The genre-blending musician premieres the video to his latest song Crown and Key
- TextAnother Man
GAIKA is the genre-blending musician or “academic rap” artist whose gothic and highly magnetic version of electronic music melds grime, dance hall, garage, hip-hop and R&B – a sound he refers to as “hood cinema fine art”.
Today, on the Another Man website, the musician premieres the video to his latest song Crown and Key, which is directed by Paco Raterta and takes inspiration from the “very grotesque, stiff and very beautiful” Christian visuals Raterta grew up around.
“I wrote this song in fury,” GAIKA says of the track. “I was thinking about violence mainly… The politics of respectability arms the supremacist and it makes a mockery of morality in the end. So we fight. I’ve written about it in detail elsewhere.” Raised by two activist-scientist parents, a sense of the political infuses much of GAIKA’s creative output – he even sits on the Dazed Digital masthead as Political Editor-at-Large.
As well as “some big installations, film scores, pieces for dance”, this output includes fashion: he’s working with with a designer called (MA) Menikmaton on a fashion brand called Armour in Heaven, throwing a party at London Fashion Week Men’s this weekend to celebrate the launch of its latest collection.
Crown and Key precedes GAIKA’s upcoming debut album, BASIC VOLUME, out July 27 via Warp Records. Taking its name from the company that belonged to the musician’s late father, the musician describes the album as a “collection of alchemical parables for all the immigrants who wander the earth in search of themselves”.
