- The trio's first full-length together expands the Space Afrika narrative with a brilliant host of UK artists, demonstrating the excellence brewing in the North's experimental scenes.
- There's hardly anything purer than a collaborative album about the beauty of collaboration. On A Grisaille Wedding, Space Afrika and Rainy Miller's first joint album, they aimed to show how effortlessly their sounds marry up—or, rather, how effortlessly Miller thrives in the Space Afrika biosphere. Titled after the grey monochrome style of painting intended to depict two-dimensional figures like sculptures, the album offers a new name for their individual projects's hazy gloom."Space Afrika's work has always contained meaning and message, but it was an early intention of mine to try and perform within their world in a much more literal sense," Miller said. The record, he explained, was an attempt "to put more of a focal point on voice and lyricism for this environment they have created."
Space Afrika—childhood friends Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid—first worked with Rainy Miller shortly after the pair released hybtwibt?, a cathartic mixtape made in the days following the murder of George Floyd. The trio bonded over a shared affinity for cold and funereal soundscapes that sounded native to their hometown Manchester, the world's first industrial city. But even before they worked together it seemed like Space Afrika and Miller were operating in the same world. The former makes music that conjures grief and longing through a meticulous subtlety—sliced ambient, hazy vocals, recordings of confessions so vulnerable and profound they feel invasive to listen to. Miller expresses similar emotions with pronounced angst and fury, channelled through Autotuned Frank Ocean-influenced cries and synths that rush and retreat like waves at high tide.
In concert, the musicians not only comfortably balance each other out, they encourage. Miller brings out the duo's longtime love for grime ("00-down / Murmansk 12," "Sweet (I'm Free)," "HDIF") and narrative (Joshua Inyang's stunning verse in "Maybe it's Time To Lay Down Arms"), while Space Afrika invites Miller to occasionally fade into the background, allowing other characters to riff off his squelchy rhymes. The poems they spin out of the resulting music reflect on finding love, accepting death and pursuing joy when the world closes in.
More than a celebration of just the trio's union, the album reads as a toast to the unique music that has risen from Manchester and the broader UK scene in recent years. Fellow Manchester residents Iceboy Violet and RenzNiro contribute to the album, and looking beyond the city, UK-based artists like Tirzah collaborators Mica Levi and Cobey Sey embrace a distinctly English melancholy. These influences are the tiny hands painting the album's community mural of ambient and futuristic grime; and the elaborate vocals weaved into the Space Afrika narrative add new textures to music that already displayed incredible depth.
Iceboy Violet's metallic shrieks are unintelligible on "Sweet (I'm Free)," deformed into alien punk babble above melodies as dense as guava flesh. By the close of the initially ominous "The Graces at Charleroi," Coby Sey's pillowy vowels form cosy, rounded lines above warm acoustics—guitar plucks, muted horns, feathery strings. When all goes quiet, he sermonises. The repeated phrase "I want you for yourself" falls with the heaviest weight. The most impressive use of these collaborative voices show up on the album's first single,"Maybe it's Time To Lay Down Arms," where Miller's Autotuned cries crinkle and synths twist into wind tunnels. Suddenly, dusty trip-hop percussion fills the track's vacant soundscape and Mica Levi enters with a shadowy verse that unknowing ears could mistake for a Dean Blunt feature. Inyang shows up when the quiet returns, his downtrodden raps seeking light and comfort in a dark place, a brilliant surprise.
The production on A Grisaille Wedding is indulgent, often only revealing vocalists until its dynamic textures have had time to steep and deepen. On "HDIF," crunchy 808s interlock with echoed yelps for a minute before a chipmunk vocal squeaks. Not long after, Bobbie Orkid finally shouts, "I want to set you free," to which Miller later responds in a singsong whine, "Baby could I stay?" Nearly two minutes pass on "Summon The Spirit/Demo," before Voice Actor's Noa Kurzweil emerges with deadpan pronunciations of phrases like "eye con-tact," delivered with the clickiness of an ASMR artist and the delayed, drowsy cadence of someone possessed by a spirit.
"1-2-1" is trad Space Afrika, opening with slow-moving guitar and piano speckles that lead to an unknown speaker's breathless ramble about the ephemerality of relationships. The subject matter anchors the seraphic pads on the following "Let It Die," where Miller's vocals rise to a falsetto. Thinning the usual murk of his vocals, he arrives anew with words soft and sweet: "So if it hurts, then let it die."
A Grisaille Wedding is a suite of delights, each room eerily familiar, while cloaking the many UK artists involved and their greatest strengths in new light. All of this, of course, was intentional. Expounding further on the meaning of the album, Space Afrika explained: "The record's title figuratively describes the marriage of two similarly motivated perspectives, each affected by a common backdrop and familiar ground tread amongst the scrimmage of urban sprawl, sombre, a boisterous landscape and clouds of uncertainty. Yet this time," he added, "the grey, also represents a sense of maturity and a reconciliation in our method of response."