Gaika has spent the day in Brixton’s Brockwell Park to try to find some space to breathe and ease a pollen-induced tightness in his chest. It hasn’t worked, and when we meet in a nearby pub it becomes clear that this sensation may have been triggered by something other than pollen.
Born to Jamaican and Grenadian parents, Gaika Tavares grew up in the area. He is in a sombre mood today, the second anniversary of his father’s death. “I did the particular walk to the park that I used to do with my dad,” he says. For the past two years, he has been absorbed in making an album in homage to his father. Even its title, Basic Volume, is a reference to the place he worked as a material scientist. Gaika is wearing a brilliant-white lab coat (“I thought it was apt”) over an orange T-shirt and jeans; his hands are adorned with gold rings and tattoos.
The album tells the story of his dad’s experiences as an immigrant in the UK. “He worked his entire life and the stress of it, of being a good immigrant, eventually ... killed him.” One track, 7 Songs, includes guttural wails and prayers taken from a phone recording made at his father’s graveside.
Critics have struggled to define Gaika’s sound, clumsily labelling it everything from “ghetto-futurism” to “afro-techno”. “I’m not really part of grime music, I’m not part of UK urban 1Xtra vibes, I’m definitely not ‘black indie,’” he laughs. “I’m kind of the naughty boy of afropunk.” Instead, he says, he makes “club music, black music with all the sex left in it and all the bullshit maths taken out” – as a reaction to the neutered dance music in the charts. He recalls a recent visit to an EDM club in LA, “the weirdest experience I’ve ever had,” he says between sips of beer. “It was massive, too bright and everyone was just really drunk. It’s not music you can dance to, it’s just there for the spectacle alone. It’s the most sexless thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Gaika’s aim, conversely, is to make “anti-commercial music – but that doesn’t mean it has to be difficult to listen to.” Still, there is a combative element. “I think some of my music is like battle music from a big, epic end scene from Lord of the Rings, like black Hans Zimmer – Black Zimmer! Or it’s a futuristic club space that’s imagined in my mind – what I feel the entertainment of tomorrow would be like.”
Contemplating the future is central to Gaika’s work – a way of imagining a time when Britain’s immigrants are liberated from the enduring restrictions of empire. At the end of 2017, he released music and writing from his dystopian, audiovisual project The Spectacular Empire, which looks ahead to a 2062 in which motorcycle gangs run riot before returning en masse to Africa.
For Gaika, there is little difference between the personal and political. “Black Power from the 70s was in some ways ineffective, because we didn’t advance as quickly as other communities, but it was also necessary for survival.” A theme of Basic Volume, he says, is statelessness, an idea that sums up his experience as a black man in the UK. This summer he had an exhibition about the history of the Notting Hill Carnival at Somerset House “but on the street I’m still just a black guy monitored by the state, who can get stopped by police at any moment”. Gaika’s parents arrived in London in the 1960s as part of the Windrush generation. He rubs his temples when I mention the recent scandal and tells me he doesn’t want to go into it. “I don’t feel an affiliation with the state because it means to kill us – it exists to disempower us,” he says. “The trauma of Windrush alone is an example of that.”
The album also reflects his life as a musical outsider. At home his dad played Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and Thelonious Monk; outside the house, Gaika moved among Nirvana-loving skaters, garage girls, and Jamaican dancehall. “It’s about range,” he says. “I wanted to make a gangsta rap record, but I’m also emotional and open, and I’ve got metal pins in my face from fighting … that’s just the dichotomy of my life.” Much of Basic Volume, he says, is about the pressure on immigrants generally. “‘Make money, be someone’ – then, without even realising, you forget about love. That it’s OK to love people and there’s some things that transcend achievement. I wanted to tell that story.”
Gaika accepts the esoteric nature of what he has made, and says he’s not too worried about how it will be received. “The angry black man is an easier sell – what I’m trying to do is present that, but with layers,” he says. “This is what the black experience sounds like, in all its joy, and heat and pressure. And you know what? I think it’s great.” He takes a breath. “I think my dad would like it.”
Basic Volume is out now on Warp
