Back in 2020, when Black Rave Culture, the DC-based trio of Amal, James Bangura, and Nativesun emerged, it felt like a line was being drawn in the sand. This was the summer of discontent when the world was finally waking up to the entrenched nature of current race relations and it felt like the culture was on the cusp of a seachange.
Blending together music from across the Black diaspora, the trio were intent on reclaiming dance music from its gentrification across the globe. Even their name, Black Rave Culture, felt radical.
That moment of change never arrived. Six years on and, if anything, we’ve gone backwards with the retrenchment and amplification of reactionary politics across the globe.
But that hasn’t dulled the revolutionary vision of Black Rave Culture. As their latest transmission, ‘Black Rave Culture Vol. 4’, testifies, the sounds of Black diasporic music are just as potent now as they were then.
The record is a celebration of Black dance music in all its shapes and sizes. We have everything from the groovy summertime house bounce of ‘Smoke Em Out’ to the dubby syncopated swing of ‘Herengracht’ to the compressed East Coast breaks on ‘Urban Classix’.
The net is wide here — they draw from footwork on ‘Geekin’ and a mix of amapiano and UK garage on ‘Fried Behavior’ (also check out the baile funk meets sultry house on the VIP version of the latter).
Fontes
Informação baseada em material público de DJ Mag, reescrito pela redação ULTRA NOTÍCIAS.
