Angolan artist Nazar weaponises EDM to mock the powerful, never quite revealing who holds the trigger.
His sonic dystopia is constructed in maligned shades of BASS, swush and womp that subside to expose an equally horrifying reality beneath, an endless civil war.
Human voices contort and drown in a bleak Call of Duty ruin-scape, rendered in plastic tones that seems to corrode with repeated listens, rather than re-generate. Kuduro and Zouk rhythms, Portugese utterances: all wrestle with an assault of global presets.
Moments of melodic lightness are swiftly massacred by an insurgent reality that has been continually supressed; Nazar honours the ghosts of unburied, unnamed dead.
As such, his “tongue-in-cheek ode to the reigning kleptocracy,” with all its linguistic and aesthetic wrapping pointing to resistance, to sedition, finds a singular path in the exhausting global arms race sometimes called ‘Global Bass’. At its most elastically thumping, in “Oligarch’s Son”, Nazar turns sounds many of us have come to hate, in all their aggressive machismo, onto issues that truly deserve our hate.
Hubris, An EP that acts as “a referendum on the dictatorship of Angola that rigs elections, jails dissidents and extrajudiciously murders whomever interferes with its policies”, constructs and destroys a sound-world to mirror this horror.
More about: Nazar
