Published
Someone speaks in the distance, a car passes, the conversation trails off and the city keeps breathing. That is how Quiet Storm, released on 25 September through Dais Records, begins to sound, and how much of the album sounds: a postcard from Manchester at three in the morning, recorded from the opposite pavement. It follows Honest Labour, the album that in 2021 established Space Afrika among the strangest and most necessary names in British ambient electronics.
Joshua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle Reid still draw on ambient, dub and trip-hop, but the frame has widened here. Double bass, violin, harp, saxophone and piano enter the picture, alongside voices and field recordings that emerge between the electronic layers and disappear, leaving a ghostly echo. The nocturnal city and fractured memory remain; what changes is that instruments of flesh and blood now hold them up, giving them body and soul.
Some of the material began as the score for Opera Omnia, Valentin Noujaïm’s short film about two Black teenagers roaming Manchester at night. Those origins have not been erased, and all the better for it: the album often works as a succession of entrenched scenes rather than songs. Conversations, background noise, distant voices, small sonic events moving in and out of the frame.
The list of collaborators is long: Axelle Fanyo, Vanessa Bedoret, Alto Aria, RXKNephew, Klein, Tony Njoku, Kiala Ogawa and Deuén, among others. Thirteen pieces in which the dub pulse of earlier work loosens to make room for something more open, more cinematic and deliberately uncomfortable. Pitchfork gave it a 7.4 and highlighted precisely that shift: less pulse, more introspection.
The record also arrives with a Spanish date close behind. Space Afrika play on Saturday 7 November at MIRA Digital Arts Festival, whose fifteenth edition takes place on 6 and 7 November at Fira Montjuïc, Barcelona. The festival describes an immersive live show in which ambient, dub, trip-hop and orchestral textures become a physical landscape.
This does not look like a routine stop. A record that relies so heavily on space and on what is left unsaid needs a room that works with it, and MIRA, where sound shares ground with installations, performances and live visuals, is one of the few places where that is not a technical problem but the whole point.
Quiet Storm is out now. The other part, hearing it move through an entire room, is three weeks away.
Official information: Dais Records · MIRA Festival · Pitchfork.