GAIKA - Spaghetto

They say gospel comes straight from the guts of the soul, and that in its purest, most dispassionate form it can connect us to the Divine spirit. But it's equally true that centuries of human interference have built around it an environment ruled by a narrow-minded, needlessly dogmatic vision.

Dancehall was born as a union of bodies, souls and social purpose in the dance halls of 1940s Jamaica, but over the decades its constant mutation has taken a more street-level turn, dominated by a testosterone-fuelled aggression. At best, we find it in charts around the world thanks to the pleasant but rather watered-down and bastardized version served up by people outside the culture, starting with Canadian Drake.

In his own way, Gaika Tavares, an Art student from Brixton, south London, reclaims the languages mentioned above, which belonged to his ancestors, catapulting them into a future where socio-cultural awareness and raw, skin-deep emotion blend with a twisted, conceptual aesthetic. Gospel has been diluted into a series of feminine choirs with caricature-like traits, in an almost Disney-esque sense of the term ("Neophyte"); the sweat of dancehall has become clotted blood and industrial grime stuck to the skin, like Grace Jones in the days of "Hurricane". These are strong images, just as strong as the words Gaika delivers, carrying himself like a solitary figure recording his own laments through the echo of a marble crypt. But the vision of his ruthlessly gentrified London, and his openly admitted search for an image that lets him escape the hyper-masculinity so often associated with the genre, are the foundations of a high-tension "Spaghetto".

After all, his presence is unsettling from the very first encounter; his voice is cavernous and rough, yet it trembles under the weight of the words, as if having to steel itself to hold up those frail melodies drowned in the most disjointed, crashing rhythms. And even that permanently scowling face, glimpsed in the photos taken of him almost against his will, looks ready to throw a punch at the slightest provocation, and yet, from his gaze and tensed muscles, there emanates a sinister energy that turns fear into empathetic pain.

"Spaghetto" is a succession of hybrid, amorphous electronic sounds that never fail to make an impact; synthetic screeches recalling both Arca and the meta-disco of Amnesia Scanner ("Roadside"), narcoleptic trap leanings ("VSOP"), danceable bass visions ("3D"), Jamie XX-style deconstructed scraps ("Little Bits"), or even unexpected melodic openings (the chorus sung by Alyusha on "The Deal"), everything flowing viscous and crumpled through a constant shift of nocturnal landscapes.

It's no surprise to find Warp behind this project, a label that has always paid close attention to the mutations of electronic language. But Gaika himself has worked with real care this time around; even within its industrial clangour, there's a certain looseness compared to "Security", the other, even more unbearably dark Ep released via Mixpak a few months earlier, or the debut mixtape "Machine", which featured the track that first brought Gaika to people's attention: "Blasphemer".

"Spaghetto", by contrast, is driven by a melodicism that, however clumsy, makes for a more digestible listen, while the numerous female voices that appear like fallen angels create an atypically genderless vision – quite something, given the genres in question. But the future hinges on these very themes too, and it's a good thing that figures like Gaika, or his friend and fellow Londoner Dean Blunt (who recently met up for a conversation with Crack Magazine), keep pushing back against the social and racial perceptions that still weigh like boulders on their bodies.

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01/02/2017