Rainy Miller x Space Afrika – “A Grisaille Wedding” (Review) – ByteFM

Rainy Miller x Space Afrika – “A Grisaille Wedding” (fixed house)

8.7

Manchester: Experimental electronic artist Rainy Miller has collaborated with experimental electronic duo Space Afrika. Overall, this results in a lot of experimental and electronic music. But it never became more of the same. The music for “A Grisaille Wedding” is best approached through individual pieces and assemblies, because it is not easy to understand what kind of music it consists of and what it is made of. The album title alone could trigger a mild torrent of ideas. To paraphrase the artists: “A Grisaille Wedding” describes the relationship between two similar viewpoints built on a common foundation of experience.

Ghosts of my life

Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid aka Space Afrika have filled their tracks with all sorts of nonsense about “honest work” as of 2021. Field recordings, audio snippets, glitches. Based on John Cage, Space Afrika and Rainy Miller also work on the sound field in “A Grisaille Wedding” that gives noise an equal presence alongside and in music: noise and music. Noise in music. Music in the noise. Even when the music appears in its usual form, for example as a simple piano melody, it appears as if behind a veil, as a ghostly apparition. It’s foggy and ghostly in the former industrial city of England. At least on the first half of the album “A Grisaille Wedding”, Space Afrika toned down this extreme sound a bit and Rainy Miller confirmed with his voice and lyrics that “A Grisaille Wedding” moved towards a classic song structure.

However: Space Afrika is still collectors, diggers and archaeologists. They reveal layer upon layer of sonic material and layer of new sonic material: ambient, urban, trip-hop and industrial soundscapes. Memories of dark folk pop up every now and then, and yes, at least a resemblance to post-rock a la Godspeed You! The Black Emperor is also recognizable – without its kitsch style. Genre definitions do not matter to artists; They work according to moods.

Scary dream world

In England, a musical aesthetic examination of increasingly precarious social conditions was established – and this ranged from Stormzy to Burial. For the latter, cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who died in 2017, had the conceptual complex of mania ready: Fisher saw a post-imperial England populated by ghosts and demons from the past and from a lost future. It seems as if a young generation of musical creators have set out to create and develop musical forms according to this term: among them LA Timpa, Slauson Malone1, Dean Blunt, Mica Levi and Coby Sey. Levi and Sey can also be heard in “A Grisaille Wedding”, as can the Belgian voice actor. Perhaps the strangest of the ‘Friends by Interest’ are Space Afrika and Rainy Miller, whose debut album ‘Travel By Telephone’ (2023) is a compiled collection of an astonishing 109 tracks. The voice actors convert some of the oblique ambient loops in the first half of the opening “Summoning the Spirit – The Devil” into spoken word, before Rainie Miller explains why it’s actually called “Lancashire’s answer to Frank Ocean”. Then, Mica Levi has finally made no secret of talent and unmistakably diverse trademarks (here: sparse bass, guitar lines and/or electronics) in the increasingly inaccessible music of recent solo albums ‘Ruff Dog’ and ‘Blue Alibi’. “Maybe it’s time to put down the guns,” Levi lays a carpet of stuttering vocals beneath Rainie Miller’s weeping embrace of his despair: “I can’t fight these demons.” Miller places himself at the top of the vocal range, although by his own admission he’s not a good singer. Not at all, but he somehow got into this, “singing thing” with auto-tune.

On “Sweet (I’m Free)” RenzNiro and Iceboy Violet lay down a thick hip-hop track in Hi-Def, and Space Afrika put small counterpoints of alienation to it, but otherwise they seem like reserved curators of raucous chaos.

Ultimately, “A Grisaille Wedding” loses its power. Not in terms of quality, the album is gradually deteriorating. Coby C visits a cemetery in Charleroi in “The Graves At Charleroi”, a fast, enchanted ballad. A Belgian industrial city whose abandoned factories have turned the place into a hipster cult site as sad as Detroit. You let yourself ride out the raucous crescendo of “Let It Die” before guest singer Bobbieorkid laments on the final track: “I know I let you down.” But she also sings: “I want to set you free. And he sets us free.” From the eerie dream world of Rainy Miller and Space Afrika.

Published: November 16, 2023
Tag: fixed dwelling