Love and illness are reminders of a difficult truth. We’re at the mercy of forces both beyond us and intimately of us. They can level the ground and strip away the facade – we may not in fact be the great architects of our destiny.
But how to communicate the totality of such forces? Perhaps the best we can hope for is to be able to describe in the abstract, to make out the shadows of an outline. After all, when faced with the unknowable, even the most precise language can feel lacking.
In the years that followed his debut Guerrilla, Angolan-Belgian artist Nazar had to contend with both love and a life threatening illness simultaneously. Hit by Covid with an already weakened immune system, the latent tuberculosis he’d incubated while in Angola spread throughout his body and left him incapacitated.
Demilitarize captures this new not-at-all-normal, a time of uncertainty, of transformation. Nazar renders destabilisation in the clearest way he can. You need only listen to the single ‘Anticipate’ to pick up on a sense of amorphous flux.
It’s admittedly a bit of a lazy reference to place on a Hyperdub artist, but Nazar’s evolution from Guerilla to Demilitarize is not unlike the evolution Burial made going from his self-titled debut to the classic Untrue. It’s analogous, at the very least. Both artists drape their follow-ups with diaphanous choirs. They’re as much refracted R&B records as they are submerged dance ones.
2020’s Guerrilla was something altogether different, a work of ‘rough kuduro’, his own stark spin on the dance genre that originated in Angola. Through his distinct sound and the use of field recordings and narration, he unpacked the legacy of the country’s twenty-seven-year civil war. His father, Alcides Sakala Simões, was a guerrilla general for UNITA and later a member of the National Assembly of Angola. Speaking with tQ at the time of its release, Nazar had this to say about his intentions with the project: “I’m a narrator. I’m not trying to glorify what happened, just represent it.”
Where that record dealt in the reality of conflict, Nazar is now inward-bound, allowing himself plenty of room to dream. In a statement on this new record, he explains how “With the album being introspective, I didn’t seek to capture sounds from real places to enhance its universe like on Guerilla. I wanted to make it almost metaphysical, like creating sci-fi.”
Tracks have titles like ‘Unlearn’ and ‘Disarm’. An unravelling of what’s known. You can read the music here as a sort of experiment. How can immaculate sound design be used to tackle opaque feeling? But Nazar is not content to rely on tried and tested forms of lo-fi obfuscation. Instead we get murk in high def. Everything on the album is audible but nothing is settled. He has a skilled compositional hand and an ability to shape the shapeless.
On ‘Safe’ he’s is nestled amid criss-crossing streams of signal. His voice is subtly augmented, autotune used to create a taut warble, carrying just a tremor of electrical charge. The ‘rough kuduro’ sound of his debut has been liquified. Choreographed cocked guns are out. Now on a track like ‘War Games’, we have the sloshed clink ‘n’ clank of underwater machinery.
The brain-hacking anime Ghost In The Shell has been cited as a touchstone of the record. You can see how its themes of identity and psychic autonomy (or lack thereof) are an understandable source of inspiration. Who are you when stripped of what you thought defined you? How much are you really in control? On Demilitarize, it turns out self-dissolution can occur without the need of cybernetics. Love and mortality are shown to be more than capable causes of rupture. Nevertheless, hacking is an apt analogy to riff on.
It’s not all bound up in the distress of dislocation. Like Björk on Vespertine, Nazar gives us glimpses of private union, sites of bizarre sanctuary. The aforementioned ‘Disarm’ has synths that swell and froth, globular vocals that bring to mind Arthur Russell and his own oceanic masterpiece World of Echo. It’s a strange track, but it has the feel of a squirming caress, two lovers adrift at sea. But this should come as no surprise. To pay love its proper due, sometimes you need to turn to the weird. A template of this idea is Robert Wyatt’s ‘Sea Song’, with its opening passage that captures the queasy bliss of intimacy with poetic clarity:
Intimacy here is slippery, hyper sensual, with notions of control and surrender muddied. Nazar sonically taps into this space. A song like ‘Mantra’, beautiful but wheezy, shows us how love can make you feel both safe and seasick.
By the time of ‘DMZ’ we’ve learned to embrace it. The closer is the best thing on here, a sustained swoon of a track that leaves the most indelible mark. Synths and vocals seem to communicate in mutually understood glossolalia, orbited by guitars you could imagine on Brian Eno’s Apollo. It’s a remarkable piece of music, no easier to clasp than anything else on the record, but you’re content to let it slip between your fingers.
Sounds burst then cut out. The kuduro rhythms can barely wade through.
No matter.
We relinquish. Let the currents decide.
