Mutant and shadowy, the Mancunian duo’s tracks draw from contemporary classical music as much as from urban landscapes.
“Right now, I am in a deep state / I fell asleep and never woke up / I turned my dream into reality.” Across the short span of Ballad for a ‘G’, Rochester, New York rapper RXKNephew stitches together all that makes the duo formed by Joshua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle Reid’s music and its hypnagogic qualities—the sleepwalking is the threshold of Space Afrika’s sound.
Thus the duo refuses to be reduced to a preconceived identity and exhibits an almost anthropological drive to record the real (Black and Gold, We Live. Joy, Validation). The typically Manchester urban atmosphere of their ambient, capable of unsettling an American like RXKNephew, testifies to their inexorable desire to make Space Afrika a space for collaboration (the excellent Klein co-produces Ballad for a ‘G’).
French soprano, pastoral melody and fluidity
If the New Yorker’s experience resonates with that of the two Manchester artists, it’s because their music cannot be reduced to a handful of aesthetic or plastic clichés. In constant expansion, Space Afrika’s sound takes, with Quiet Storm (a title coined by conceptual artist Glenn Ligon), a fresh turn.
Borrowing from contemporary classical music (the appearance of French soprano Axelle Fanyo at the opening, the myriad collaborators on strings in particular), Quiet Storm moves away from Burial’s influence and offers a new canvas for Space Afrika’s mutating and shadowy music.
Deliberately more structured, Quiet Storm advances the idea of foregrounding Black craftsmanship in the service of exploring the ambivalent relationships between class, identity, and diasporic experience. No matter how articulated it might be, this third album derives its vitality from its impermanence, its fluidity, and its constant back-and-forth between outward and inward spaces.
Here, a piece of urban field recording tainted by a pastoral melody (Validation), there, a Pretty Gospel replaced by a dizzying inner dialogue (If This Is Hell with Deuén, the album’s summit), elsewhere, a spectral post-punk sound inhabited by a heart-rending Auto-Tune (MLN). From intimate music to collective plenitude.
Quiet Storm (Dais Records). Release on September 25.
