NON-PROFIT MUSIC FOR THE PROTESTS: Space Afrika – hybtwibt?

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Manchester dub techno duo Space Afrika were already pushing EDM into a strange, murky corner after the release of their second record, Somewhere Decent to Live. Yet even considering how far Joshua Reid and Joshua Inyang have previously pushed the limits of electronic dance music, the sheer boldness of a project like hybtwibt? is worth the price of admission alone. (That price, self-determined, goes straight to several organizations dedicated to the fight for racial equality). After the tumultuousness of the last few months, and the resurfacing of centuries-old race-based discrimination, the duo return with an phantasmagorical suite of voices and sounds that bends space and time around it.

Recorded and engineered in a flash over four days, hybtwibt? (acronymic for “have you been through what I’ve been through?”) layers memories over memories like a radio transmission from a fractured heart. It’s almost unremittingly somber, the color of thick endless rainclouds. The titular non-rhetorical question frames the proceedings, as does the cover art – a phalanx of formless Black faces pointedly scrubbed of identity and humanity. As if panacean, Space Afrika start from a ethereal, formless, almost pastoral landing point in opener “self” and then flesh out the details, adding tenderness (“judge”), grief (“crave”), poignancy (the cresting nightmare of “oh baby”) and interpersonal connection (“dairyday4”). The humanizing isn’t the point, for to claim that Black people need to be humanized is a self-defeating argument. Contrarily, it’s essentially one long exhale of disappointment at the inherently prejudiced of us who can’t conceive of Black individualism, who instead allow that pigment to overwhelm identity completely. The unending tragedies, the strife and the tears that flood the record, aren’t just collateral; they’re daily routines that started long before the recent riots and won’t end after the moment loses its luster in the popular sphere of attention.

The illustration of a broken soul requires an equally broken environment, and Space Afrika construct hybtwibt? to reflect that brokenness. Samples stop and start, reenter and fade, and clash over each other like pieces of a shattered mirror on a sidewalk. True to the duo’s MO, track delineations feel arbitrary, some merely serving to buttress the labyrinthian nature of the record. On the stretch between “wanna know” and “more than”, for instance, the duo plays with extended silence, drawing out strings and voices to an expected conclusion and then cutting them off entirely like questions without answers, or lives taken too early. Some songs seem to be in dialogue with each other – the two versions of “kitty” leading to “you or me” – while others feel like punctuation on a statement, like the responsive moment of silence on “riot ambi”. Combined, hybtwibt? feels exhilaratingly disorienting and powerfully bitter simultaneously. Even considering the rushed nature of the project, it might be Space Afrika’s best work yet.

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Proceeds from sales of this record go toward these organizations:

Black Lives Matter Global Network 

National Bailout (NBO) 

The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust 

NAACP 

Project NIA 

Black Minds Matter 

The Black Curriculum