131 NORTHSIDE – The Rise
Hailing from Edinburgh, Internet age artists KING WAVEY & WTKAKACB bring their new age vision to hiphop’s classic techniques & sounds using intricately auto-tuned vocals with matching heavily effected visuals that give a deep insight into their past, future and present.
Creating beautifully dark, melodic tracks about love, lust, drugs and pain, they give stories of life in the 131 (Edinburgh) confessing their love/hate relationship with the city.
Producing futuristic contemporary art and visuals in-house, they have built an immersive digital world for their audience to lose themselves in.
Innocent but self-aware, lovingly inhabiting a hiphop world they have created and believe in but they don’t totally believe. It’s not ironic – there needs to be a new name for this youthful hipness, this post-irony which informs new, young music.
One mind, two thoughts. fucking bitches and holding the corners but also that weird Edinburgh thing where the Scottish accent topples over and falls into the Irish Sea on its way to Atlanta, using the mythology as simile and metaphor, believing it enough to put the attitude over and in your face but, you know, they wouldn’t actually kill you. Not kill you, like, dead.
These charmers are lovers. ‘When I said I’d kill you I meant, I love you, with all my libido.’
They say they are “creating beautifully dark, melodic tracks about love, lust, drugs and pain, telling stories of life in the 131 (Edinburgh) confessing our love/hate relationship with the city.”
Which is beautifully honest of them. Doing it for their city… or doing it to their city.
The way the autotune shamelessly blends with their actual vocal suggests the effortless mutations of kids and computers into hybrid humans. But the beats are smoky, lazy, sexual, throw-away like a club night romance of, at least ten trembling minutes, (make that a perfect three) in the shadows of the shop doorway while the bouncers look on, dispassionately.
This is way more interesting than straight-up, desperate and apparently authentically psychotic bangers from Chi-town. There’s a UK element, that ingredient we always add, because everything came from over there so we have to stamp our personality on it, warp it to fit tarmac and concrete, hillside terraces, trains moving at sleep miles an hour, nothing ever happening. “so we had to make that shit happen”. Ignorant as fuck to our surroundings.
Complex Mag Premiere / Review
http://uk.complex.com/music/2016/03/premiere-stream-131-northside-digital-memories-ep
