Backxwash

Zambia-born Montreal-based transgender rapper and producer Ashanti "Backxwash" Mutinta (a "she"), originally a member of the Grimalkin collective, debuted with the EPs F.R.E.A.K.S. (2018) and Black Sailor Moon (2018). She abandoned trap for a punkish take on boom-bap rap on the self-produced album Deviancy (2019), with the industrial horrorcore of Don't Come to the Woods , and on the even more visceral 22-minute mini-album God Has Nothing to Do with This Leave Him Out of It (2020). A sense of apocalyptic moral catastrophe permeates the droning and agonizing God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It. His gloomy theater achieves glorious levels of emotional power in several songs: the explosive shout of Black Magic happens in a desolate industrial soundscape, haunted by ghostly wailing and distorted guitars; a gospel choir disrupts the pummeling rant of Amen in an odd case of call-and-response; and the stoned tone of Adolescence steals a Led Zeppelin drumming pattern and duets with industrial emissions. Into The Void feels like a radio broadcast from the other world. His flow is more conventional in Spells but still retains that feeling of impending catastrophe. the buzzing distortion that infects Black Sheep, the ugly ear-splitting rumble that rips through Heaven's Interlude, the cosmic drone that buries Hell's Interlude, Redemption

Backxwash's cacophonic language I Lie Here Buried With My Rings and My Dresses (2021) The typical song is a powerful statement that seems to come from a deranged mind. The sense of derangement is particularly strong in songs like Terror Packets, where the harshest words drift in a dense river of ominous sounds, or In My Holy Name, where a thunder of words collides with an eruption of noise, or the brief nightmare of Blood in the Water with jungle tom-toms, warped prophetic words, industrial pangs, and surreal chirping. The soundscape is thicker and more unstable than ever, littered with seismic events like the devastating metal-like guitar glissando that opens Wail of the Banshee and the the hammering pulsation that closes Nine Hells. The desperate and symphonic I Lie Here Buried With My Rings and My Dresses drags on amid videogame noise and panzer rhythm with a demonic acceleration in the second half. There are melodic elements thrown into the mix just to disrupt the disruption, like the oddly Pink Floyd-ian apotheosis of Songs of Sinners or the African invocation of 666 in Luxaxa. It all comes together in the closing invective, Burn to Ashes, a combination of contradictory cosmic and hellish elements in an ever evolving sonic miasma. One of the most powerful hip-hop albums of all times.

His Happiness Shall Come First (Uglyhag, 2022) another bombardment of angry rants and dense productions, is not quite as formidable but, where it works, it works even better and deeper. The peaks are the explosive and seismic Nyama, a close relative of I Lie Here Buried, and the dizzying concentrate of epos Juju, blessed by a stately and galvanizing introduction by Jaja "Ghais Guevara" Robinson. The production is sometimes virtuosistic, for example how the vicious Vibanda boldly incorporates a sample of Mozart’s Requiem, or how Muzungu mixes a sample of a Malcolm X speech with a sample of naive "chipmunk" 1960s pop, or how Muzaki toys with a old-school soul sample. The production peaks with the noisy and industrial hip-hop of Zigolo.