Bubblegum Club

Tag: gothic

  • Gaika – “Some Neon Lit Underworld”

    Gaika – “Some Neon Lit Underworld”

    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.

    Top by Y-3

    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”.

    Top by Floyd Avenue

    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.

    Credits:

    Photography by Obakeng Molepe

    Direction & Styling by Rich Mnisi

    Grooming: Orli Meiri 

  • Felix Laband and Kerry Chaloner- South African Gothic 

    A few months before Felix Laband dropped his much anticipated Deaf Safari (2015) album, he played an early evening set at the 2014 Sonar Festival in Cape Town. The venue was packed as one of South Africa’s undisputed electronic masters showcased his latest work. The performance was accompanied with his collage artwork, which mixed up images of porn, politicians and eerie car drives through the depopulated urban fringe. The combination of the subtle music and jagged imagery was at once alluring and disturbing. And it contrasted sharply with the other acts that night. At one extreme were various bro-step EDM acts, trying to disguise their unimaginative beats with gaudy masks and blinding light shows.  On the other end were ambient producers, whose wholesome soundscapes seemed clinically designed to induce sleep.   Mindless hedonism vs self-indulgent introspection.  The guiding aspirations to make a background soundtrack to take different drugs to, rather than any kind of engagement with the wider world.  This lack of content was especially glaring because of the setting. Under the roof the Apartheid-era Good Hope Centre, a brutalist block of concrete   in the centre of one of the world’s most socially unequal societies.

    By combining personal obsessions with the tabloid visuals, Laband’s work came for an entirely different stream of electronic music than the rest of the night’s entertainment. It put him in a lineage of artists who have used synthesisers and samples to make out the dark corners of power, perversity and violence.  A twisted family tree which might include post-punk extremists like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire,  confrontational industrial artists Einstürzende Neubauten, Skinny Puppy and Ministry,  the insurgent techno collectives of Underground Resistance and Atari Teenage Riot.  Currently, artists like Fatima Al-Qardiri and Vatican Shadow soundtrack geopolitical dread.  In SA, the theme of revolt is central to Angel Ho’s production, while much of Gqom speaks to a sense of being trapped in an urban maze.  Music that speaks of broken bones and riot shields, burning cities, forbidden pleasures.

    With his visual collaborator Kerry Chaloner, Felix’s is plunging into this dark water of inspiration. Chaloner is an accomplished painter and visual artist, whose work wrestles with similar topics.  As she put it an evocative personal statement for one of her shows ‘I think about learning how to make gunpowder and the alarms of the terrorist drills and not understanding and crawling under our desks. I think about the ash from the next-door hospital incinerators blowing onto our sports day doughnuts.’   They got in touch after Laband was impressed by the ‘bravery and naturalness’ of her video work. As artists they share a fascination with both the darker aspects of life which society tries to sweep under the carpet and the raw power of nature.  ‘Our collaborations are about embedding our life in the work. We’re both nerds, big into film and watching wildlife and history documentaries, ’ says Kerry.  ‘We’re also both interested in filming things in nature for fun, like playing around with spotlights to make ordinary trees and gardens look suspicious.  Then we make mashups of our footage with found footage..   nature-horror-porn.’

    Their collaboration coincided with Felix rediscovering his personal interest in visual art. While promoting his last album, he found himself increasingly bored with the limited format of playing for people in nightclubs, and wanted to stage more live striking performances. Having already incorporated his own collages into his show, Kerry’s input allowed him to focus exclusively on the music, while she conducts the visuals.  Instead of just pummelling the audience with beats, they are working to create fully textured sonic experiences.  Their ultimate goal is to further bridge art and electronic music, with a focus on performing residencies and bringing live vocals into the mix. A key influence for them both is the American avant-gardist Laurie Anderson, whose long career has spanned performance, pop music and film.  Felix is planning to upgrade the practical scope of their performances ‘we’re focusing on buying more equipment, making the musical productions more ambitious.’

    They don’t just want to make dry conceptual art. Instead they want to say something about what Kerry calls an ‘extremely tense’ global political situation, by looking at the things society would rather repress. The weight of history is something which intrigues them both. Felix’s father is an historian, and growing up in a house surrounded by history books he developed a fascination with how the effects of war and conflict linger on in the present.  As an artist, Kerry is conscious of how colonialism and apartheid continue to structure South African life ‘anyone who comes from this middle class, white background must think of how to deal with this history. It subconsciously affects us in so many ways.’ Felix’s interest in the politics of pornography also speaks to this theme of repression, but it’s not without its tensions. ‘We’ve had a lot of fights about it because Kerry comes from a strong feminist perspective and wants to ensure that we always use it in a critical way.’  Kerry argues that ‘I want to make sure that it is not about being salacious or exploitative. It’s more about the politics of what people don’t want to see.’

    A further point of convergence is their shared personal histories, as they both grew up in Pietermaritzburg, a small city where the weight of colonial history is especially glaring. ‘Growing up there shapes people artistically’ Felix remembers ‘it has this strange lost colonial outpost feel. But it has produced a lot of really good artists. I haven’t been there in a long time but I’ve been talking with Dave Southwood (photographer) about doing a project about it.’ Kerry also has vivid memories of the gothic strangeness of the KZN midlands ‘Pietermaritzburg was like Twin Peak with more race tension. There was a lot of beauty, trees, parks and mist, but also a real dark side. We both spent many hours as kids and teenagers in the same romantic forests, cemeteries and botanical gardens.  There wasn’t much in the way of radical youth culture in Maritzburg… especially pre-internet.  If you felt different you had to invent your own.’

    Along with excavating the recent path they both have ambitious plans for the future. Kerry is continuing to focus on disruptive paintings and video art. Felix wants to take his next recordings into some unexpected places ‘I’ve always had this dream of recording sounds at World War Two genocide sites in Russia… I wonder does the earth sound different in Babi Yar?’

    For the immediate future Felix will be touring the EU at the end of July, and is prepping an EP for release on Compost Records later this year. While other South African electronic artists have their sights fixed on a dimly lit dancefloor, they are keeping their eyes on the ominous skies above.

    Felix Laband’s EU tour starts 27 July at Ortigia Sound System (Italy). He we also be performing at Nachtdigital (Germany) Garbicz Festival (Poland) and  Mukanda (Italy). 

    More of Kerry Chaloner’s work can be seen here.