Multi-disciplinary artist Negashi Armada used to make music under the name Blunt Fang (read an interview with him from 2015 here), but now he's entering a new era.
The Atlanta-raised experimentalist debuted his first material under his own name on Show Me The Body's Corpus I mixtape back in March 2017. Today, he returns with the premiere of "Capricorn," a lo-fi track produced by Cities Aviv, peppered with synths that rattle like snakes or dying stars.
During the gravelly intro, Armada tells us he is "celestial prosecutor," a "chaos cop." Flexing his vocal versatility, he carries us from these spoken declarations to the softly sung chorus, and rapped lines about the system. His earnest repetitions draw me into a drowsy hypnosis, yet the song is riddled with an undercurrent of electronic energy that accelerates my sleepwalk into a sleep-dance.
"Dignity is for all that breathe, cry, laugh, and think," said Armada of the inspiration behind "Capricorn," over email. "[The song] is a straight-from-the-heart but not too calculated reflection on respect for me, my comrades, and all."
The accompanying music video teleports you to aerial shots of a graffiti-stamped city that make you feel like Player 1 in an '80s action video game. Scenes of Armada motorbiking through the city are disrupted by apocalyptic shots of barbwire and flames. Video director Whitney Mallet elaborated on the vision that inspired the video.
"The first time I heard the track, I imagined a man alone in a city," said Mallet over email. "With the video, I was thinking about the limited environments of FpRPGs like Grand Theft Auto; the speed of contemporary consumer technologies like drones and motorized scooters; and classic tableaux of urban alienation from Françoise Hardy music videos to Akira. There's a lot of pop references warped by lo-fi production."
Watch the video above.
