Bubblegum Club

Tag: non records

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Angel Ho- Energy Without Restraint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • FAKA – Speaking With the Gods

    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.

  • The Emancipation of Angel Ho

    The Cape Town based electronic artist Angel Ho made an international splash last year with his hard- hitting debut EP Ascension.  That release consisted of five sinister experimental tracks and was mastered by Arca, whose previous collaborators have included Kayne West and Bjork.  Angel Ho is also the co-founder of NON records, an internet based collective with a mission to work ‘’ across genre and geography to unite politically and sonically forward-thinking musicians in an ongoing exploration of Pan-African identity in the twenty-first century’’. On Soundcloud, NON has been building an impressive body of work, with its geographically disparate artists united by their brutal yet danceable music.

    Angel Ho’s latest release Emancipation, a collaboration with Desire Marea, continues this trend. A ‘bootleg collection’ he has described it as “tracks that became an emancipating, unifying experience for everyone listening.  It is for our relative black queer trans communities, I want us to exist without compromise and to be brave everyday’. This hopeful sentiment presides over the collection of four dark, pulverising new songs and remixes.  The addictive ‘Clocccc’ sounds like it was recorded inside a machine gun, while ‘I Don’t Want Your Man’ twists a song by Keyshia Cole until it sounds like she is presiding over the apocalypse. And it’s all wrapped together with Chino Amobi’s opulent cover art, which shows golden dragons writhing through a surreal blizzard.

    Currently, many underground electronic artists are making explicitly political releases.  Already this year, new albums from ANOHNI and Fatima Al Qadiri are confronting catastrophic global warming, drone warfare and state terrorism head on. Although the political themes in Angel Ho’s work are more subtle, its sense of dread and violence is utterly contemporary. One of his best works ‘Solidarity’ responded to the 2015 Fees Must Fall movement, eloquently capturing the tumult of repression and rebellion. It was loaded onto Soundcloud with an image of a police riot vehicle doused in flame.  Like this photo, Angel Ho and NON are a snapshot of a chaotic time, both dangerous and thrilling.