about how politics impacts on his practise, they suggested that it’s about keeping positive in dark times. ” There’s no escaping reality and fantasy, they are the same. Of course, what happens around you affects you, and people collectively. With every event that happens globally, we see the repeating of white supremacy and collateral violence which comes out of a desire to maintain power. You see it in South Africa, you see it everywhere in scales. It makes me want to spread good energy and make tracks which counter negativity. What better way to step away from negativity then to let it thrive in itself, like a parasite with no wound to feed on?”

    To this end, 2016 has seen them spreading good energy around the world. They recently took on the Performa Biennale in New York, in collaboration with Dope Saint Jude, Vuyo Sotashe, Jackie Manyaapelo and Athi-Patra Ruga. Their forays into the world of High Art also saw them unleash the firestorm of his Red Devil performance on the Berlin Biennale. This performance was inspired by the Kaapse Kloopse festivals- ” Red Devil was a desire to be your complete diva self, in my drag. It had a lot to do with the Red Devil performer who  traditionally lead the atjas in procession, and would scare the kids away alongside moffies. Red Devil, in my case, was chasing away fears, in celebration of the things which make people separate from each other. It became an intervention where I performed a re-birth of my feme energy, without restraint, using fire to light the way.”

    The performance has the Devil transformed into a character called Gia. The theme of transformation is central to his work more generally “our generation leads by not conforming to gender, race, sexuality… As a performer it became important to tell the narratives which I live day by day, to be fearless”. And with their track record, the secret projects they has lined up for 2017 are bound to be as fearless.

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  • Wildnernessking- Mystical Darkness

    Since the genre first screamed to life from the frozen wastelands of Norway in the early 90s, black metal has accrued a number of stereotypes. There are the associations with church burnings, Satanism, shady political views and misanthropy. More benignly, there is the cartoonish image of ridiculous poseurs, dressed in corpse paint and running around forests. But in reality, some of the most transcendent and powerful contemporary guitar music bears a proudly blackened heart. Take the Faustian anthems of Polish titans Behemoth, who decimated South African clubs on their blasphemous world tour this year or the unabashed romanticism of California’s Deafheaven. The latter draw deeply from shoegaze, indie and post-rock guitar abuse, in which they are joined by artists like Agalloch, Wolves In The Throne Room, Panopticon and Cape Town’s own Wildernessking.

    Since 2012, they have been making  some of the most exciting guitar music to come out of South Africa. While many local rock bands are focused on making twee psychedelic, they are keeping it both fucking brutal and classy. Their series of releases to date include all the blast beats, screaming, solos and lyrics about morbidity and death you could hope for. But EPs like ……and The Night Swept Us Away and The Devil Within highlighted the melodic nuance and conceptual sophistication of Dylan Viljoen, Keenan Nathan Oakes, Jason Jardim and Jesse Navarre Vos.

    The early releases have culminated in their first full length, this year’s Mystical Future. The song pushes its black metal core into directions that are both deeply personal and wildly cosmic. The songs highlight menacing vocals and apocalyptic burst of energy. This dance between melody and cacophony is similar to Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their best. People from outside of South Africa are noticing this powerful band, with sites like Noisey giving them major coverage. From their lair in the sun blasted tip of Africa, Wildnerssking are making music dark enough to envelop the globe.

  • Run The Jewels – Life during Wartime

    A lot of 2016 releases have been underpinned by a sense of profound dread, of something terrible slouching its way into reality. The cosmic horror alluded to in David Bowie’s Blackstar, the inner horror of Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition. Fatima Al Qadari`s riot porn, ANOHNI`s bleak portrait of environmental collapse Gaika’s paranoia, the witch burnings and mob violence on the last Radiohead album. It’s hardly surprising-the world is faced with multiple economic and ecological crises, and culture reflects the feeling that time is running out. Alongside this has been the resurgence of xenophobic and racist political movements, as the fearful and resentful vote to preserve their cherished borders of hate. France may have an openly Fascist prime minister by this time next year, as may Austria, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler……

    Last week, this appeared to reach its current nadir with an orange reality TV bigot and sexual abuser becoming the most powerful politician in the world. Even more sinister than Trump are the cadre of deranged, far right lunatics who surround him. The dead-eyed religious fanatic Mike Pence. His white supremacist advisor Steve Bannon. Trump’s victory has empowered other Fascists the world over, and he hasn’t even begun to rule yet. But as sinister as this all is, it’s not as if the US has become the Trumpenreich overnight. Trump did not so much win the election, as Clinton lost it. By running Hilary Clinton, a compromised and unappealing center-right candidate, the Democratic Party failed to capitalize on popular support for progressive change, with many potential voters simply not even casting ballots. Hilary Clinton is an exemplar of the neoliberal ideology which has dominated the world for the last four decades, and which now appears to be on the verge of being  superseded by the more overtly authoritarian populism represented by Trump and his vile cohorts . As Ajay Chaudhary and Raphaele Chappe recently noted, Trump will be inheriting an apparatus of detention and assassination that the likes of Clinton and Obama themselves helped to build up ` Anyone who takes seriously the threat of the newly empowered reactionary right, must take seriously the role neoliberalism has played in laying out the red carpet for its arrival. Instead of handwringing over liberal dead letters, we must come to terms with the fact that we have already been living in a form of deeply destructive authoritarian liberalism for nearly four decades now’.

    Run The Jewels, the pairing of Killer Mike and El-P, have been one of this decade’s most vivid chroniclers of authoritarian liberalism. Their first two albums (which came out in 2013 and 2014) map out a landscape of income inequality, arbitrary police killings, survivalist economies and drone surveillance. This might almost be too bleak if they didn’t combine their dark worldview with colour, humor and swagger. RTJ are an ebullient middle finger aimed at the dystopia of everyday life. They were also vocal supporters of Bernie Sander’s campaign for president, which offered a platform of democratic socialism as an alternative to both Trump’s deranged fearmongering and Clinton’s robotic cynicism.  With anticipation for their immanent third album already high, they responded to the election news by dropping `2100’. This songs take a more meditative approach then their earlier work. Straight off the bat, Killer Mike offers ` how long do the hate that we hold lead us to another Holocaust’. The mournful production evaporates, rather than explodes. But there is a hopeful subtext, with lyrics that praise both human solidarity and revolution ` I don’t study war no more, I don’t hate the poor no more, getting more aint what’s more’. It’s this message of a future worth living which resonates in such horrifying times. It is the same insurgent spirt which is animating the Americans who have been protesting en masse and organizing walk-outs for the last week- Fuck Donald Trump.