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Petite Noir
The eyes have it: Petite Noir
The eyes have it: Petite Noir

Petite Noir: 'Nowhere really feels like home'

This article is more than 9 years old

From Camden by way of Congo and Cape Town the musician is following in Spoek Mathambo’s footsteps with his dark mix of 80s electro and African styles, shaped by alienation, exile and a friendship with Mos Def

Petite Noir is remembering the moment he had to choose between pop music and God. Well, kind of. Then still in his teens, and known as Yannick Ilunga, the South African musician met township tech star Spoek Mathambo at a Cape Town club. “Spoek called and asked if I wanted to record some guitar for him,” he says. “But I had church band practice the same day. So I told my worship leader I wanted to go to the studio, and she said, ‘If you leave the church for this, you never gonna come back.’”

You can guess which way he plumped by the fact that Petite Noir is now signed to Domino subsidiary Double Six (“for a crazy sum”) and is about to release a compelling debut EP. God, the 24-year-old likes to think, stuck with him anyway. But the intervening half-decade has involved a serious innocence-to-experience-style journey. “Back then I was hardly even drinking,” he says. “Now I’ve seen so much, so much, so much…” Petite Noir, as you’ll gather, can in conversation be as nebulous as his bespoke tees and baseball caps are sharp. At times he seems less to be responding to questions, more freestyling languorously over his own private beat.

Encouraged by Mathambo’s interest, freestyling languorously is pretty much the process he used to write his first songs. In church he’d played guitar, but after hearing Kanye’s electro-influenced album 808s & Heartbreak, he experimented on Ableton for 10 hours a day until he found a more complex sound. The result was a mix of edgy electronics, deep bass, syncopated percussion and looping African-blues guitar lines. Binding it all together came a surprising, soul-excavating baritone – dark, intense and curiously 80s-sounding, like Phil Oakey on 85% cocoa solids. “My musical journey went in reverse,” he says. “My father’s Congolese, my mother’s Angolan, and they liked to dance to music from all over Africa. I went in every other direction, then came back to traditional sounds.” He tagged his first three tracks with his own coinage, “noir-wave”, signifying “new wave with an African aesthetic”. “My music sits right in the middle, man,” he explains. “If I were a country, I’d be right on the equator.”

Petite Noir’s father, it transpires, is a former minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who took his family into exile when his colleagues started getting fired (and shot). They finally settled in Cape Town when Ilunga was six. South Africa taught him “everything I know – the way I speak, the way I play guitar…” But the racism was “in your face”: at the English school they ate lunch in the Cecil Rhodes memorial gardens. “I started to do my own research, to become socially awake,” he says. Around which time he heard a holler from a Cape Town balcony, and looked up to see Yasiin Bey – the rapper formerly known as Mos Def. Bey had recently relocated from America, and the pair began sharing music and politics. “I don’t believe in coincidence,” says Petite Noir. “We were meant to bump into each other. He really is an activist and taught me a lot about what’s wrong with the world.” And Bey isn’t the only respected to name to endorse Noir: in 2013, Solange Knowles showcased him on her Saint Heron compilation of experimental R&B, alongside artists such as Kelela and Sampha, and secured his first American shows. By summer 2014 he was playing James Lavelle’s Meltdown festival decked out in his own capsule collection, dedicated to the Soweto youth uprising.

Petite Noir should, in other words, be on top of the world. So why is his new EP called The King Of Anxiety? Like many slides into modern urban despond, it began with a move to Camden. “In London, normal things just happen double hard,” he says. “You start to feel cold and lonely, and it’s easy to get involved in things you don’t want to get involved in.”

The exact nature of these “things” is left enigmatically hanging. But his long-distance girlfriend (and fellow member of South African creative collective the Drone Society) certainly didn’t approve. Following a climactic Skype Messenger spat – which did, at least, provide readymade lyrics for the song Chess – he was temporarily dumped. Soon after, he suffered a brief but unsettling cancer scare. And bubbling under all the while was a deeper, less tangible unease. “Nowhere really feels like home,” he says. “I’m always changing, changing, changing…”

Restless youthful ambition has its part to play in all this, too, of course. Petite Noir wants his own guitar range (“black and gold with a round tone like a Telecaster”). He wants to design merchandise for the new EP that “people will be wearing for ever”. He wants noir-wave to become the new pop culture (“I’m serious, it’s coming – even Beyoncé and Bruno Mars are getting an African shuffle”). But right now he has a more urgent goal: “Putting out all the frustration that’s been creeping up on me, the craziness of being a black dude.” His debut album, he says, will be “a lot angrier, a lot louder, a lot more political”. If the world isn’t Petite Noir’s oyster in 2015, we hope he’ll be demanding to know why.

The King Of Anxiety EP is out now digitally, with a physical release on 23 Feb


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