About this item

'Demilitarize' follows Nazar’s remarkable 2020 debut 'Guerrilla', which reprocessed Angolan kuduro music with rough textures, field recordings and media clips, telling a personal story of the civil war that exiled his family to Europe, while his father, a rebel General, fought a losing battle in the jungle back home. After 'Guerrilla', and an extended period of serious illness, now 'Demilitarize' is motivated by a reckoning with mortality and the flowering of new love, turning the ‘rough kuduro’ of 'Guerrilla' inside out.This is a deep sound world, genuinely dreamy, the arc of the album describing shedding the armour of trauma and surrendering to this new situation. A constant and unexpected aspect of 'Demilitarize' is Nazar's gentle, submerged vocal. Insistent and mantra-like, it’s like a cross between Elisabeth Frazer, Arthur Russell and Frank Ocean, and the music is fragile and opaque in response. The rhythms of kuduro are still here,but move around his voice like fish around a swimmer, while precise sound design illuminates from different angles. Chords spiral, ripple and shoot through the beats giving tracks the loosest of settings; songs disassemble; vocals float off-centre.

TRACK LISTING

1. Core
2. Anticipate
3. War Game
4. Mantra
5. Unlearn
6. Disarm
7. Open
8. Safe
9. Heal
10. DMZ