Gaika’s addictive cocktail of grime, dancehall and futurism has made him one of the most exciting new artists of the last few years. But surprisingly, he hasn’t yet released a full length album. All that is about to change when Warp Records drops Basic Volume on the 27th of July. Coming in at 15 tracks, the song titles evoke the cybergothic, rebellious world view that drives his work- ‘Hackers and Jackers’,’Warlord Shoes’ and most tellingly ‘Black Empire (KillmomgerRiddim)’.
In the build up to the album, Gaika has released two advance tracks- ‘Crown and Key’ and ‘Immigrant Sons (Pesos & Gas)’. ‘Crown and Key’ is a menacing soundscape, in which tales from an hedonistic underworld are undergirded by massive trance synths. While it slowly insinuates itself, ‘Immigrant Sons’ is an immediate banger, with the anthemic hook “Bad yutes from me downtown, I wanna see you just fly” rearing over beats from UK producer SOPHIE. The songs are thematically linked by two visually resplendent music videos directed by Paco Raterta. Filmed among a ruined building in the Philippines, both pieces show a cascade of Christian imagery, masked gang members and cultists, smoke and tropical haze. It’s occasionally grotesque, always beautiful.
The political climate of xenophobia and state violence against migrants and the poor has long been a theme in Gaika’s work. The very title of ‘Immigrant Sons’ is a powerful statement when the US government is gleefully locking up the children of immigrants in cages. The song’s empowering sentiment is to praise the fortitude and resilience of people who are brutally stigmatised by governments and the right wing media. Both its theme and epic chorus echo M.I.A’s 2007 classic ‘Paper Planes’, another subversive anthem for the global diaspora. In 2018, Gaika is reminding us that no one is illegal.
Gaika‘s collision of dancehall, grime and ominous drone creates a charged atmosphere of dread. As audiences to his recent performances in South Africa can attest, the UK musician and visual artist’s work powerfully evokes themes of confusion, terror and exploitation.
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Via email, Gaika described this intensity as a response to the confusing social reality of the early 21st century. “I don’t think I can make art divorced from reality, however fantastical it may seem. I think of my work as hyperreal in the sense that it amplifies our surroundings. I do see all the chaos and tension in the world explicitly, for sure. But I also really feel its beauty, I hope there is some of that in what I do too”.His projects to date have explored the space between intense anxiety and stark beauty. The mixtapes Machine and Security, and EPs Spaghetto and The Spectacular Empire 1, as well as his accompanying visual releases, place a deeply resonating patois above production which pushes R&B, trap and grime styles down a haunted, gothic path. The result is darkly alluring, as on the deceptively gentle ‘Glad We Found It‘, where a mournfully lovely synthesiser winds under lyrics like “it burns to love” and “this is my song for you, Now we’re dead”. While many artists are making dystopic electronic music, Gaika stands out for his concise lyricism. His break out song ‘Blasphemer’ announced itself with the hook “I’m watching TV when it’s not on”, a precise distillation of the contemporary sense that we are trapped in an endless loop of media voyeurism.
2016’s Security narratively focused its menace on a conceptual journey through London nightlife. When I asked Gaika about its origin and inspiration, he suggested that it was “about fear, money and dying, inspired by my time getting my ankles wet in some neon lit underworld. The truth is there, if you know what to listen for”. The word security conjures images of control, rigidity and surveillance cameras watching over clinical spaces. But the album sounds profoundly out of control, with Gaika’s howling tales of nights lost under a blizzard of drugs, guns, money or worse. At first listen, lyrics like “I’m getting smashed like the world ain’t real”, seem to echo the depressive hedonism of Future or The Weeknd. But while those artists can never seem to identify the causes of their existential malaise, Gaika pulls a brilliant rhetorical move with the closing song ‘White Picket Fences‘. Guest MC 6Cib precisely details the true roots of mass feelings of insecurity, firing off at war mongering politicians, corporate greed and pacifying consumerist values. Security joins the dark British pantheon of dystopian music, conjuring images of police cars on fire, illuminating riotous tower blocks. Its most recent ancestors are the black hole bass of Kode9 and the Spaceape’s Memories of the Future or The Bug’s London Zoo. But you can trace it back even further to David Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs, where the singer essayed the imagined collapse of society with a mix of despair and relish.
Later in 2016, Gaika dropped perhaps his most hard hitting release to date, ‘3D’, with its opening verse of – “This is my city and these are my streets, in a state of emergency/ This is my city and these are my streets and it’s murder out here”.
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As the title allusively hints, it’s also a song about the racist and classist imaginaries which fuel police killings and the role of the cultural industry in reinforcing these destructive tropes – ” Our bodies as props to the jewels and the glocks, that’s the only narrative that we see”. It becomes a song not just about violence, but about the nature of perception itself.
The inspiration came from an unexpected source – “3D glasses are the one, like the old school ones with the red and blue lenses. When I was a kid I wanted to wear them all the time. The song is about the perception of black male artistry in Europe/America. I think it’s often a bit flat from the outside. I think it’s ok to be contradictory. To be a developed human and to do gangster shit”.
With his most recent work Spectacular Empire 1, Gaika expands his hyperreal vision into the future. The two track release includes the stirring ‘Battalion’, a collaboration with Miss Red which is sung from the perspective of a future bike gang member. The ambiguous words leave it unclear if they are homaging a human lover or an advanced machine.
Cape by Don Zondo
The EP came with an richly detailed text piece where Gaika imagines the next 50 years of geopolitics, with London ruled by omnipotent warlords and the rise of “walled-in fascist republics” under the iron fist of an adult Barron Trump. The text works as a satire of our current political malaise, while retaining a disturbing plausibility. Gaika modestly describes how “I just wrote what I thought might happen and tried to make it make sense, I wrote it over a few days as a framework to some music and visuals I was making. I like to make complete worlds that pieces inhabit but normally this kind of thing stays firmly hidden on my hard drive. Somehow it got out. I’m glad though”.
According to the theorist Mark Fisher contemporary life is defined by the creeping sense that “The catastrophe… is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart”. It’s that sense of creeping dread you get when reading on your Facebook timeline about the melting Artic, or the latest electoral victories of xenophobic politicians. But Gaika’s darkly luminous work not only paints a picture of our time, it makes you want to question and change it.
Built in 1902 Kitcheners (KCB) has been the general stomping ground for generations upon generations of creatives, artists and students alike. Famed as the second oldest building in the city, there is no one occupant of this city who doesn’t know about it. It is more than fitting then that Gaika would perform the Johannesburg leg of his tour at this historic venue.
Arriving prior to the show, at 18:30 sharp for my interview with him it was eminent that nothing about KCB changes. The built-in upholstered cushioning that surrounds the dance room has reached the end of its lifetime of elegance and is peeling at the seams, presumably due to countless back and bottom harassment from eager party goers. As I walked into the crowded dance floor space the media was closed in by means of the glass and wooden door room dividers. Flashbacks from my student days spent body against body grinding out to some of South Africa’s best local talent all came rushing back to me as my feet stuck to the sticky floor and a minor sweat temporarily took hold of me.
There he was, locked in a video interview as I waited patiently for my turn to speak to the underground London-based artist. Camo pants, nude Nikes, a white top and a denim shirt loosely styled made up his attire. His demeanour was different from his music. He was calm, relaxed, open, and inviting. Unlike his experimental rap that oozes with pointed criticism on society and a near dystopian future. My turn finally arrived and he smiled at me with kindness, shaking my hand for an official introduction.
I took a seat next to him and in conversation, I saw a personal side to the artist I had never heard in his lyrics or seen published in any article. A visitor to South Africa for the second time in his life he shared with me that his visit was vastly different from the first he made as a child. Describing it as an emotional experience, Gaika tells me that the decision to embark on this tour was greatly motivated by his need to travel to the furthest place.
With an ability to partake in an intimate conversation, and seconds later retort with aloofness, I asked him about what he would perform for us that evening. “My records.” He told me as I tried to flesh out more. “I don’t want to ruin the magic so you’ll have to find out.”
He described his passage into music, “I fell into it really. I always wanted to be around music. I was a visual artist and around musical culture and one day I just decided I want to make music and just got lucky that opportunities arose for me to do that. I was never a kid with a hair brush in the mirror like I wanted to be a singer. My dad got sick and I just decided that you only live once and you’ve got to follow some of the things that you are too scared to follow. Or too scared to try and so I did and I’m quite committed. I want to do it properly. I don’t want to half do things.”
What stuck with me most was his response to what inspires him “Everything and nothing”. After some prying, he tells me that the sounds of early 80s and 90s film music act as an influence that he can recreate and interpret in his own way. It is as though Gaika finds comfort and inspiration from sounds of his early childhood or as he likes to call it, “kid music”. He does, however, caution by stating that, “I’m not really aware of influences”.
Dark musical undertones, otherworldly hard-hitting bass and sharp criticism found in his lyrics got me to the question of a possible pessimistic outlook. He responds to me confidently “No that isn’t true. I’m an optimist and a realist. I say it like it is. If it’s uncomfortable it’s uncomfortable. I don’t think I focus on negatives in my life. In my music that can be quite a criticism of energy that I bring out. Things can only get better from confronting what’s wrong in the first place.”
In parting, he shares with me that he would enjoy another tour like this in the future. The evening draws on as the dance floor greets sets by Rosie Parade and Kajama. 23:00 and the underground thunder of Gaika breaks loose. His sound intoxicates not only KCB but the streets in its surrounds.
His outfit has changed. Dressed in all black his music seems to inhabit every human form on the dance floor. The bass amplified and clinical leave my teeth on a near clatter. As he jumps and dances and throws his arms, so the crowd follows in imitation. The music in my bones, in all the life forms stacked on the dance floor, and in the old floorboards of KCB during his performance was so abundant that keeping my camera stable was a balancing act in itself. Gaika spits his lyrics with such intensity it makes his lyrics come across as dogmatic, with synchronized rhythmic bodies as followers of his sonic dogma. His ‘Security’ album takes hold of us and he asks, he pleas for a future of equality. Seeing Gaika live at KCB was nothing short of extraordinary. His vigour for his experimental practice will forever live on in my memory.
Get out your diaries. Here is our list of not to miss film, music and art events for 2018:
Inxeba (The Wound) is on circuit in South Africa
When: From 2 February
Where: Throughout the country
Inxeba (The Wound), South Africa’s official entry to the 2018 Academy Awards for best foreign language film, will be released in South Africa from the 2nd of February. It will be screened at a number of independent movie theatres as well as mainstream movie houses. The film focuses on bringing questions and realities around homosexuality and tradition together. It stars SA musician Nakhane Touré who has received much praise for his performance as initiate Xolani. The movie’s engagement with gender, sexuality and tradition makes it a worthwhile watch.
Gaika performs in South Africa
When: Johannesburg – 8 February
Cape Town – 9 February
All the way from Brixton in the UK, the dystopian style of Gaika will be greeting South Africans for the first time in February. His childhood was surrounded by various forms of tech and scientific innovation. His current mode of production is inspired by the digitization of humanity. You can look forward to a live performance of some of his recently released tracks, including ‘BATTALION’.
For their Valentine’s Day Edition WAM will be hosting Drop in Drawing, and just as the title of the event suggests, all that is required from participants is to come by the gallery during the allocated time slot. No experience or booking is required.
If a cheesy Valentine’s Day events such as a film screening or dinner is not quite your thing, we’d recommend giving this one a chance. Let your hand lead your chosen implement of mark making and experiment in a gallery environment. Honestly, what could inspire creativity more?
‘Cape to Tehran: Re-imaging and re-imagining personal history in post-Apartheid South Africa and post-revolutionary Iran’
When: 13 February – 29 March
Where: Gallery MOMO Cape Town
Opening Tuesday, 13 February at 18:00
For this group show a diverse set of artists have been selected largely from South Africa and Iran by the curatorial hand of Sepideh Mehraban. The featured artists engage with complexities surrounding their individual country’s histories and legacies of trauma. Emphasis is placed on personal experiences of both conflict and change through their work resulting in the presentation of a multifaceted discussion. This discussion takes on areas of cohesion and divergence between post-apartheid and post-revolutionary Iran.
‘Cape to Tehran’ does not take the form of a sole narrative but instead acts as full-bodied conversation amongst artists from varying geographies and generations. This show serves to juxtapose personal encounters of socio-political turmoil experienced by the artists in their motherlands. They create art as a way of reflecting instead of simply representing their experiences of change and conflict.
As part of the Kirstenbosch Summer Sunset Concerts, Petite Noir and Slow Jack will be performing on the 21st of March. For those who are feeling a little out of the loop, Petite Noir is a Belgian-born Congolese musician and songwriter now based in South Africa. His EP The King of Anxiety and his album La vie est belle / Life Is Beautiful demonstrate why watching him perform live should be on everyone’s bucket list. Slow Jack was formed in 2015, and has grown to include some of Cape Town’s best musical talent. Be sure to have a listen to their Soundcloudas a warm up for the concert. Access tickets for the concert online. The availability of tickets at the venue is dependent on online ticket sales.
‘Bakhambile, Parktown’, 2016 by Zanele Muholi
Stevenson group show BOTH, AND: commemorating 15 years of the gallery’s existence
When: 7 July – 24 August
Where: Johannesburg and Cape Town
The Stevenson gallery turns 15 this year. A commemorative group exhibition titled BOTH, AND will take place from 7 July to 24 August. This exhibition reflects on the foundations that continue to allow the gallery to stand tall in South Africa’s art scene – being a space that has its finger on the pulse of the art market while remaining dedicated to art history and the development of ideas. Two new directors, Sisipho Ngodwana and Alexander Richards, aim to unpack this through their curation of the show. They will look back and look forward, outlining the history of the gallery, its unique publication programme, local presence and global perspective. The show will include artists who began the journey with Stevenson, namely Zanele Muholi, Deborah Poynton, Nicholas Hlobo, Pieter Hugo, Wim Botha, Guy Tillim and Nandipha Mntambo, and those who joined the gallery’s journey at a later stage, like Robin Rhode, Meschac Gaba, Barthélémy Toguo, Penny Siopis and Moshekwa Langa. New and existing work by these artists will tackle the questions, “How have we, over the past fifteen years, collectively navigated the paradox inherent in the commercial gallery model? And what might the future hold?”
Red Bull Music Festival
When: 3-8 April
Where: Johannesburg
Just when the weather will be getting a little cooler, Red Bull plans to bring the heat to Johannesburg with the Red Bull Music Festival. Trompies, Oskido, Moonchild Sannelly, Moozlie, Stiff Pap and Distruction Boyz are among the musical stars who will be performing at this exciting explosion of sound. The festival has something for everyone, with artists from genres such as jazz, hip hop, electro, gqom and kwaito. Different spots throughout Johannesburg’s inner city will come to life at varying points throughout the festival. These spots include The Orbit, Newtown Music Factory, Republic of 94, Great Dane, and Kitcheners. Be sure to get your tickets online.
2017 Fak’ugesi theme
Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival
When: September
Where: Tshimologong Prescinct, Johannesburg
This year will mark Fak’ugesi’s fifth consecutive run in Johannesburg. The festival is due to take place in September, hosted at the Tshimologong Prescinct in Braamfontein in partnership with British Council ConnectZA. It offers an interactive space to celebrate digital technology, art and culture in Africa. Events and projects that should not be missed at the festival include the Digital Africa Art Exhibition, Market Hack, ColabNowNow, A MAZE and Block party. Dates are subject to change.
All the way from Brixton in the UK, the dystopian style of Gaika will be greeting South Africans and Malawians for the first time in February. A childhood surrounded by various forms of tech and scientific innovation fostered within, Gaika’s current mode of production inspired by the digitization of humanity.
Gaika’s sound can be compared to that of a future voice whispering profanities – barely out of reach. What is organic has become a ghostlike digitized chaos devoid of humanity. Like a Black Mirror episode Gaika’s message is one of grimness and disillusion.
His unapologetic worldview has been compared to the trip-hop of Tricky, and he has been deemed electronic music’s answer to Basquiat. The background noise of a post-millennial existence is given a sound track. These are the sounds of human failure, surveillance, violence, terror, masochism and exploitation all strewn together to create a seamless sound broken as the broken world that Gaika sees and contests with his music.
Titles such as ‘BATTALION’ featuring Miss Red and ‘BLASPHEMER‘ act as piercing commentaries on modern society. Collaborations with artists such as Israeli MC Miss Red known for bringing ‘Murder’ to beats speak of the idiosyncratic nature in which he chooses to execute his message of doom and despair that is only strengthened by the collaborations he partakes in. In an interview with Dazed he expresses, “How can we make art that isn’t political when you go out of your house in London and you see two or three homeless people by a cash point, and people like me are getting killed by the police. What are we doing as artists?”
Music that inhabits the industrial space pertain to a machine fetish. Gaika should however not be mistaken as a pessimist – instead he is a realist and depicts the world for what it truly has and is becoming. “I prefer to express the darkness of reality. I’m a ‘night’ person in that sense,” he tells Dazed.
At the end of 2017 the artist released The Spectacular Empire I and II that included his ‘BATTALION’ soundtrack. Perhaps it’s time to fight the machine, or will we become one with it in a world where minimum wage jobs are dying out and the friendly person at your local McDonalds is slowly but surely being replaced by an automated system. Making poverty soar at an all-time high. Let’s join Gaika on his tour in solidarity with a world that is losing its humanity.
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.
2016’s Security narratively focused its menace on a conceptual journey through London nightlife. When I asked Gaika about its origin and inspiration, he suggested that it was “about fear, money and dying, inspired by my time getting my ankles wet in some neon lit underworld. The truth is there, if you know what to listen for”. The word security conjures images of control, rigidity and surveillance cameras watching over clinical spaces. But the album sounds profoundly out of control, with Gaika’s howling tales of nights lost under a blizzard of drugs, guns, money or worse. At first listen, lyrics like “I’m getting smashed like the world ain’t real”, seem to echo the depressive hedonism of Future or The Weeknd. But while those artists can never seem to identify the causes of their existential malaise, Gaika pulls a brilliant rhetorical move with the closing song ‘
