London’s Breaka is very much a product of the city’s multicultural and diverse underground scene. In essence, he’s a white guy named Charlie Baker who makes Black dance music. While the optics of that may be questionable to some, the landscape in the UK is notoriously open to embracing this sort of cultural exchange. At the end of the day; it’s about whether the music manages to move you. In Baker’s case, he’s mostly passed this test with flying colours. His recent debut album We Move zoned in on his love for global dance sounds, seeing him take on everything from footwork to kuduro. On his latest single Dololo, he shifts his attention to amapiano.
Dololo, a piece of South African slang that roughly translates to “finished” or “nothing,” is the phrase around which Off The Meds frontman Kamohelo Khoaripe builds his MC spot on the track. It’s new territory for Breaka to work with a guest vocalist or MC, but Khoaripe’s presence adds some needed legitimacy to the track. The track itself takes on amapaino’s most basic signatures, but the quality of the sounds here are very Breaka. Despite his love for international sounds, Breaka has always maintained a breaks-and-bass core. The log drums and bass modulations on Dololo are round, squabbly, and almost acid in tone. Over the breakdown, the four on the floor stabs recede just long enough to reveal a trippy, skittish gated synth riff and spacey tech pads. It works by avoiding caricature; Breaka is not so much trying to create an amapiano track than he is playing at assimilating its motifs with his own. The result is not necessarily groundbreaking, but it’s a definite floor filler.
Listen to Dololo below
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