Sheldon Pearce talks to GAIKAabout the London native’s genre-blurring style.
“On a rainy fall afternoon in Brooklyn, GAIKA was perched in the corner booth at Caribbean restaurant Pearl’s, explaining to me how he intends to modernize black music. “I see the inherent value in our music at the rawest level,” he said as the sun set outside, the dusty brick walls and wood panels around us suddenly aglow in orange light. Clad in a fitted leather jacket, the 30-year old musician, director, and designer sampled from several small plates on his last day in New York, a pit stop before his morning flight to Miami for a show. “All I’m trying to do is take my education and my confidence and any talent I have to push black art forward.
“Using machines, GAIKA tests the limits of frequencies to produce sounds that embody a gothic black utopia, an aesthetic he refers to as “ghettofuturism.” Listening to his music feels like going to a rave at a power plant in a post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland, with a Jamaican emcee (GAIKA is of both Jamaican and Grenadian heritage). His 2015 Machine mixtape is a genre-warping exhibition that melds melodies into mechanical sounds, and his Security EP, released last spring, presents a futuristic kind of dancehall, like a bashment set in the Blade Runner universe.”
GAIKA’sfollow up toMachine andSecurity, theSpaghetto EP is out now via Warp Records. Listen to the full release with Spotify, and watchthe new video for “Glad We Found It”below.