Nihiloxica, the dark electro-percussion group, has released a new album on Crammed Discs.
Source of Denial comes more than three long years after Kaloli, their album debut. It points a (middle) finger at the hostile immigration and freedom of movement policies implemented in the UK, as well as across the world. Fuelled by their frustrations with this intentionally convoluted system, the group have produced their “most cataclysmic effort” to date, we’re told.
Returning to the Nyege Nyege studio in Kampala where the band recorded their early EPs, the band tracked Source of Denial over an intense month of sessions in early 2022.
The cover art is emblazoned with an ultra-metallic new logo, echoing the growing presence of metal influences across the tracklisting, while the hi-vis, official-document styling wryly evokes the bureaucratic nightmare at the heart of the project.
The only spoken words we hear outside of studio outtake “Preloya,” are computer-generated. They speak of application processes, character backgrounds, and accountability, blasted through crackled phone speakers.
The frustrations are a problem the band, a global outfit, has faced continuously. A whole UK tour was cancelled in 2022, and recently, a UK show had to be performed with only three members due to problems with a certain visa agency who “provide services” for the UK, as well as a growing number of countries.
“We wanted to create the sense of being in the endless, bureaucratic hell-hole of attempting to travel to a foreign country that deems itself superior to where you’re from,” the group said in a statement. “We’re focussing on the UK as that’s where we’ve had the most trouble, but the problem goes much, much further.”
“In this system if you have a certain passport or have even visited a certain country then you’re an appropriate subject to be interrogated and insulted time and time again just to prove that you’re worthy to enter, and normally this involves proving you have a good enough reason to want to leave again! The arrogance of it is unbearable,” the statement continues.
Nihiloxica was born in 2017, following the encounter in Kampala, Uganda between two UK musicians (Spooky-J & pq) and four Ugandan percussionists from the Nilotika Cultural Ensemble (Isa, Sally, Prince and Spyda). You can read more about them in their XLR8R feature here.
Tracklisting
01. Kudistro
02. Exhaust / Outsourced
03. Olutobazzi
04. Asidi
05. Interrogation / Welcome
06. Source of Denial
07. Preloya
08. Postloya
09. Trip Chug
10. Baganga
11. Tuuka / Bulung
Source of Denial LP is available now. You can stream it in full below and order it here.
