The black experience is one of the most peculiar cases of such reservoirs of experience spanning many generations. From the pioneering texts of W. E. B. Dubois, CLR James or Frantz Fanon, its protagonists have sought to reflect the particularities of a history marked by the horror of the black Atlantic —through whose waters the ships carried their sinister cargo, as Herman Melville might have said— and its inherent diaspora. Forced into the abstract space-time of capital and deprived of their particular histories, black theorists and artists have tried to recover and preserve the ideal contents of consciousness, either by reconstructing the ruptures of collective memory or by constructing a radically imaginative future, offering an enormous number of theoretical proposals and poetic-aesthetic expressions that constitute one of the most original corpus, fundamental for understanding much of the history of art in the last century.

Award-winning NikNak’s work is inscribed in the long chain of that tradition, specifically in the link of Afrofuturism, a portal that “liberates futurism from the master narratives of white modernity” and denies any model of linear history, proposing instead a technologised time: “plastic, stretchable and prophetic.”

NikNak borrows her primary compositional techniques from two main sources. First, the approach to the recording and production of dub as an alien parasite through which ghosting, ventriloquies, lapses and disjunctions are produced. Second, turntablism, initially the black translation of the techniques of musique concrète to the turntable and mixer; but NikNak’s use of this art is close to the experimental approach of artists such as Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck or DJ Sniff, an angle that led her to appear in the issue dedicated to women turntablists of The Wire magazine (#470), and which demonstrates the inescapable hybridism and the mixture of ideas present in the historical processes.

NikNak’s dense soundscapes, built from field recordings, are a potent allegory for queer visions of Afrofuturism: devoid of blind historicism or essentialist nationalism, they envision a hopeful open future. Indeed, much of their strength lies in the way NikNak obliterates or blurs the catachresis of the concept of musical texture to endow it with its metaphorical force, so that their soundscapes are like histories seen from within or without, individually or in relation to each other, that is to say, a motley skein of threads moving at different speeds, a relentless process of fractures, stops, inversions, repetitions, duplications, statements, anticipations, synchronizations, wraiths, or —sonically— crackles, scratches, delays, juggling, echoes, loops, spins, hisses, fizzes, voices, noises, beatmatching and sillon fermé effects. One could say that NikNak makes the kind of dub-from-scratch-from-(field)recordings that would have fitted so well in Mark Fisher‘s The Metaphysics of Crackle.

After the explorations of black women’s spirituality in Sankofa and the sub(bass)aquatic soundscapes, full of vestiges and relics that evaporate into the sky, of Chasing Solitude or Night EP, NikNak presents Ireti on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records. Dressed as a nerd/geek (one of the types described by Ytasha L. Womack in her book on Afrofuturism) comic book addict, NikNak offers a narrative-driven album inspired by iconic films and video games like Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077 in which she openly introduces for the first time elements of jazz, jungle or trip hop.