Experimental

Ethiopiyawi Electronic defies the colonialist idea that the cultural (and monetary) value of African art increases only when Westerners pay attention to it. “I worry about appropriation and gentrification because the West.. [has had] a very abusive relationship with my continent,” Mulu says. “I also worry about this attention we are getting [from the West], like African people worry about their raw materials and lands. I think the only way for Africans to be safe here is for people from my continent to take ownership of their cultural evolution.

Mulu has become involved in a pan-African music platform, Crudo Volta. Run by Rome-based collective Python Syndicate, which has released documentaries on African electronic genres like gqom (in Durban) and afrobass (in Accra), they recently unveiled a new miniseries, Taxi Waves, which showcases a new wave of artists from Lagos, Maputo, and Addis Ababa.

A year on from his debut album, and a year after moving from Australia to London, the latest Air Max ‘97 project has landed, the four-track ‘Falling Not Walking’ EP. The release features two collaborations with artists also impressing with their own distinctive shades of club music — Italian producer TSVI on ‘Paroxysm’, and Manchester’s LOFT on ‘Xhrinicibles’.

With upcoming shows in London, New York, Glasgow and Madrid, Air Max ‘97 also recently played a show in Hangzhou, China, in a venue called Loopy, behind the food court on the third floor of a mall. “It’s a concrete cube with a huge Funktion-One soundsystem,” he says. “I was so gassed to finally go there, the crowd was amazing, creative, young and free.” Travelling the world is an “indescribable privilege” for van der Lugt, who will never miss an opportunity to meet local people, eat in their favourite restaurants, and explore local scenes.

Sonically and stylistically too, Fofana explains, each place he has lived has informed the music he has loved and been influenced by and, subsequently, the art he has crafted himself, or released through his label, Sci Fi & Fantasy – on which Lotic released their phenomenal  ‘Sankofa / Glittering’ in 2013.

“Both projects are reflections of me coming across new knowledge,” he says. “New bodies of thought compelling me to rethink things. Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers produced works in the second half the 20th century and in 21st reflecting on the paradoxical conundrum of the black person in the Western world. Black Metamorphosis in particular is me attempting to transmute my interpretation of some of these ideas, which I find deeply inspiring and illuminating of my own experience.”

The emotional blend of many elements is something Plaid have refined over almost 30 years of recording together as a duo. They’ve moulded a characterful sound from meandering off-world melodies that bound off at unexpected tangents, and beats that skirt the edges of dance music but refuse to conform to stiff regulation. ‘Polymer’ finds Plaid in especially tuneful form, while maintaining the exploratory impulse that has made them one of the UK’s most celebrated leftfield electronic acts.

“The branch of techno we loved initially was the hopeful Detroit version, the Carl Craig, Derrick May, Juan Atkins stuff,” Ed Handley says. “A lot of their earlier output was very positive, it was sort of melancholic, but it was trying to find a better way. It was a response to alienation, trying to create something warm from the technology. I’ve always liked the meeting of the two, where you have this machine quantisation, but then you have these almost romantic harmonies.

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