From music to photography, Space Afrika is extending its explorations of the inscription of sensory experiences in harsh urban environments.
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The Manchester-based duo Space Afrika (Joshua Reid and Joshua Inyang) has developed a body of work that is alternately ambient, electronic and experimental hip-hop. Yet there is one common denominator: the spectres of bodies or intimate stories, and their wanderings in a more or less abstract sound context evoking the coldness of the interstitial public spaces that characterise England's post-industrial cities. Space Afrika thus follows in the tradition of a part of English electronic music that reflects the wanderings of daily life in an impersonal, polluted and rainy urban environment. The haunted South London depicted in Burial's music comes to mind, as Mark Fisher's work (2014) so aptly captured.
“It is like walking into the abandoned spaces once carnivalized by raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction. Muted air horns flare like the ghosts of raves past. Broken glass cracks underfoot. […] Audio hallucinations transform the city's rhythms into inorganic beings, more dejected than malign. You see faces in the clouds and hear voices in the crackle. What you momentarily thought was muffled bass turns out only to be the rumbling of tube trains.” – Mark Fisher (2014), Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures, Zero Books.
Space Afrika's music is of course related to Burial's, both in content and in its minimal wrapping. Somewhere Decent to Live, Meet me at Sachas, Above the Concrete / Below the Concrete, Primrose Avenue, The Way Home, The Sudden Walk... The spatial quality of the titles of the tracks, albums and EPs accompany the musical evocation of a gloomy, greyish urbanity. The cover of Primrose Avenue uses white lines on a black background to depict an empty suburb. The Honest Labour cover illustrates the dialogue between the motion of a busy road and the still solitude of a silhouette in the rain.
The evocative signs of a particular urbanity, harsh, lived and felt are everywhere, and the Mancunian duo draw on their sensitive experiences of the city to sculpt their productions.
“Everything we do and are is a product of our experience, and so our surroundings are of maximal importance. […] Day to day commuting and hanging out in the city, you catch the natural sounds and dynamics from the most simple of things, like transportation, and it becomes second nature. Manchester is the place that made us, we were born and raised here, we learned the ropes here. It would hard, maybe even ignorant not to translate that into the sounds we create.” – Space Afrika for Truants magazine (2016).
During the second half of the twentieth century, Manchester, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, was marked by a severe industrial decline and a sharp rise in unemployment. It was further made extremely vulnerable by Thatcher's liberal policies from 1979 onwards. In this context, the 1970s and 1980s saw the development of alternative movements in the districts of large housing estates. Alternative and counter-cultural venues and their associated musical figures emerged, with the post-punk and new wave of Joy Division/New Order, and later with the acid house and UK rave scenes that developed thanks to The Haçienda for example. The neo-liberal strategies for developing the city that followed resulted in the formation of "a much more dual city where highly dynamic spaces [...] and spaces of extreme relegation exist side by side" (Vincent Béal, 2014).
Space Afrika's music explores these fragments of abandoned urban spaces, their movements and stasis, and the infrastructures that shape and distance them. The sounds of the city are interwoven, sometimes captured during walks, sometimes taken from audio archives on the Internet. Ambiences, sirens and other urban sound signals are recontextualised in music, and the rare passages of spoken word or distant singing add the humanity of intimate stories and their sensitive, sensory and sentimental experiences in these suburban contexts. The music maps out atmospheres, revealing places that are occupied and appropriated in the midst of major roads and housing estates.
“We’re paying homage to these suburban environments. We’re showing the limits of those structures and trying to break them down at the same time.” – Joshua Reid (of Space Afrika), for Dazed magazine (2023).
Space Afrika is part of a distinctive yet-to-be-named scene that has been emerging in the North West of England over the last few years. Iceboy Violet, Rainy Miller, Blackhaine, aya, Renzniro... These are just some of the artists who regularly collaborate and come together in places like The White Hotel or Soup Kitchen to develop a collective aesthetic that transcends genre boundaries, and which is above all concerned with expressing a collective representation of the urban spaces they have inhabited or continue to inhabit. Regardless of the precise names of the towns or outlying districts, the atmosphere experienced in these post-industrial spaces is more or less the same. According to the duo, these common tropes arise from a shared geographical confinement in declining spaces.
“The city changes very quickly and there are a lot of us in the same situation. The good thing to come from that was that we were able to form communities, groups of people that could start to address things specifically in the location we were based in. We took inspiration from the architecture and the journeys we’ve travelled and put that into some sort of art form. That’s what makes music from there quite interesting. […] Maybe Manchester had that limelight in the 1990s, but then none of the things we were promised ever came. So, it forces people into boxes, into places to start creating something. Having these hopes and dreams and trying to actualise them in confined spaces can have interesting results.” – Joshua Reid (of Space Afrika) for Exberliner magazine (2022).
With MONO, published by Kermesse éditions, Space Afrika continues its exploration of urban environments, this time in images. MONO is a series of monographic and monochromatic white cards, printed in risography. The content of the publication is chosen by the contributing artist, as is the colour of the print. Space Afrika plunge into a photographic derivation of their sound work. For the occasion, the group presents a collection of nocturnal urban photographs in sepia tones.
Grain and blur add to the distancing of the subjects and the hazy atmosphere of the spaces we cross or enter. The glow of artificial light sources such as streetlamps, headlights and flashing lights and their reflections, as well as the saturated confusion of darkness, capture the way in which the interstitial urban spaces of a post-industrial English city can be experienced, somewhere between inhospitality, alienation and encounters. Rare subtitles add a narrative structure and a message about the alert state of night-time wanderers. The bodies are anonymous, hooded, sometimes reduced to moving spectres of light.
The wanderings photographed play on textures but also on angles and points of view to reveal a critique of the political control of public space. More abstract images are juxtaposed with documentary evidence of the contestation of domination: on two pages, an overturned car is burnt by a fire that cuts it up by illuminating it.
Photographs are taken from above, overlooking those who walk or stand still in the public space, suggesting the state of permanent and insidious surveillance allowed by CCTV. Following on from their textured musical ambiences and the disillusioned romanticism injected by the vocal events, here the juxtaposition of photographs gives rise to a discourse through images, giving an account of the inscription of the senses and feelings of individuals in the fragmented and cold spaces of post-industrial towns in Northern England.
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Article by Antoine Malo.
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To go further:
- Space Afrika’s discography : https://space-afrika.bandcamp.com/music
- MONO – Space Afrika (2023), Space Afrika, Kermesse éditions : https://kermesse.cool/products/mono-space-afrika
- Fisher, M. (2014). Mark Fisher (2014), Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures, Zero Books : https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781780992266?source=chasse-aux-livres¤cy=EUR&destination=FR&a_aid=chasse-aux-livres&a_cid=11111111
- Dazed Digital, Space Afrika: the ambient noise duo putting Manchester on High Alert, by Günseli Yucinkaya, 2023,: https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/60076/1/space-afrika-joshua-inyang-joshua-reid-interview-2023-manchester-music
- Exberliner, Space Afrika on the future, Cosmic Awakening and how to “keep the rawness”, by Damien Cummings, 2022 : https://www.exberliner.com/music-clubs/space-afrika-cosmic-awakening-hkw-honest-labour-rawness-interview/
- Truants, Truancy Volume 162: Space Afrika, by Antoin Lindsay, 2016 : https://truantsblog.com/2016/truancy-volume-162-space-afrika/
- Béal, V., & Rousseau, M. (2014). Interview “The neoliberal trajectory of two British industrial cities, Manchester and Sheffield”. Urbanités journal : https://www.revue-urbanites.fr/la-trajectoire-neoliberale-de-deux-villes-industrielles-britanniques-manchester-et-sheffield-entretien-croise-avec-vincent-beal-et-max-rousseau/