Nazar’s Demilitarize, out this month on Hyperdub, is essential listening from the Amsterdam-based Angolan artist – reimagined kuduro DNA woven into a sound world inspired by processing trauma and absorbing the ethos of anime classic Ghost in the Shell. It follows two releases that responded to the civil war with an imaginative, intimate coda.
I caught this via Loraine James, whom I interviewed this month, and this has the same sense of liberated experimentation. It speaks to you; it’s personal.
The 2020 Nazar full-length debut, Guerilla, told the story of Angola’s civil war, remaking kuduro music with field recordings and media clips, the war that brought Nazar’s family to Europe. (Nazar was born in Belgium and now is based in the Netherlands.) The EP before, Enclave, took on the same subject matter, and introducing a “rough kuduro” to embody anger an frustration, to respond to massacres and violence. That’s something I know will be relatable to many, many friends.
But if family legacy and roots were the narrative of Guerilla, Demilitarize is more directly autobiographical and in the moment. From the liner notes:
After Guerrilla, and in the early throes of a new and important romance, Nazar was hit by Covid and with a weakened immune system, the latent tuberculosis he’d incubated while living in Angola, took over his body and left him seriously ill for a year. Reckoning with mortality and the flowering of new love are the two things that motivated this album, turning the ‘rough kuduro’ of Guerrilla inside out.
It’s beautiful how the kuduro rhythm becomes a new dialect here; it’s there throughout without being directly quoted. It’s been resynthesized into something new. It’s interesting to me that the notes describe these as fragile. I’d say “vulnerable” and maybe “gentle,” – but in those lush sounds, you feel fully immersed. It all has the momentum of a poem – not just because of the vocals throughout, but in the easy falling musical lines. They may be organic and free of a grid or rigid pattern, but there’s constant momentum. The music has all the forward motion that you miss in chronic illness; it’s like experiencing that motion again in all the livid color of a dream.
I’d say more but I have that special excitement with music where I’m so overwhelmed that – I kind of don’t want to. (Yeah, music critic, that’ll be a great career for me!)
And go listen to the earlier stuff, too. The title of Demilitarize is obviously not accidental. It’s a conclusion to the trilogy; a healing chapter to follow the horrors that form the basis of the first two releases.