Space Afrika + Blackhaine + NÂR
Saturday 09 Apr 2022 from 8pm to 11:30pm
15€
At la Station Nord - Gare des Mines
An evening in the new indoor space of the Station - Gare des Mines, punctuated by a new creation between Space Afrika and Blackhaine never shown in France!
The duo Space Afrika arrived at a key moment to remind us of the reflexive and activist force that electronic music can (and should) assume. Composed a few days after George Floyd's murder by the police, the piece hybtwibt? (Have You Been Through What I've Been Through?) came to accompany and support the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK.
Honest Labour, released in 2021, is an assemblage of British dub, Detroit techno, dark ambient and acoustic drone music. Steeped in Manchester's cultural heritage, Space Afrika's production blends masterful aesthetics, sonic innovation and an emotional and cerebral approach.
→ Blackhaine
Blackhaine has succeeded this year in capturing the anguishing collapse of the present times. A sought-after choreographer (he has worked with Mykki Blanco and Kanye West), the UK producer creates post-industrial music bathed in the social realism of the north of England. In the synthetic and dark meanders of his productions, one evolves in a physicality sometimes emaciated, sometimes sublimated, which often evokes a Kafkaesque rereading of the drill.
→ NÂR
Listening to NÂR's tracks, one rediscovers the evocative power of industrial electronic music. Handcrafted, abrasive, sometimes fragile, the sound work assembled by the Lebanese artist Nadia Daou appears terribly instinctive. On stage, her music takes on the appearance of a leap into the unknown. She assembles live synthetic, hypnotic, dark and sometimes brutal tracks that revive a fundamentally humanist and organic experimental tradition. Now based in Switzerland, her performances and various collaborations have made her a future masterpiece of current experimental music.
Manchester UK’s Space Afrika make music of what they term “overlapping moments” –oblique mosaics of dialogue, rhythm, texture, and shadow, half-heard through a buswindow on a rainy night.
Their releases Above The Concrete/Below The Concrete (2014) and Somewhere Decent To Live (2018) were sparse, spacious yet intimate electronic abstractions, partly inspired bytheir observations of industrial landscapes and experiences of life in the North of England.
In 2020, Space Afrika released their most emotionally charged project to date, hybtwibt? (have you been through what i’ve been through?). First recorded for broadcaston NTS Radio before being edited down to a half-hour collage and released a few days laterin the wake of George Floyd’s murder. As Black Lives Matter protests were gatheringmomentum across the U.S. and UK, the Manchester duo’s self-released mixtape capturesthe unrest with intercutting fragments of their own unreleased work. Described as a“dreamlike tapestry”, and hailed by Pitchfork and Bandcamp as one of the best ambientalbums of 2020, sales of the mixtape continue to raise funds for Black Minds Matter UK andthe Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust in support of the fight for racial equality.
The duo went on to release in the spring of 2021, Untitled (To Describe You), a collaborationwith photographer, filmmaker and poet Tibyan Mahawah Sanoh, generating a living,breathing study of the duo's Northern working-class Black British reality.
In January 2021, they announced their signing to Dais Records. Honest Labour, the duo'sfirst full-length since 2020's landmark "hybtwibt?" mixtape (have you been through whatI’ve been through?) expands the project's palette with classical strings, shimmering guitar,and visionary vocal cameos, leaning further into their enigmatic fusion of ambient unrestand cosmic downtempo. It's a sound both fogged and fragmented, at the axis of songcraftand sound design, born from and for the yearning solitudes of life under lockdown.
Blackhaine is a UK based project operating between Noise and Drill.
With its origins in the static anxiety of 2020, their output focuses on the ‘transition from stomach knotted dread to exhaustive, prang-out negative ecstasy’.
A political act - the live show contains deconstructions of their existing sounds and future releases whilst experimenting with genre convention ranging from ambience to hardcore punk.
Previous releases include And Salford Falls Apart and Armour.
At once confrontational and intimate, Heyes probes the limits of rap machismo, street poetry, experimental dance and, ultimately, what it means to be an artist from a working class background.
He offsets aggression, braggadocio and nihilism with intense vulnerability and unrefined honesty, a dichotomy with which he is able to bring together a dizzying array of influences, from Moor Mother and Playboi Carti to William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.
Stripping away convention, Blackhaine seeks to replace his own limitations, both physical and emotional, with an armour of a paler shade.
NÂR is a Lebanese multi-instrumentalist and singer/spoken word performer.
In constant metamorphosis, she works with various instruments,her vocals and many objects she finds,processed through a chain of analog effects and loopers she uses in a very singular way.
Layer after layer,she builds up and deconstructs each piece, often leading her sonic experiments with short sentences on repeat like mantras oscillating between Arabic and English or declaimed poetry by writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and other contemporary poets as Lydia Lunch.
Abrasive and fragile NÂR’s music take its roots in a very large spectrum of sounds, inspirations or genre such as traditional middle eastern and north african trance music,early minimalism, industrial, down tempo, grime moods and noise music.
Lately playing with a set up essentially composed of clocks, carillons and other metallic objects, Daou is showing a new face with more radical directions sometimes even drifting into something we could assimilate to concrete music.