A genre-spanning collection of cryptic transmissions, interludes, and asides, the Manchester duo’s second album gets at emotion in an oblique fashion, remaking your desires as it plays.
What do you do with an ambient album about love? That’s the challenge of Space Afrika’s Honest Labour. Space Afrika are a duo of musicians—Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid—who both hail from Manchester, though the latter is based in Berlin. The music that they make varies from album to album, but what is consistent is their ability to place the listener in a state of reckoning with themselves. Space Afrika’s 2020 mixtape hybtwibt? contended with the minutiae of racial oppression, fusing snippets of daily life, protests, and popular songs with distorted melodies. It’s the type of work that invites neither easy listening nor easy answers, even though it’s often beautiful. Their previous album, 2018’s Somewhere Decent to Live, is even more elliptical. One sound or one sample will be swirled again and again, until it’s impossible to discern if it’s still there. It makes you reevaluate your senses, and after a listen, it’s easy to want to start touching the walls to reorient yourself. Honest Labour, named after the patriarch of Joshua Inyang’s Nigerian family tree, is somehow more deeply rooted and maddeningly abstract then these previous releases. A genre-spanning collection of extraordinarily detailed interludes, asides, and transmissions, the record gets at emotion in an oblique fashion, remaking your desires as it plays.
Though the music may sound minimal on a first listen, Space Afrika fill up the songs with samples and heavy instrumentation, overwhelming with disjointed parts. They tempt fracture, embrace distortion, and emphasize delay, all in service of creating sound that feels close to the beginning of Wings of Desire; you feel as if you are Bruno Ganz hovering from apartment to apartment, subway to subway, divining the thoughts of the denizens of each building you pass. Two early standouts exemplify this tendency. In “Preparing the Perfect Response,” over warbling, resonating strings, a woman speaks about her life and the struggles that she’s gone through in order to begin to appreciate herself. The closeness you feel to her comes from the detail in the sample, and the way you can hear her pound her chest when she declares that she loves herself. As the background oscillates behind her, she stays resolute. In “Indigo Grit,” over a backdrop of abstracted electric piano, clipping bass, and thunder samples, you hear their collaborator, who goes by the name of guest, singing mordant lines about “hidden things.” Two-thirds of the way through, this singing is replaced with a dialogue on the meaning of love: A man asks a woman whether love just means “to like someone a lot”; she says no, there’s a huge difference between the two. When he asks her to clarify, she hesitates, and the song abruptly ends. The effect of this is crushing. After moving you through an impeccably created atmosphere full of yearning, they place you right at the edge of expression, pushing you deep into the places that you hesitate to go, and then they cut the cord.
As the album progresses, concrete statements become more legible, and it becomes possible to delineate specific genres. Space Afrika provide their version of hip-hop with “B£E,” which begins with a clattering drum echo. Even as they work in an identifiable style, they curve the song by bringing in momentary waves of static and dropping the beat out entirely. And once the beat returns and strings swell, it gets even deeper. Blackhaine, a Manchester rapper, gives an impression of what he sees, the loneliness that surrounds him, and a final tag of pride: “Man are trynna get rich at the top of the map.” It’s an expression of love to a city and culture that nurtured them, delivered in a way that earns every scintilla of sentimentality. The first half of “Girl Scout Cookies” is drifting ambient pop that floats on Bianca Scout’s voice, which is somehow as light and sharp as Elizabeth Fraser’s, and a disappearing synthesized glissando. After a sample of a feud appears for an instant, a transfixing This Heat-like guitar riff repeats as Scout sings cryptically about how she’s “run out of chances,” ending the song by repeating the words, “For the last time.” Not only does the song function as a bifurcated embrace of two disparate styles, it feels like a depiction of the slow understanding that one’s idealized love is slowly ebbing away beneath the day-to-day destruction of reality; it’s dream pop with an industrial underbelly.
The tightly controlled mix of voices and textures on Honest Labour feels cinematic primarily because it pursues human feeling. Kodwo Eshun said the Detroit techno duo Drexciya “exacerbated the dehumanization” of electronics in order to create “impalpable hallucinations that get on your nerves.” After repeatedly listening to Honest Labour, I think the electronics of Inyang and Reid do the exact opposite. What they do on this album is create a wholly humanistic synthetic world focused on figuring out exactly what we mean when we talk about loving one another. Honest Labour is a taxing, emotionally exhausting experience precisely because it replicates the messiness of human existence, in all its flaws, insensitivities, and oppressions. The titular last track repeats the melody of “Indigo Grit,” yet this time the keys are clear, a wavering cello plays along, and celestial electronics pulsate in and out. As the cello plays, the other instruments slowly fade out, and you are left listening to this lone player, struck by their devotion to their work. And then it’s over.
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