Space Afrika - Quiet Storm

World-building has always been central to Space Afrika’s sound. Since 2014’s ‘Above the Concrete/Below the Concrete’, Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang have honed their style of synesthetic ambient, using found sounds and spacious production to make sense of their environment. On 2021’s ‘Honest Labour’, they turned the isolation and uncertainty of lockdown into a meditation on love, loss and self-reflection. On NTS special-turned-mixtape ‘hybtwibt?’ they zoomed out, using field recordings and fractured electronics to respond to the wider reality of 2020: protests, police violence and the Black experience in Britain.

On ‘Quiet Storm’, they turn that world-building inwards, using collaboration as a way to explore class, diaspora and identity. Reid and Inyang build the terrain, heavy bass, warped synths, strings, static, weather and the hum of the city, then let their collaborators loose inside it. The album pulls together artists from ambient, rap, jazz, classic and electronic. Opener, ‘Vanity’ hears Grammy-winning opera singer Axelle Fanyo drive her soprano from quiet trill to seat-pinning drama. On ‘Ballad For A ‘G’’, rapper RXKNephew’s woozy, deadpan delivery drifts through Klein’s caustic production, while ‘If This Is Hell’ lets Brooklyn experimentalist Deuén spiral, stream-of-consciousness, over equally jittery percussion before cutting mid-thought.

During their 2022 Cafe OTO residency, the pair performed sprawled across a futon, twiddling casually with their equipment, unleashing huge sound from an otherwise simple, domestic set-up. ‘Quiet Storm’ works from the same principle, building something vast from the sounds and experiences of the every day. The cello, rain and industrial churn of ‘Crying never had a voice ~’ seek a moment of solitude in a busy cityscape, while the crowds of ‘Black and Gold’ bleed into ‘H00D Ambient’, shifting from the cheer of what sounds like a school pep rally into a thick, harmonic haze. ‘MLN’ is one of the record’s densest moments, with a tense rhythm and beefed up basslines, cut through by Tony Njoku’s clarified vocals.

For all its looseness, ‘Quiet Storm’ is meticulously constructed. The music can feel sprawling and barely tethered and yet every tone or texture feels intentional, with each new character providing a different perspective on place, genre or identity. For all those different voices, though, the record remains tightly controlled, every detail held in situ within Space Afrika’s particular world.