Like Nazar himself in the lyrics, Demilitarize appears inaccessible at first, using its abstraction and deconstruction as a shield. But a strong light still shines through this shell and sinks in a bit at a time, first with circumspection, then with warmth, until opening itself to repeated listens and blooming in all its beauty and intention.
Limelight-piercing-through-the-darkness
Over five years ago, Nazar’s debut album Guerrilla overlayed war, nature, and humanity: on its opener “Retaliation,” an iconic, limelight-piercing-through-the-darkness synth is sounded like a siren on top of dense rain and bird recordings, and set against a childlike choir a minute later. Throughout the album, disembodied vocal and gunshot samples, kuduro and post-industrial rhythms, field recordings and clubby, deconstructed production synergized to speak of the collective experience of the Angolan Civil War, mixing the political perspective with that of family history, and with the personal lens of second-generation memory and trauma.
Following up Guerrilla was never going to be an easy task, either from the conceptual point of view or the musical one, but Nazar seemed to know the turn he would take next back then already: “The next album is going to be just as introspective, but it’s going to be less about the past, maybe more about the future and about my own life.” (Borshch Magazine). And Demilitarize, out on Hyperdub on April 25th, does just that, reckoning with a fully personal inner landscape and with the will to dismantle the past to heal.
Translucent opacity ::
Something that strikes the listener from the start is the translucent opacity of the album. Melodic synths swell and recede fast, interlocking with beats deconstructed to their limit, shaping into freeform tracks with flowy structures. The sound design further differentiates the tracks in Demilitarize from the musical landscape, with recognizable but understated subs and kicks underlying a flurry of echoes, reverbs and modulations making one question where a sound might come from. “Mantra” is a great example of this, with most of the instrumental elements approximating vocals, and the human voice approximating the instruments: the gated synths could well be distorted choirs, and chops of “yo,” “yeah,” and assorted unintelligible syllables add to the rhythmic component, punctuating the end of some of the main melodic phrases.
Nazar’s own vocals are also pervasive in a way that they were not in his previous music, but they do not tower over the mix. They are an element of the ensemble rather than the focus, with lyrics in English and Portuguese that are often hard to parse, pitch shifting and timbre manipulation adding to their diversity. The singing gives depth to the content and sound of the tracks; it’s an original and humble use of the voice that really furthers the complexity and emotionality of the album as a whole rather than offering an easy interpretive key.
And most of all, for all of its syncopation and dissonance and at a huge distance from Guerrilla, Demilitarize is soft, lush, and kind-sounding. The trauma so central to the documentation of Guerrilla is now addressed as some sort of military superstructure, something to tear down and shed before moving forward, as shown by the tracklist already—a narrative moving from the self-defensive stance of “Anticipate” and “War Game,” to the active process of recovery and renovation in “Unlearn” and “Disarm,” to the final goals to be “Safe” and “Heal” in one’s own “DMZ”. “É para o meu bem, desaprender” (unlearning is for my own good) Nazar sings in Portuguese, his words finding their way out of an arrangement as overgrown as a rainforest, and “Demilitarise: it’s a form of self protest.” Through the highs and lows, determination is vital in this personal politics of vulnerability—private, but radical: “Já tirei meu colete anti-bala” (I’ve already taken off my bulletproof vest), “I embrace the fear in me and I live in peace.”
Like Nazar himself in the lyrics, the album appears inaccessible at first, using its abstraction and deconstruction as a shield. But a strong light still shines through this shell and sinks in a bit at a time, first with circumspection, then with warmth, until opening itself to repeated listens and blooming in all its beauty and intention.
Demilitarize is available on Hyperdub. [Bandcamp]
