Nazar brings the harrowing sounds of war to a dark dance floor with “Bunker” (ft. Shannen SP)
Beneath Nazar’s rich productions lie heartache for a home he cannot know. Born in Angola but now based in Manchester, the 26-year-old electronic artist and rapper brings the brooding realities of war to the dark trenches of the dancefloor. It’s from this childhood that he develops an incredibly singular voice on the developing dark club-rap scene, with a genre he calls “Rough Kuduro”: a chopped up version of the Angolan style of music emerging from the civil war, characterised by danceable uptempo akin to UK funky. With “Bunker”, his first release on forward-thinking electronic label Hyperdub, he distorts the typically energetic quality of Kuduro with a slowed down beat layered above ambient droning synths.
Nazar displays true talent for building narratives. A synth-heavy soundscape features in “Bunker” that draws out the horrors of war. Glitchy snares cut through disharmonic synths with crisp, cinematic field recordings of helicopter rotors spinning and the sounds of urgent commands over a radio. Hyperdub affiliate Shannen SP’s appearance provides a compelling juxtapose, setting up a club scene with sultry feminine vocals over downtempo beats — seductively conflating violence with the imagery of war. Both their voices meld together in minimalist, repetitive lyrics that cleverly meld a dark dancefloor with harsh war scenes. Uttered repeatedly, “Guns in my head/trigger fingers in the sky” harks to an anthemic refrain on an euphoric dance track. Yet it’s a palpably numb monotony filtered through vocoders with bass-heavy drum machines that vibrate menacingly through a dancefloor.
War is absolutely a drug, and the realities of warfield horrors surface even as one tries to escape through the release of the dancefloor, imagined as the titular bunker. Is dance resistance to war, or a reminder that we must fight to achieve rave utopia? “Bunker” marks a return to dance-focused tracks from Nazar’s more ambient offerings of the last year, that pits him as a talent that serves a nuanced narrative blurring lines of morality with minimalist beats and lyrics that cut to the chase.
