When Space Afrika’s Josh Reidy describes their sound as “borderless”, he means more than the 900-or-so miles separating the city he now calls home, Berlin, from his Manchester birthplace, where his studio partner Josh Inyang lives. Like the pair’s productions, you need to listen carefully to understand exactly where they’re coming from — a futuristic place where spatial atmospheres, heavy low-ends, abstract noises and unique rhythms combine to create entirely new sounds.
Space Afrika’s evolution through the UK’s electronic landscape during the second half of the last decade has been patient. They’ve had select releases on labels like Where To Now?, Sferic and Noorden imprint LL.M., and have played irregular live shows, inviting audiences to escape into their otherworldly soundscapes. Throughout, they’ve occupied a sonic realm entirely of their own: lost in the darkened mist of techno, affected by jungle’s melancholic euphoria; underpinned by the reverberative depth of dub, with layers of ambient floating above. It takes little time to realise they don’t adhere to any easy labels.
“That's beautiful actually, I’m really happy that finally we’re at a point where the tunes aren’t easy to describe,” says Inyang, when we mention difficulty characterising Space Afrika’s work. “For me and Josh, like any artists that strive to continually improve themselves, if your music can be defined, maybe you’re not doing enough with it? Unless that’s what you want. We operate in the experimental underground, right? So to an extent, when you are lifting borders, or when it is impossible to pin-point, that's a good thing.”
Space Afrika’s early output was referred to as dub techno by some critics, but the genre merely provided a jumping- off point for new directions. The likes of Basic Channel, Quantic, Deepchord, Rob Modell, Kassem Mosse and HBL Studios can be heard in certain moments, but rather than emulating those artists, Inyang and Reidy take their lead from the way those producers mapped out uncharted musical territories. It’s an ethos that has expanded to focus on how artists operate and develop identities on their own terms. First and foremost, it’s about ownership.
“We’ve studied how people like ourselves, Black British artists, have been able to become pioneers of a particular sound, or push electronic music forward a certain way,” Reidy says of how Space Afrika has developed into a concept as much as a studio and live outfit. “That was the real learning, rather than being super- engaged in listening to hip-hop, then R&B, then dub. It was more asking: ‘How have these figures moved? What have they put in place? What sort of strategy have they had behind the scenes that has allowed them to be understood better?’”
“You know, paying attention to the basics, watching interviews with Massive Attack and Tricky,” Inyang adds.