The Beginning, the Medium, the End and the Infinite

Truly a concept rather than a story, this comes at you ‘packed with utopia and sermons for righteous earthlings… those who dare to dream.’ So IKOQWE are a fictional pair of cosmic outsiders, from a far distant time and space, coming to observe what’s happening on Earth. IKOQWE are also the album’s two Angolan Afro-futurist creators: Pedro Coquenão (better known as Batida, Angolan-born, Lisbon-raised stellar producer) and Luaty Beirão (better known as Ikonoklasta, Angolan rapper-turned-activist icon).

Influences include old school hip-hop; samples of Angolan field recordings by ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey during the 50s featuring the local variants of thumb pianos; Kraftwerk as on ‘The Medium (O Melo)’; vintage Jamaican digital dancehall rhythm sleng teng on ‘The End (Kamicasio)’; kuduro, the hectic Angolan dance form that Batida has wired up to the 21st-century; and the magic of traditional melodies on ‘Makumba’. The vocals fly out in Umbundu, Portuguese and English, so consult the lyrics sheet if you’re strictly Anglophone, otherwise you’ll miss their vivid flows and rants, alternating wit and visions of apocalypse, as they engage with neocolonialism (‘Makumba’), dictatorship (‘Vai de C@n@!’) and the climate emergency of our species on ‘Outra Cidade (Another Town)’. And you can guess what ‘Quarentena’ deals with.