Bubblegum Club

Tag: grime

  • Missu’s ‘An Education’ is the Soundtrack to your Next Summer

    Missu’s ‘An Education’ is the Soundtrack to your Next Summer

    Missu makes music for the summer. Feel-good synthy grooves that are just as much a jam cruising with the windows down or sweating it out on the jol. Which makes his debut EP ‘An Education’ well timed since it’ll take South Africans a month or 2 to pick up on the dopeness at hand.

    In a weird way, it reminds me of Gateway Drugs’ self-titled EP. Not that it sounds the same although there’s plenty of 80s pastiche weaved into ‘An Education’, but in that it’ll probably be the cult-hit soundtrack for those who find it. Those who do find it will love it and make it blow up amongst an ever-growing fan base. Missu is already a rather popular chap in Durban with his fun live shows that are just straight up impossible not to dance to. Both his energy and songs are infectious, the dude is a multi-instrumentalist who puts effort into making each live show a unique experience.

    ‘An Education’ has five tracks and 4 features, most of whom you should probably recognise. Red Robyn, Costabesta, Robin Thirdfloor and Moonchild all add their unique personalities to the tracks. Each song suits the vocalist and feel like they were made closely together, making the EP a well-rounded release.

    ‘Dilemma’ is the opener and features Red Robyn. It kicks off as a dreamy synth pop number and then diverts into a sci-fi rap breakdown for a bit, only to then kick into this section that feels like you’re playing Space Invaders. It has so much depth and commands multiple listens. It’s fun, it’s cheeky, it’s sardonic, it’s honest. Oh, and the Luke Nelson directed video will have you feeling some type of way.

    Costabesta comes through with a grime flow on ‘Coast’ which might have you mistaking him for Dizzee Rascal rapping over a beat made using cups and spoons. I can’t tell if the “You and you and you” line is a Max Normal reference, because it’s said with a similar cadence, but either way it’s a vibe.

    ‘Engojeni’ features Robin Thirdfloor and it’s an up-tempo feel-good dance track that’s all about the art of thrift shopping drenched in Kavinsky-like synths with a thumping beat. No Macklemore vibes here though as I know for a fact that Robin’s style comes from living that thrifty life.

    Moonchild does her thing on the closer, ‘Popcorn’, which is a song about the pains of wearing high-heels and has a chorus about popping the corn on your foot. I shit you not. It’s amazing. Moonchild has a penchant for providing earworms and this one encourages on the jol footcare, although the imagery makes me think of Dr Pimple Popper which means this is either gonna gross some people out or turn them on.

    ‘An Education’ is a solid offering from a musician who really should be on your radar by now. There’s plenty of weirdness that’s held together by pop sensibilities, collabs that accentuate both, and a love of synths that would make Robert Moog proud.

    Listen to Missu’s debut EP, ‘An Education’ here.

  • Gaika – Pumping that Gas

    Gaika – Pumping that Gas

    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.

  • UK artist Haich- Making Life Shine

    UK artist Haich- Making Life Shine

    The writer Grafton Tanner argues that as the culture industry voraciously strip-mines ideas from the past, musicians respond by creating even weirder versions of earlier styles. Artists wildly mix genres and musical eras, expressing the social dislocation of living in a society where the line between the real and the online seems to grow hazier by the day. But this post-genre approach can also result in beautiful and uplifting work. Frank Ocean’s Blonde pushed soul music to new heights of sublime abstraction. The mysterious Jai Paul made instant pop classics that sound like they were sung by ghosts. UK artist Haich is the latest young visionary aiming to transform our idea of what a singer is in 2018.

    Haich AKA Harrison Bernard describes himself as a producer and “still transitioning” vocalist. Originally from the UK, he began his artistic career making hip hop and grime, under his previous stage name That Boy Slim. But something was missing in those aggressive sounds – “When I started making that kind of music, it felt like I couldn’t get the sound to feel authentic. It would feel like an underwhelming copy”. But in opening himself up to new influences something clicked “After getting older and widening my taste, it seems obvious now, but I realised we can do whatever we want. The most avant-garde artists are doing whatever they want, no genre or mood attached. They are paving their own sonic lane- I’d rather try and do that”.

    Two years of hard work produced his debut EP Unbalanced, which dropped last year. A dreamy genre mix, it sounds like James Blake submerged in a downpour of experimental electronics. This week, Haich is putting out the new song ‘Peak’. As with all his work, it’s inspired by the complexities of everyday human interaction in this wild century. “Unbalanced was pretty much all about growth and becoming an adult. ‘Peak’ is more like a distorted love story. I’m inspired by accidents, mistakes, imperfections. I’m trying to make those so- called negative things shine”.

  • 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 

  • Go with Flohio

    UK MCs are straight up killing the game at the moment. Literally everyone has heard of Skepta and the Boys Better Know crew, Stormzy’s ‘Big For Your Boots’ just hit 23 million views in under 3 months, and for those of you who have been sleeping, we recently introduced you to Lady Leshurr. Whilst their American counterparts are mumbling through hooks, Brits are bringing the fear back to rap with grit, grime and in the case of Flohio, ‘Dirt’.

    ‘Dirt’ is the latest single from the 22-year-old rapper representing south London’s TruLuvCru. It’s a menacing yet uplifting track from a woman who sounds like she could mug you, but instead actually works as a graphic designer when she’s not rapping. Originally from Nigeria, Flohio found her love for rapping when her family moved to south-east London. Judging from the chorus, ‘Dirt’ is an ode to growing up in the south and the spirit of those streets instilled in her. “You can tell by the way that I get back up// Been pushed down but I never got stuck // Dropped out of class, still classy” she spits with conviction over a minimalist industrial type beat that Kanye would be into.

    At the end of the day, the song is about rising above your circumstances. Something many rappers have touched on over the years, but Flohio does it with a lot more conviction than most. She’s a straight-talker and there’s a ferocity to the way she raps that makes me believe her. While south London is half a world away from South Africa, there’s a relatability to ‘Dirt’ that almost anyone will get. I mean, who hasn’t fallen and gotten back up? If you’re currently down in the doldrums, and you need a little help, maybe ‘Dirt’ could be your Rocky montage music out of it?

    Check out her powerful live performance of ‘Dirt’ for Noisey’s “The New Breed”.

    And here’s the studio version.

  • Ikonika’s Dancefloor Disruption

    “I always had headphones on and I always knew I wanted to make music”, Ikonika told me. I sat down with the London-based electronic musician, producer, and DJ last week at KCB Braamfontein, where she and the Pussy Party posse were embarking on a nation-wide dancefloor revolution: a series of femme insurgencies to shake up club culture, forge new sound, and nurture emerging talent. With Ikonika as guest mentor, Pussy Party is launching a series of DJ and production workshops for femme-identifying artists in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban.

    Alongside the workshop series, Ikonika will be pouring her bass-heavy, off-kilter rhythms and oozing synths over our urban dancefloors. In the process, she will be engendering a sonic dialogue between two parallel generations — across continents — each seeking to make a life radically different from that of their parents. Each born of collisions between multiple times and places.

    As a kid growing up in London, Ikonika listened eclectically: metal and punk, alongside RnB and grime. “All the different tribes, I was hanging out with all of them”. Like many producers before her, Ikonika (Sara Chen) crafted her early sound from late nights and Fruity Loops.  She remembers starting out as a DJ: a dingy Sunday night residency with an audience of five. Today, Ikonika has given us more than a decade of genre-bending, progressive electronic music. She has released two albums with Hyperdub Records (Contact, Love, Want, Have 2010; Aerotropolis 2013) and produced four EP’s (Edits 2010; I Make Lists 2012; Beach Mode 2013; and Position 2014). She has toured widely in Europe, Asia, Australia, as well as North and South America — all the while shifting between her roles as DJ/Producer.

    “When I DJ, it’s about making people move and feel something, but when I produce my music, that’s really personal to me. That’s my own little world I wanna create. And if I can play those tunes and people feel them too, that’s really special to me. To be able to share my music, and music I’m feeling, my friend’s music”.

    Dub-step holds special place in Ikonika’s origin story as a DJ/producer. “The sound systems were incredible. Mad Jamaican sound systems in places like Kitcheners. I’d never felt music like that physically.” In small basement clubs like Plastic People and parties thrown by DMZ, Ikonika was taken by the new dub sound. “The music would just shudder in your chest and you couldn’t swallow anything apart from bass.” Those were the days when Ikonika learnt the importance of sound systems and started infusing more base into her music.

    Since these early days, Ikonika’s sound has broadened, spanning grime, RnB, dancehall, footwork, house and techno: spinning soundscapes at the underground’s most progressive cusp. Her sound is a testament to her love of nightclubs, to the dialogue between DJ and dancer, and to music itself. When I asked Ikonika about the supposed ‘death’ of London’s club scene, she said:

    “We still keep it underground and we still find basements. Chuck sound systems down there. Could be a fire hazard, I don’t know. We always find a way to have our music because music means so much to us, and clubbing means so much to us. Dark room and a sound system is all you need right?”

    In the club, Ikonika’s focus is on the dancer/DJ dialogue. I asked about the extent of improvisation in her sets:

    “I used to plan a lot and that never worked out. You just don’t feel the room as much. If you’re just sticking to a set, it becomes very cold. You’re not watching people. For me it’s about interaction. It’s a team effort between me and the dancers. I’ll try not to plan too much. Maybe I’ll decide on the bpm range and take it from there”.

    That magic that happens, when all of us collide in a dark room, with bass flowing down our throats needs to include women: especially behind the decks.  

    That has been the fuel for facilitating femme-focused DJ’ing and production workshops. “I would want women to feel a bit more comfortable in this industry”, Ikonika says. I’d never felt real sexism till I started in music.  I’ve had a lot of guys come up to the mixer, and I’ll have like two faders up in the mix. They don’t believe that I’m mixing so they’ll come up to the mix and pull the fader down. Or like on a day I’m playing vinyl, they’ll put their hand on the vinyl to make sure it’s actually coming out of the vinyl.”

    Alongside fellow artists E.M.M.A, Dexplicit and P Jam, Ikonika has co-facilitated a series of workshops in London, titled Production Girls. “We teach production at a beginner level. People are scared to try the software. They can’t navigate around it. We show them how to make drums, how to mix down, how to use the synths and that kind of stuff”. It’s no wonder then that Pussy Party, which provides ongoing mentorship for Johannesburg’s femme DJs, would partner with Ikonika on a femme-oriented club-culture intervention.

    “Women as tastemakers is the best thing you could ever have. Cos if the girls aren’t dancing on the dancefloor, what’s the point?”

     

    ‘This article forms part of content created for the British Council Connect ZA 2017 Programme. To find out more about the programme click here.’

  • Georg Gatsas – Exploring Cities Through Portraiture

    The work of Swiss photographer Georg Gatsas has been published by magazines such as Wire, Dazed, i-D and Beat. Georg has been operating between London and Zurich for the past couple of years. He recently spent some time in Johannesburg as part of an artist residency organized by Pro Helvetia. I caught up with him to find out about his work and his time in SA.

    Georg shot his first series called “The Process” (2002-2007) in New York which ended up in several exhibitions, magazines and publications. Currently, he mainly works as an analogue photographer. Shooting on film has allowed him to develop a particular attitude towards the shots he takes. Thinking about the cost of film rolls and that each closing of the shutter has a feeling of finality to it, Georg tries to focus and capture the right moment, taking less shots than he would with a digital camera. And often he finds it easier to carry around an analogue camera. In mentioning his creative process, Georg emphasized how he enjoys working organically and tries not to force any part of his work.

    tubestationTube Station

    Georg’s first series were mainly portraits of musicians, visual artists, performance artists and designers which he shot at night. The people he was shooting were living mostly parallel to mainstream society; they had created their own hub. Through taking their portraits he got into their sleeping rhythms and started shooting nighttime streetscapes  and the environment of the people in his portraits. The combination of these pictures became a portrayal of New York City and particular kinds of people who lived there. While residing in London for an exhibition in 2008, he started shooting the UK base music scene, which over an eight-year period has developed into a series called “Signal The Future”.”The portraits as part of the series become a portrayal of a certain environment, but also of the times we live in.” Georg explained that his work can be looked at in different ways, bringing to the fore questions on global sound, migration politics, cultural production in a hyper-capitalist city such as London, new aesthetics, new instruments of the underground, and how the mainstream reacts to it.

    Having only spent time in Europe and the States before, he was initially quite thrown by the different rhythms and ways of being in Johannesburg. But soon his desire to learn about the flow of the city became stronger. His photographs from SA will follow a similar creative starting point to his previous work – capturing artists best representing their city. He has been photographing some of South Africa’s most interesting producers, musicians, artists and performers of 2016, including Fela Gucci, Mante Ribane and Dear Ribane, DJ Lag, DJ Doowap and Moonchild Sanelly. In his comment on how he selected people to photograph he explained that “it has to be a fan boy thing. So I am first of all a fan [of their work].” He explained that his choices were based on people doing important work, but work that was not quite defined yet. “I don’t like defined stuff. I like surprises…I like when people try out new things, things that move forward.”The photographs from Georg’s Johannesburg series will also be linked and combined with the images from his previous series as some of the artists in all these series know each other personally, are communicating and collaborating with each other.

    manthe_ribane_iiManthe Ribane

    Georg’s experiences in Johannesburg and the people he has met have influenced the way in which he thinks about his work. “I have learned a lot politically, work wise, rhythmically. And a lot on the history of photography coming out of Africa and South Africa which is heavy, complex and difficult.”

    Georg will be back in April for the second part of his residency. His first solo museum exhibition will take place at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland in November 2017, and parts of it will hopefully lead into partnership exhibitions in London and Johannesburg.

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    sky_h1_iSky H1

    bill_kouligas_iBill Kouligas

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