Faka, the dynamic duo of Desire Marea and Fela Gucci, are proudly representing black and queer creativity with potent sound and vision. Along with their glam imagery and performance pieces, they make music which combines the brute force of Gqom with the optimistic ghost of bubblegum township pop, kwaito and gospel. Their artistic manifesto is best epitomized by the song `Izitibane zaziwe ukhuti zibuya ebukhosini’(Let it be known, that queerness is a thing of the Gods) which they released with the accompanying statement: ‘ this is an ode to all the powerful dolls who risk their lives every day by being visible in an unsafe world. This is a celebration of those who have fearlessly embraced themselves. Because when your identity is the cause of your suffering in the world, you begin to feel the very source of your greatness in the world’.
This hopeful message underlies the mysterious and alluring debut EP Bottoms Revenge. Adapted from a live piece of the same name, this three track Ep is thirty minutes of outrageously psychedelic `Ancestral Gqom Gospel.’ The opening ‘ Isifundo Sokuqala’ starts with a false sense of calm, until it introduces hypnotic static. The 18 minute title track is ambient odyssey through inner and outer space. Such a terse description undersells how unique their music is, but that’s because it hard to describe something so singular. If I had to pin it down, I’d describe it as sounding like releases from an alternate timeline where Brenda Fassie teamed up with post-punk synthesizer abusers Cabret Voltaire to ritually summon a benevolent matriarchal elder god.
Appropriately, the EP is released on NON records, a collective which has been steadily building an impressive catalogue of provocative music. In such dark times, where a racist maniac has just been elected to the most powerful political position of Earth, this expression of individualism and refusal of labels feels like a welcome act of aesthetic resistance.
Johannesburg based Givan Lotz is a prolific musician and artist, who has just released his new EP MAW. The title alludes to the vicious mouth of a dangerous animal. Appropriately then, there is subtly feral quality to the work. With skeletal guitars and synthesizers that crack like broken leaves, it is the soundtrack to being watched by something malevolent while you are lost in some ancient forest. Eyes glowing red embers from the blackened undergrowth… This air of malevolence gives Lotz an edge. There are many self-described artists and musicians putting their home recordings out there, but the results are often insubstantial, bloodless. Work where the artist’s vision fails to translate for the listener. By painting pleasant music with burnt edges, Maw conveys an unexpected air of malevolence.｀Watchtower’, for instance, sounds like the notebook of a stalker, an appropriate theme for the age of social surveillance.
MAW is released on decadent, royal blue vinyl, and comes with a bonus download called YAW. It’s the follow up to the similarly teeth focused Snarling. An equally languid album, it was described as an exploration of ‘obsession, loneliness, desire, paranoia, tragedy, sensuality and melancholia’.
Lotz has paralleled his musical production with forays into sculpture and drawing. Series like Feral Futures extend his nature fascinations into the visual realm, creating a kind of post-apocalyptic pastoral, a romantic dream of `re-wilding both the landscape and humankind’. Death, decay and renewal- ` I am an artist because I am uncertain. My art-objects are, first and foremost, results of a philosophical inquiry – critical thinking about what it means to be human. The moments of obsession involved in this process of art-making aspire to achieve a mood of catharsis. I have a desire for innovative and dislocating descriptions of life through a willingness to confront it in all its contradiction and complexity’.
British artist Gaika has been gaining a lot of attention for his enticingly dystopian style. On 2015’s Machine and this year’s Security,he blowtorched mutant grime, toxic industrial and subterranean dancehall into incendiary sonic devices. His dread-soaked worldview has often been compared to the trip-hop of Tricky who, exactly 20 years ago, unleashed the apocalyptic Pre-Millennium Tension. Gaika is sound tracking the tense background of post-millennial tension ie: everyday life circa 2016- surveillance, exploitation, murderous police, a buzzing hum of entropy and failure. Even his titles feel like pointed commentaries on our time. Security is one of the buzzwords of modern politics, the term used to justify terror against the immigrant body, the foreign body, the poor body. And what does it even mean to be secure in a world where you supposed to feel grateful living from paycheck to paycheck, pacified by machines which record your every move? The current arch of capitalism is to replace human workers with automation, leaving large segments of the world as ‘surplus population’. Gaika’s music sounds like a dispatch from the ghettos of this near future, bodies caught in silhouette a second before the drone strike. However, the grim, last night alive ambience is offset with flushes of warmth and hope. Security highlight ‘Last Dance at the Baby Grand’ sounds like a flash of blue sky peeking through polluted clouds.
And last week, he dropped his surprise project Spaghetto。The eight tracks build on his earlier work, while pushing it in a (relatively) more accessible direction. Songs like ‘3D’maintain the murky paranoia, but there is more of a focus on hooks. But there is a new lightness to his trademark hardened production, like on the mellifluous ‘The Deal’. Ambitiously, this EP is part of a trilogy with Another Hole in Babylon and Glad We Found It promised in the coming months.
In interview’s he has spoken of his love of the classic cyberpunk anime Akira. Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 film is a delirious tale of rebellion, technology and transcendence. It’s an appropriate totem for Gaika. With each successive release, he is plunging further into the wires and screens of an oppressive cyberculture, searching for what comes out on the other side.
When asked to describe the sound of the Gqom subgenre, DJ Lag doesn’t hesitate- ‘it’s raw and hype.’ Since the beginning of this decade, it has become the defining electronic music to come from Durban and it’s surrounding townships, like Lag’s home Clermont. Gqom takes SA production to a new extreme of brooding intensity. It’s powerful enough to command attention when blaring 130 bpm at dangerous volumes on public transport. But it has enough nuance to reward intimate listening on cellphone headphones. Coming from an isiZulua word for drum, Gqom really does sound like a huge monolith being hurled onto a heaving dancefloor. Despite its popularity, it still remains an underground status with little overt media or radio support in South Africa.
But such potency has also given it an international cachet. DJ Lag himself has recently been featured on UK music websites eagerly awaiting the release of his self-titled debut EP. Coming out on the London label Goon Club All Stars, it will be backed up with a tour of Asia and Europe. Ahead of the new release, he has dropped the spine tingling ‘16th Step ‘as a teaser. Like so much Gqom it makes you want to dance, while having an unmistakable menace. The beat sounds like something horrific scratching at your door on a stormy night. Underneath runs a synthesiser reminiscent of a murderous robot haunting you through the flooded streets of future Durban, after the city has been lost to rising sea levels. It builds and builds and then suddenly drops out completely. In a masterful stroke, Lag leaves in a block of absent sound. Just as you think it’s over, it suddenly drives in again, going off into an unexpected but welcome conclusion. The step on this song is that feeling when you are about to fall asleep, but are awaken with a jolt as you imagine losing your footing. A sure-fire way to feel awake.
And he has been honing this craft since a young age. His first introduction to recording was at age 12 when he went with his rapper cousin to a recording studio. Seeing a producer at work making beats immediately hooked him in. It was a few years before he could get his own PC, but as soon as he did he started exploring the possibilities offered by Fruity Loops. His own musical progression is like a Darwinian microcosm of the evolution of Gqom itself. Beginning with hip hop he, then slid into kwaito. He then took a detour into a percussive house style. But hearing Gqom pioneers Naked Boyz for the first time locked him onto the deep new style that was breaking out in KZN around the turn of the decade. Since then, he has built up an impressive back catalogue of production, which keep the drive of Gqom while adding in deeper shades of nuance and sophistication.
His EP comes at an interesting time for the style, as it is also sprouting new offshoots, such as the more pop orientated Gqom trap and it’s house cousin, Sghhubu. In the early days of its coalescing into a distinct style, Gqom was characterized by a certain mystery. Young producers would put up songs fresh from being factory tested at intense backyard parties onto file sharing sites, without clear attribution or titles. This created issues of plagiarism, with rivals claiming credit for others tracks. As a result, artists at the styles forefront like Lag and Rudeboyz are taking control of their public image. It’s also a way to grow the genre by highlighting discographies, which the audience can watch evolve. With his cinematic, emotional style DJ Lag is poised to become an internationally appreciated South African pioneer.
This release is a psychedelic fun ride through the urban centre of South Africa, from the streets of Soweto to the enclave of Maboneng. Bhubesii raps from the perspective of his Kobayashi alter ego, a stylish trickster on a mission for a good time. The music aims to reinterpret classic kwaito for 2016, with Bhubesii saying that ‘it has a very township wave feel about it. Kobayashi is a new wave tariyana.’ The boisterous title track looks back to the infectious work of Arthur, Mandoza and M’du. But Bhubesii is clearly working in his own lane. For a start, he is a lot more lyrically focused than his minimalist progenitors. He adopts an impressive amount of languages and idioms, dropping witty punchlines and outrageous boasts.
The eager embrace of local influences and style set him apart from an often derivative SA hip hop scene. It’s no secret that even talented artists may often expend energy trying to keep up with what’s happening in the US. In the most egregious cases, people will adopt entire fake accents, which isn’t fooling anyone. More subtly, there is pressure to emulate production styles and sonic tricks. Constantly chasing the next big thing is a fool’s errand though, as it always leaves musicians on the back foot.
So Bhubesii uses the recent South African past to find his own voice. Tracks like ‘Chankura’ and ‘Zulu Jedi’ mutate and stretch in constant motion. It conveys the sense of a weekend with endless possibilities, spanning the hot spots and dank dives of Gauteng. Bhubesii also put extra attention into curating his image, with a laudable eye for detail. The cover for the single version of ‘Kobayashi’, has him as a futuristic seer, bringing life to a blighted wasteland. For this EP he has gone for a witty piece of cover art. In place of the tough guy mask which rappers have adopted in the past, his face is covered by an explosion of flowers. It’s a nicely unexpected touch, which expresses the exuberance of his music.
As he moved deeper into his own psychosis, whose onset he had recognized during his year at the hospital, he welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell– The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G Ballard, 1970.
Staring at the devils face but you can’t stop laughing- Atrocity Exhibition, Danny Brown, 2016.
Danny Brown’s latest album is the work of debauched 2016 Dante, clinically detailing the levels of his personal hell. It’s production is not so much futuristic as beamed in from some parallel universe where the bombs dropped long ago. In Atrocity Exhibition, we hear the diary of a decadent recluse holed up in the suburbs around the decaying city of Detroit- phone off the hook but still ringing, residue on mirrors. His voice and lyrics range from resigned to hysterical. On the incredible ‘Tell Me What I Don’t Know’, he is a steely witness to the human cost of the drug game. On other tracks, he is a high-pitched maniac lost in a horror house of hallucinations and waking nightmares. He delivers the most coldly hilarious line about celebrity life I’ve ever heard- ‘nosebleeds on red carpet, but the colour just blends in’, and sicko life advice like ‘ the one thing I’ve learnt is don’t nod off with your motherfucking cigarette burning.’ The album would be morbid if it didn’t sound so invigorating. The moment when the beat drops on ‘When it Rain’, the psychedelic guitars which blaze through ‘Dance In The Water.’ The manic creativity on this album is reminiscent of peak Outkast, who Brown explicitly quotes on ‘Today’. But whereas Andre 3000 and Big Boi moved in a universe lit by warmth and spirituality, he speaks from a perspective leached of hope. This is a winter album, which sounds like walking down the wrong alleyway, in the wrong city. Pain and pleasures are indistinguishable in this frigid depressive landscape.
The phrase ‘cold world’ appears throughout the album. In the past other hip hop artists have used this as a shorthand for the chilling effect of poverty, despair and deprivation. The haunting ‘Cold World’ on GZA’s Liquid Swordz, the entirety of Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein (‘it’s a cold world out there… tell me about it sometimes I feel a little frosty myself’).
But Brown looks further across the Atlantic to find inspiration for his personal ice age. The title itself links Brown into an unexpected circuit of British eccentrics. It was first used in a book of the same age by the great writer J.G Ballard. For Ballard, the exhibition was the media landscape created during the Cold War, in which the horrors of nuclear annihilation and the Vietnam War comfortably existed alongside Hollywood stars and advertising billboards. In 1980, it was repurposed as the opening song of Joy Division’s second and final album Closer. Over drums that sound like a Satanic choir, singer Ian Curtis invites you to a world with ‘mass murder on a scale you’ve never seen.’ Two months before the album was released, Curtis had committed suicide. In the years since this tragic end, the band’s stature has only grown, its music retaining an elemental power transcending the time it was made. As cultural theorist Mark Fisher suggests, the band drew a sense of foreboding from the era it was made (1977-80). A time when politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan pioneered the shift towards an increasingly unequal and brutal neoliberal capitalism. We live in the ruins of this counterrevolution, a world where high levels of economic stress incubate chronic rates of depression, substance abuse, alienation and despair. The exact same personal effects which Brown confronts with such raw honesty. And the rabbit hole runs even deeper. The original American edition of Ballard’s book was pulped by its’ publishers because of a section called ‘Why I want to Fuck Ronald Regan.’ Some year’s later pranksters handed this out at the Republican Party convention, presenting it as the work of some deranged think tank. The Reagan administration’s right wing economic doctrines and shady foreign policy both helped to dramatically increase poverty in America while helping to flood cities with hard drugs. Born in 1981, Danny Brown has had a first-hand seat at the intensification of urban poverty. Today’s atrocities exhibitions are captured on live stream and retweeted rather than caught on tape, but the historical thread is there.
One final overlap- on his last fatal night in Manchester, Curtis was listening to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, itself a cold electronic album about the twilight life of a trouble Detroit star. As Ballard put it later notes about The Atrocity Exhibition ‘deep assignments run through all our lives. There are no coincidences.’
This background only adds to the appreciation of Brown’s masterpiece. It’s determination and focus is almost heroic, and makes the one percenter whining of Kayne or Drake sound like grocery lists by comparison. This is sound of one man laughing into the abyss, a ‘living nightmare which most of us share.’
In a cover feature he did with Bubblegum Club earlier this year, Felix Laband told us of his desire to push his music forward by making it more topical and confrontational. But sometimes you have to retrace your past steps to go forward. Dropping on the 30th of September, the Bag of Bones EP seems he taking a Janus-faced look at his past and future.
At first, when I saw that the EP has provocative titles like Righteous Red Berets and Donkey Rattle- Kill The Boer I felt a lot of trepidation. There has been a tendency in South Africa for certain white artists to substitute racist stereotypes about African and post-colonial dysfunction for valid critiques of the present ( serial offenders include the writer Rian Malan and artist Anton Kannemeyer). But while Laband’s accompanying EP notes acknowledge that South Africa is undergoing an unsettling period of change, he is coming from a more interesting space than boilerplate white panic ‘ the record speaks of hope, anger, love and dreams.’ Berets in fact draws its inspiration from beyond South Africa. The epic track is built around an emotive vocal sample of the great America murder ballad Stakerlee, which rests on a soft bed of warm synthesiser swells. It sounds positively elegiac, like a gospel song contoured for 2016. But the vocals become even more unsettling, as samples of contemporary South African racism mix with dialogue about notorious cult leader and mass murderer Jim Jones. As with the horror movie lifts on his last album Deaf Safari, he combs the archive to mix horror and beauty. This extends to his own past , with a remix of his most famous song Donkey Rattle modified to revolve around a sample of political action in 1960 Soweto.
Amidst all the political background , the EP’s most satisfying song is it’s intimate title track. Bag of Bones is a warm collaboration with Shane Cooper of Cards on Spokes fame. Putting aside tension and conflict, it has a lovely pastoral feel. Overall, this is another great release by one of SA’s most consistently introducing producers which leaves you wanting more.
Being sad about failed love and emotional disasters is almost de rigueur for any self-respecting contemporary star. It shows your human side by connecting with universal experience. In rap and RnB, (primarily male) pain has been a dominant style since Kayne released the morbid 808’s and Heartbreak in 2008. Almost every major artist who has come up since then has been influenced by some aspects of that work. The Weeknd has the whole focus on predatory relations and the hollow pleasures of fame. Frank Ocean has capitalized on the space for naked self-expression. Drake, of course, owes his entire career to his heartbroken persona, although at this point it’s clearly more a marketing tool than coming from any real personal conflict! Conversely, many female artists like Rihanna and Beyonce have adopted a more confrontational attitude to matters of the heart, and produced some of their most forthright and empowered work.
Pretoria based Una Rams is drawing on this international pop hegemony in an interesting, and highly personal, way. His intimately detailed work borders on certain types of confessional folk music- less trap beats, more sighs and whispers. In fact, his Pink Moon EP even shares a title with the album by doomed UK folk singer Nick Drake.
The song Girls Like You is a good representation of his style. It deals with the common musical scenario of being messed around by your object of affection. But Rams doesn’t fall into the common lyrical snares of either self-pity or sexist insults. In fact, he suggests that they should just stay friends. The song’s production is subtly complex. A downtempo piano loop is uplifted by a burst of dancehall style toasting. The celebratory Nobody takes a more courtly approach in which he promotes his personal qualities to a love interest. With his unvarnished style, he charts a heartfelt, but optimistic course through the travails of modern love.
The exploitation of the black body, and the counter efforts to resist, are the centre of gravity for South African history. Everything else- colonialism, Apartheid, violence, war, brutal labour and toil, paranoia and fear revolve around this to various degrees. Such a trouble reality of embodiment is central to the work of Mohau Modisakeng, the winner of the 2016 Standard Bank Young Visual Artist award. Originally from Soweto, he initially studied sculpture under Jane Alexander at UCT. But his focus shifted from sculpting external bodies to documenting his own. And through a series of photographs, films and installations he has made profound imagery which draws upon ancient and contemporary scars.
A great example is the 2012 photographic series Untitled. What strikes you first is the beauty of the images. They are expertly posed and styled, with plumes of mist and white doves giving a dream-like atmosphere. But the items included in the shots, like colonial style bowler hats and repeating rifles, betray a more brutal reality. History seeps like blood into all his work, with Endabeni being made at the site of the first official segregated settlement in South Africa, a literal birthplace of Apartheid urban planning.
His more recent work extends his critique beyond the borders of South Africa, with potent references to global forms of exploitation. An image called ‘ To Move Mountains’ is a stark close up of hands being soaked in crude oil. It subtly highlights how the substance we depend on is also the cause of war and environmental destruction, from the Niger Delta to the Middle East. My favourite image of his features a fancy dining room table covered in piles of filthy coal and scattered debris. Historically it speaks to how European high culture was built on the backs of black slavery and the plundering of the Global South, and to how white supremacy was haunted by the fear of revolt and reprisal from the repressed. It also implies that our modern civilization is built on a fragile foundation of non-renewable resources.
Modisakeng makes visual poetry from these contradictions. His work is like a documentary snatched out of nightmares.
Exuberance is the best word to describe the work of multi-media artist Dion Monti. His practice in film, soundscapes, music and installations all share bright colours and warm tones. Operating out of Johannesburg, his various projects have the quality of being deceptively simple. For example, he produced a series of geometric human figures painted onto stark black backgrounds. At first it seems almost perfunctory. But the combination of the shapes and colours create an evocative mix, as if seeing some forgotten childhood cartoon character. In a similar way, his installation work creates spaces of explosive light. Full of torn fabrics and broken frames, they look like crime scenes redesigned as playpens.
A similar aesthetic is seen in his music. His main style is minimal house, which he tweaks and freaks out with all kinds of unexpected elements. Instead of focusing on the beat, his productions constantly shift and swirl, creating non-linear soundscapes to fall into. This year already he has dropped two eps. The first, Contortions, has thee tracks, including a homage to ‘Mrs. Ples’, the famous proto-human fossil discovered outside Johannesburg. The recent release The Wonderer is more conceptual. As the title suggests, it develops the deliberately naïve style that he has cultivated in his visual art. In a supporting text he describes the work as being about the ‘the one who is curious, no child but no adult either, never stops wondering, always inspiring’. Beginning with the opening ‘the kid’ we are lead on a metaphysical journey through the self. It ends on the other side with the gently rousing ‘the adult’, which climaxes with an optimistic flourish. While much contemporary electronic music is focused on darkness and anxiety, Monti is carving out a niche by looking toward the light.
When I heard Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia Ultra for the first time in 2011, his captivating voice and dissolute lyrics were great enough. But what really made me flip out was a line on the song ‘Novacaine’ where he (or at least its protagonist) compare themselves to Stanley Kubrick. It’s a unique mind that thinks to fit a reference to the director of Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Full Metal Jacket into a decadent RnB song. Appropriately, his first full length album, 2012’s Channel Orange,was like a series of great short films. A lot of media attention focused on Ocean’s sexuality and the autobiographical nature of the album. Clearly songs like ‘Bad Religion’ offered accounts of unrequited love that came from a place of brutal personal experience. But much of the album saw him telling fictional tales of characters on the extremes of society, including the idle rich, Las Vegas prostitutes and jetlagged drug mules. Like all great artists, Ocean was able to imbue even his most fucked characters with humanity and pathos.
It’s been four years since that massive achievement. Last week he broke his relative silence with the new album Blonde (or Blond, depending on which version you get). It takes a darker, dirtier direction than its predecessor. The lyrics are more cynical, the production more paranoid. After the critical and commercial success of Channel Orange, it would have been easy for Ocean to quickly release a crowd pleasing set of anthems. Fortunately, he has chosen to do something a lot weirder. The album‘s hazy beats and dread guitars sound closer to underground producers like Dean Blunt and James Ferraro. For a work that apparently cost $2million to make it sounds shockingly intimate, like it was recorded in a bedroom. But unlike some of his more subterranean contemporaries, Ocean also has a classical way with hooks and choruses. Beneath all the atmosphere, ‘Self Control’, ‘Nikes’ and ‘WhiteFerrari’ are just wildly catchy.
The album has been accompanied with the visual release Endless and the hefty Boys Don’tCry zine. Included in the latter is a list of his favourite movies. If you are considering going to film school, save yourself the student debt and just watch the 200+ hours of cited work instead. The list represents a substantial cross section of the classics of world cinema. And more importantly, it highlights some of the obsessions which captivate its author. The characters in the films range from Cuban crime lords to doomed lovers, murderous Samurai to suicidal Japanese yakuza. In particular, Ocean is fascinated with the night worlds of film noir– both the classics and more contemporary offshoots (Bladerunner, Blue Velvet, LA Confidential, Spring Breakers). It makes perfect sense that he would be inspired by these visions of existential misery, smoke and rain-swept neon.
But above all, the person on the list who seems to have the most affinity with Ocean’s aesthetic is American director Paul Thomas Anderson, whose Hard Eight, There Will Be Blood and The Master all make the cut. They share a focus on the dark shadows cast by American success, along with similar career trajectories. Anderson’s breakout project Boogie Nights was a lovingly crafted epic about the Californian porn scene in the late 1970’s. Like Channel Orange, it finds both the humour and tragedy in its characters extreme lives. His later work has been less immediate but as rewarding. I feel the same way about Blonde as I do about The Master and There Will Be Blood. Initially, they may leave you confused or even underwhelmed. But with a bit of engagement, they lodge into your brain with powerful visions of money, religion and power. In fact, the two artists share a collaborator in Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who both plays on the new album and has provided several of Anderson’s scores.
Ocean is not the only musician currently playing with cinematic decadence. The Weeknd owes a lot of his recent success to his David Lynch inspired visual image. But he is doing it better than anyone else because he plays with expectation, fantasy and narrative so well. The biggest artistic success on Blonde is ‘Nights’, which is really about three songs melted into each other. Quickly going from upbeat to sinister, it contains some of his most personal lyrics. He talks about family problems and being a Hurricane Katrina refugee. But in the midst of such candour he adds unexpected dramatic touches, singing about driving to a recording studio as if he were some predatory figure prowling the streets, like Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler. With the eye of an auteur, Ocean invites you into his surreal, empathetic, operatic creative universe.
Since 2014, Healer Oran has been creating a library of ‘afro-noise’ releases. Healer hails from the Eastern Cape, but has more recently been based in Johannesburg. And much like the harsh Midrand sprawl, his aesthetic is all about the power of disruption and dissonance. His ear is tuned to the abrasive potential of the many genres this continent has produced. Relentless percussion and repetition tell the story of social realities moulded by an apocalyptic past, runaway technologies and strange mutations.
In his previous interviews he has listed an enticing list of influences. His love of furious music ranges from the stately jazz of Charles Mingus, to the provocation of Throbbing Gristle and The Fall and the epic post-hardcore of Texan legends At The Drive-In. Most intriguingly he has drawn from the demented world of Japanese Noise and in particular the infamous Hannatrash. During the 80’s, the group terrified Tokyo audiences with their destructive tendencies, including bulldozers being driven into the back of venues and plans to throw Molotov cocktails off the stage!
But unlike some of his more brutal antecedents, Healer Oran favours subtlety and nuance over raw power. This has been a consistent theme in his prolific run of albums too date- The Recognitions, Jerk, Love Is My Only Shield, Darling The Pickled Fish and Mirror For A Saint.
‘Camomile Parrot Blues’ begins delicately with whispered vocals. As the song progresses it starts to steam and hiss, culminating in a menacing beat. On the more aggressive Jerk, the songs show a punk quality, which is given the genre categorisation of ‘violent house’ on his Band Camp page. It’s a useful description for his work as a whole. By focusing on the aggressive aspects of African music, he entices the listener down into the dark alleyways of contemporary life.
