Angel-Ho’s ‘Ascension’ EP out now on Rabit’s Halcyon Veil

Co-founder of the trans-Atlantic NON Records, South African artist Angel-Ho‘s music and anti-imperial rhetoric has been making waves as of late, both for its shocking immediacy and the depth of its critique. Released on Rabit’s new Halcyon Veil label, the Cape Town-residing producer’s Ascension EP comes in the collage style favored by TCF, Elysia Crampton, Total Freedom, Why Be and the Janus collective, a shattering blend of urban noise, technological squelches and vocal remnants. It’s noisy, barb-heavy and comes across less as a club deconstruction and more as a high grade shell exploding in the middle of the dance floor. Mastered by scene heavyweight Arca, Ascension, despite the rawness of its makeup, builds a high resolution landscape across its short 19 minute run time, a landscape in material and spiritual flux built out of the failed construct of contemporary democracy. It’s a world where robotic commands boom out of the rainforest and ballroom tropes infiltrate the virtual boardroom, all tied together by Angel-Ho’s conjoining of the corporeal with the technological. This isn’t an EP full of randomly placed breaking glass and club tropes, it’s a revelatory takedown of all that we take for granted about our cities and the capitalist superstructure that guides them. Ascension can be streamed below and downloaded here.