Space Afrika are flying the flag for the Black avant-garde

Once one of northern England’s brightest jewels, present day Blackpool is a city lined with chipped paint, neon-clad bars and the cheapest burger in the UK. The seaside town has been battered by years of neglect, but aside from its famous illuminations, there is a rich lineage of music and culture just below the eyeline.

It’s perhaps most evident in the Blackpool Opera House – a music hall that has gone through three iterations on the same site since originally opening in 1889. With its expansive ceilings and historic grandeur, it’s a fitting location for Manchester duo Space Afrika’s showcase of their latest industrial-ambient LP Quiet Storm – as they play opener ​‘Vanity’, Axelle Fanyo’s washed out, operettic soprano vocals fills the room just as several singers have throughout the decades. They are playing at the debut edition of The Black Lights – a festival organised by the team behind legendary underground Manchester venue The White Hotel, where Space Afrika have been regulars since their early days.

Made up of Josua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle Reid, the pair have established themselves as leaders of the UK’s Black avant-garde experimentalist movement with their distinct blend of ambient, experimental, jazz, rap and neo-classical since their 2018 debut LP Somewhere Decent to Live. Playing their new music away from their home city feels apt, with Quiet Storm seeing them expand their sound further than their usual warehouse-sized soundscapes that typically evokes the bricks and mortar of Manchester.

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“It felt more like home than playing in a lot of other places,” Inyang says. The duo had vacationed there when they were younger, and they see ​“beauty within the stuff that looks a little greyer, a little darker”. 

Quiet Storm marks the pair’s fifth full-length studio album, with Inyang and Reid using it as a canvas to explore vocals more than they ever have previously. ​“One of the advancements that we’ve had is a strong vocal presence – myself and Josh perform and use the microphone a lot more now, whether that’s direct messaging or poetry,” Inyang says. ​“But you’ve also got the spectrum of working with someone like Fanyo, and then the balance of Gabriel [Evans], who’s more folk or indie in his delivery.” 

Different voices have allowed them to create deeper, more personal material, while exploring the collective voices of the wider diaspora. It sees collaborations with the Grammy-winning Fanyo and Kiala Ogawa in Paris, London’s Klein and Tony Njoku, and New York’s Deuén. ​“The Black voice, it’s very personal experiences, some of it quite raw and intimate,” he continues. ​“It could be like a rip from someone’s direct poetry or like a super old obscure YouTube sample.”

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As such, Quiet Storm is wider in outlook than ever before, which reflects the dynamic for a record made, in part, apart – Reid is now based in Berlin, Inyang in Manchester, the two rarely occupying the same room even as they built something together. ​“As we go from working with our peers and our friends locally, whether that be Manchester or Berlin, and you’re now working with a soprano in Paris, or a director from Athens or Lebanon, it’s just become very familiar,” Inyang says. ​“There’s actually been a lot of common and shared ground.”

And it’s required collaboration strictly beyond the musical. The pair self-funded the recording process, and they acknowledge the importance of the help they received, as well as provided others. ​“This album follows a good three, four years of us working with other people, not expecting or asking anything back, exchanging knowledge, mentoring in parts, offering people studio spaces, paying for people’s trips to studios or passing on opportunities to them,” he continues.

Growing up in the outskirts of Greater Manchester, the pair used their surroundings as inspirations for their greyed-out sonic palette, with their early albums a reflection of working class, northern life and architecture. Areas people called ​“dangerous” were second nature to them, but they gave the pair space to create and experiment. ​“There were localities, there were homes, there were studios, there were DIY spaces,” Reid remembers. Studios that cost them £30 back then are now being priced out of reach for the next generation of local artists, a shift Reid traces to the same success that put Manchester’s music scene on the map. ​“There’s a buzz, there’s artists in an area, and that starts the process – it invites a level of investment,” he continues.

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Sonically, Quiet Storm is moody and anxious, and makes for an apt soundtrack to a decaying society, marked by gentrification and growing inequality. ​“Our friendship groups have all fled the city centre and moved further out, back home or to Stockport, further afield,” Reid says – the city centre, once the beating heart of the scene they grew up in, is now simply too expensive to stay in. ​“This album is a sort of cathartic break for us to deal with some of those anxieties.”

Those anxieties are perhaps most evident on one of the album’s centrepieces, ​‘If This Is Hell’, plays to a stream of consciousness which Deuén recorded in a single take. It takes place over skittish drums and freeform strings. ​“Despite the fact that I don’t talk much at first impressions I’ve got a lot to say / I hate time I need time I hate the way that looking at a clock and its incessant ticking makes me want to throw up it’s weird it’s strange / You’re stealing the time,” they say rapidly. 

The claustrophobia gives way to the album’s final track ​‘Regards’, which is a six minute exploration of hazed out strings and pads. The relief is a blissed out ending to the album, and captures Space Afrika’s attitude to the world they inhabit, and their roots. Among the urban grit and grey, is much to celebrate. ​“There is a lot of beauty in the places that we come from,” Inyang says. ​“A lot of places are overlooked and forgotten about, but it’s important to remember them and to honour them and to give them space.”

Quiet Storm by Space Afrika is out now.

Jack Dennison-Thompson is a freelance journalist. Follow him on Instagram.

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