Rainy Miller x Space Afrika - A Grisaille Wedding
Space Afrika’s album Honest Labour was a surprise favourite of 2021 for me. Combining hip-hop, electronica and orchestral elements, the album’s beautiful title track is still something I listen to regularly. Whilst I felt the album might have been too long, the other knock against it was the really varied mix of styles. I think it might have been even better if there were less tracks and it would have been a much more cohesive listen. So now, Space Afrika are back with a collaboration album called A Grisaille Wedding, with producer/vocalist Rainy Miller, and it has that same mix of underground UK styles, ambient and sound collage as before. Only this time it’s even more scattershot, to mixed results.
The pitfalls of all collaborative albums are all there; there’s a true mix of vocal and production styles. You can have a track like the “Sweet (I'm Free)” with it’s distorted electronica trap beats and grime vocals from RenzNiro and Iceboy Violet. Then the next track “Shelter” is has this soft and dreamy quality to it. It’s a bit of a juxtaposition, but that fits in with the opening half of the album, that flits between downtempo R&B, auto-tuned vocals and sudden start and stop rhythms. I’m not a fan of the spoken word sections on songs like “1-2-1” and “I Believe in God, When Things Are Going My Way” and I know I would have preferred them as just straight instrumentals.
But there are some wonderful songs in the latter half; “The Graves at Charleroi” has a tender vocal from Mica Levi collaborator Coby Sey, and two separate musical styles. In the first part, haunting strings and distant vocals build a gorgeous backing track; then in the second, a simple stummed acoustic guitar is all the track needs. “Let It Die” has super over produced auto tuned vocals, which is normally a big turn off for me, but towards the end they really suit the droning atmosphere. A Grisaille Wedding only reveals it’s connecting threads after repeat listens; the sudden stop/starts within songs, the distorted ambience and the swooning vocals… eventually it does all make sense. And the highpoints greatly outweigh any thematic shakiness.
Also Check Out
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson - Les Jardin Mystiques Vol.1
This is a massive collection of over 50 instrumental tracks composed by Atwood-Ferguson, a frequent collaborator within the LA beat scene and the crossover jazz hip-hop artists, like Flying Lotus and Thundercat. An arranger and multi-instrumentalist, his compositions avoid the stodgy jazz fusion pitfalls, by having a grand scope to them. Definitely an album to put on and drift away with.
Other Stuff
Both series of bonkers parody series Danger 5 are just on one big You Tube video. It’s great fun, the second series does drop off once it loses the WW2 setting:
Something really big crashed into Jupiter last month. Pretty sure this is the setup to the 2001 sequel 2010 with Helen Mirren, right?
"There was another impact on Jupiter last night!" noted planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel, who works with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, wrote in a Nov 16 quote tweet — if we can still call it that — of the original video. "The bright flash is a bolide — a shooting star in the atmosphere of Jupiter."