Out of seemingly nowhere, ANGEL-HO has found himself in the limelight. But unlike many artists who rely on a heavy PR push and marketing campaign, the NON-affiliated Cape Town artist is experiencing an upswing based off his incredible music alone, having released some of the best, most devastating music of 2015. That includes Death Drop From Heaven, which we reviewed last month and spotlighted as one of our favorite releases of the year.
Today, ANGEL-HO kicks it up a notch by releasing his debut EP, ASCENSION. The title alone puts him in good company (John Coltrane, Glenn Branca), but it’s the fact that this one’s released by Rabit’s new, highly promising Halcyon Veil label (in conjunction with NON, of course) that’ll likely get him even more attention. And it’s mastered by Arca to boot!
Check out the stream below — spoiler: it’s a fucking stunner — and a statement by ANGEL-HO beneath it.
[Visit full site to view media]
Ascension - 2015 is somehow an ongoing performance. Ascending is a component of the performance. The term - not necessarily meaning to rise above, but the achievement of a higher consciousness and engagement with technology, in relation to the corporeal. Technology is corporeal and both are mediums and sites of violence and trauma.
These political bodies begin to have shared experiences, traumas which connote histories of bodily violence. These are inherited through our social structures, and conditioning implemented by staged regimes such as democracy. The taxonomy on the anonymous body is what Ascension reveals.
The performance is transitive – in constant flux, transforming, and becoming multi-form through sound and video. I find these mediums become extensions of my performance character, Angel-Ho, which is a state that is inescapable and temporary, a condition that forms the literacy for the sound and visual. These accentuate movement and in turn, consequently reflect, and affect, social political change.
The sonic component of Ascension is largely layered instruments and collages of sound, which are meant to reorientate the consumer. The idea of orientation, not only in terms of sexuality - but more importantly our orientation to, and relationship with, environments and spaces which inhabit mass and cultural construction. It is about revealing binaries – political performance and our performance as communities. Power distribution within the postcolonial state is disrupted through the forms of the soundscapes, defying pattern and synchronicity that is so present in commercial consumption of music. It is this disorientation, which re-orientates the body in relation to these mediums, which supports the questioning of our environments.
ASCENSION tracklist:
01. INSIDE THE FLUX OF MIND
02. YAH CUNT
03. AUTO SHADE
04. REMOVALS
05. REVOLTER
[Photo: Jody Brand]
• ANGEL-HO: https://soundcloud.com/angel-h0
• Rabit: https://twitter.com/rabitmusic
• Halcyon Veil: http://halcyon-veil.tumblr.com
• NON: https://soundcloud.com/non-records-1