Nazar. Photo by Marieke Bosma
It’s April 2022, and Alcides Simões dreads the sunset; that’s when the pain takes him to the very edge of this life. His body is racked with tuberculosis, and for a month he’s been running a 105 degree fever. At that temperature, Alcides is prone to spasms and fainting spells; there are holes in his lungs from the raking, bloody coughs that shake his body, and the only time he leaves his room is to go to the hospital for the antibiotics that are helping him lose weight at a scary pace – 22 pounds in a week and a half. Maybe the medication isn’t working, or at least not quickly enough, so Alcides creates a playlist of “healing songs.” A lot of ambient music, naturally, but the song that is played most is “Mother,” a song he released through his electronic project Nazar on the 2020 album Guerilla. He remembers the first day his fever broke: “The experience changed me,” he tells me from his apartment in Amsterdam. “It pulled me even closer to my own art and to the way I consume my art, my music, and my ideas and how I conceive them.”
Guerilla was released on March 13, 2020, two days after the World Health Organization officially designated COVID-19 as a pandemic. You’d be forgiven if it went under your radar, but if you heard it at the time of its release like I did, you heard an album that reflected the chaos and uncertainty of the moment like no other. The album is a project of “rough kuduro,” a genre named for its brooding, industrial take on the peppy electronic dance music from Angola, where his parents were born. His father was a rebel general in the country’s civil war while Alcides lived in Belgium, the place of his birth.
The family was reunited in Angola in 2002 after the war’s conclusion — his father’s side lost, and a defeated and dazed photograph of him, used as propaganda by the victors, covers Guerilla. Nazar created the album as a kind of personal reckoning, its samples of whirling helicopter blades and cycled gun chambers evoking Nazar’s own, guilt-ridden conjurings of the war in his ancestral homeland. Its lurching, brutal sound found a natural home on Hyperdub, the label founded by Kode9 known for releasing challenging and vibrant electronic music; Guerilla sounded like an introduction, then Alcides’ time spent sick sent his music in a much different direction.
The new sound of his sophomore LP Demilitarize was created partially out of necessity: his recording set-up in his apartment in Amsterdam required him to be more mindful of noise. A world away, he remembers with a chuckle, from recording Guerilla in Angola where neighbours wouldn’t blink an eye at Nazar blasting beats into the early hours (they’d probably just respond with a friendly Sunday night rager, he says).
Nazar knew he wanted to sing for Demilitarize. His vocals are Auto-Tuned and whispered, their delicateness inspired by Sampha, James Blake, and brash weirdness of SahBabii. Gone are the geopolitical concepts of Guerilla; Demilitarize brings Nazar’s own humanity to the fore, his loves, struggles, self-pity, and poetic braggadocio. The cybernetic streak of his previous album remains, but there’s blood pulsing beneath the steel and steam of the music, its melodies blooming and curdling at a rate similar to &&&&&-era Arca. His love of sci-fi like The Matrix and Ghost In The Shell drew the through line, Nazar says. “It's quite a nice link between so many different African and black cultures around the world. It speaks to people of color for very specific reasons.”
Ahead, Nazar discusses the making of the album that helped him feel “a lot more true to myself,” he says. “That was the main premise, to demilitarize myself.”
The FADER: What you're singing about, and how you're singing on this album, is so raw, it’s appropriate that it's a body in recovery that's delivering these words. If you were singing at full strength, I don't feel like it would have been as effective.
Nazar: Yeah, that was the thing that I was trying to convey with the fragility in my voice: I can be vulnerable. I realized that it’s a lot easier [for me] to just yell and to perform while screaming. It gives that distance between you and the crowd. It empowers you, but sometimes that type of empowerment might not represent true confidence with yourself.
Game Walla, when he came into kuduro, he made like a lot of noise because of his voice. It was very soft, very feminine voice. It was one of my favorite ones. There's [also] a branch of kuduro called "kuduro de lamento." It's not aggressive, and all the lyrics are melodic. The track itself has a lot of Congolese influences. Rei Loy, he is known as the father of this type of music. It's quite popular in churches specifically. The lyrics tend to be quite hopeful as well and relate to working class life in Angola. The death and trauma and pain is processed in a different way.
With Guerrilla and the story of my parents, it's all about following a doctrine to be a certain modern community and repress a lot of emotions. There’s a lot of distance between me and my parents, and me and my younger sister were the only ones in the family that did not see the wars. It does have an impact on how we relate to each other and how we deal with certain things. But I remember that at the time of Guerrilla it was too painful to deal with. There's so much to unpack and I believe that there's still a long road to go. So I wanted to make this album to help me move forward and bridge those gaps.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that shifting from making a record like Guerilla, which is steeped in a real armed conflict of a country, to a more personal album like Demilitarize might be liberating, since it’s perhaps less charged in certain ways.
Yeah, I do remember that. Because of my obsession to fit certain things together in a specific way, I thought that I wouldn't be able to talk about more subjects with Guerilla, because it had that weight of almost a documentary. And I really felt like “I can't bring all that bravado that I bring sometimes.” It's easier to talk about a group of people or a nation than just yourself and to become more self-aware of your own history.
[But] on Demilitarize, it's not really ego tripping. It's just to reaffirm myself and embrace a self-confidence. For example, on the track “Mantra,” I knew that a track like that wouldn't slide on an album like Guerrilla, that sense of pain and feeling grounded. I feel like any place on earth where I go, the land is mine, some type of reclamation.
This album does feel more like an existential call to arms.
I totally agree. It's easy in this industry to be put in boxes, like, “Yeah, this is niche music.” I wanted to not only to prove myself but, for my own enjoyment, to do something different. I was thinking to myself, this is the most pop music I will ever go for. I feel like it can be more powerful when the message is simplified; I wanted to make gloves that could fit on any type of hands.
When I was [making Guerilla], I was motivated by certain aspirations. For example, I really wanted to be a “good producer,” having a deep impact and not really having a cult following. Then I got sick and started to focus a lot more on me as a person and what type of impact I want to have on the people that I know. I feel like this reflects on the new album, in a sense that I didn't have to prove myself in a sonically specific way. Sometimes I was writing songs and the old part of me would like speaking, “Oh, no, people are not gonna like it because it doesn't have all these intricate patterns, it's not too crazy.”
How did you decide which language to sing on each track?
I've always wanted to sing bilingual because it's such an important part of my identity to be able to speak several languages. It showcases different aspects of your personality. And that's the reason why certain tracks felt natural for me to express in Portuguese and other ones in English. For me, I would say that the Portuguese aspect is the easiest, but it's also actually not the easiest because I don't use it as often nowadays, but poetically it's the most advanced because I studied in Portuguese for most of my life.
Portuguese spoken in Angola is a lot richer in terms of creating interesting flows and intonations of the voice. Back in the day, I used to be so mad at Americans when they popularized the triplet flows, because I was telling myself, “Yo, this is Kuduro, we've been doing these things for the longest!”
Certain tracks like “Unlearn,” I didn't want to miss the opportunity to use the Portuguese there. And because I knew that it actually would be easier for me, I just pushed it harder to make it more complex. The track is [about] me and my partner and how safe I feel around her. So it's a track that's quite close to my core. It's connected to unlearning the past, the generational traumas, so it felt very natural to create it in Portuguese.
You create a cyclical feeling on this album with the final track, “DMZ.” It ends with the lines. “As I face the void, I refill my core.” “Core” is, of course, the title of the album’s first track.
I've always loved cyclical albums. And when I make an album, the position of a track has so much importance for me. Like, “This has to be track number four, because it feels like a number four,” you know? “DMZ” is actually the very first track that I made for the album, something outside of my comfort zone using samples that go more toward R&B, synths, and a bit of guitar there. When I made the track, I told myself, “Okay, this is the blueprint for the whole thing.” I applied some sounds in a way that would make you want to restart again in the whole process. I wasn't certain if there was any meaning other than creating that cycle, but that makes sense to me.
