About Space Afrika
With their slow-stepping, spacious urban dubscapes, Space Afrika harness the sounds of ambient, trip-hop, Detroit techno, modern classical, and shades of early nineties Sheffield, creating a a fresh and open approach to composition. The duo are producers, visual artists, performers, and hosts on NTS Radio. Heavily inspired by the industrial architecture of Northwest England and notions of travel, their sonic framework evokes images of rust and disintegrating concrete, and sensations of movement and redemption — exuding a distorted analogue soul offering escape into their overcast skies.
Space Afrika's debut album, 2018's Somewhere Decent To Live feels intimate, alternating between the sparse and spacious, with electronic abstraction, and was partly inspired by the duo's observations of industrial landscapes and experiences of life in the North of England. 2020's mixtape hybtwibt? (Have You Been Through What I’ve Been Through?) "captur(ed) the energy vibrating through the world at this particular moment in history" (Pitchfork).
In 2021, the duo signed to Dais Records, and announced their second album Honest Labour with their washed out visual for the hard-edged ambient hip hop of "B£E" (featuring Manchester's Blackhaine). "Ultimately, this album is an homage to UK energy, an album about love and loss." They also collaborated with photographer, filmmaker, and poet Tibyan Mahawah Sanoh on the short film, Untitled (To Describe You), which they described as, "a living, breathing study of the duo's Northern working-class Black British reality."
Honest Labour received universal acclaim; Resident Advisor named it Album of the Year, saying "Listening to Honest Labour feels like street lights burning onto tired retinas and long nights of feeling small in a big city... replete with field recordings of urban white noise, balanced by resonant cellos, hazy guitars and spectral guest performances with fragments of profound conversations—as if overheard from the night before—resulting in the audio equivalent of subconscious dreamscape" ( -Emeka Okonkwo). Bandcamp named the album Best Ambient Album of 2021, with additional "Best Of" accolades coming from The Guardian, Crack Magazine, The Quietus, and Loud & Quiet (among others).
In 2022, Space Afrika were nominated by DJ Mag as "Best Live Act", and named "one of The 15 Top Live Acts" by Mixmag. They received radio play from Thom Yorke, as well as BBC Radio 1, Radio 3 and Radio 6, and soundtracked Nike Tokyo's "We Are Born Ready Campaign." In 2023, they scored Dior's Haute Couture Spring Summer 2023, signed to Warp Publishing, and collaborated with Rainy Miller on the album A Grisaille Wedding, featuring Mica Levi, Coby Sey and Voice Actor.
Releases
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08.2021
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03.2022