Avon Terror Corps / UK & Europe / 2019
(NM/NM)
Miguel Prado (Nzumbe) and Dali de Saint Paul (EP/64, Viridian Ensemble & DSC) are HARRGA (‘a burn’ in the Moroccan Darija dialect).
The project began mid-2017 as an outlet to create, without a motive or political intention. Soon though, the escalating Migration Crisis could no longer be ignored. They felt compelled to pay tribute to the ‘Harragas’ (people who cross borders illegally and must burn their papers, thus losing their identity.)
Héroïques Animaux de la Misère’s music is a meditation on the horror of that which crevasses borders. A great deal of state refugee policy is aimed at the silencing, repression or denial of the horrors of migration. The anxieties connected to and generated by refugee movement reflect the transgression of borders, including borders between the human and inhuman, as well as the failure of containment, borders and border walls as a response to crisis.
Turning white innocence in the Black Mediterranean into a survival horror show, Harrga tries to hijack the diasporic sound trajectories. The nomad war machine and all the Swarmachines from the liminal space of exchange and migratory fluxus.
Dali de Saint Paul mixes poetics and politics, singing in French, Darija and some English. She spits with fire and fury, though there is a tangible compassion in her pained lamentations. Paired with Miguel Prado’s singular, amorphous noise-design, they conjure a seething and thoroughly anomalous vision of contemporary industrial music.