“Kandaka” (Eastern Foreigner song) – Queen City Sounds and Art

EasternForeigner1_sm — Eastern Foreigner, photo courtesy the artist

“Kandaka” by Eastern Foreigner is proof of the inevitable synthesis of multiple musical styles that’s been happening for years anyway. The production is hip hop, the structure and percussion too but the overall sound palette is more like darkwave industrial and the vocals somewhere between and uniting the two. It’s a moody and menacing song whose hard beats and cold shimmers frame the story of a person who has had to survive in a world where everything and everyone is compromised, a dystopian near future that is really a story about today projected into a more futuristic vision. But it is also a song that suggests a place that so far is free from that compromise if you can manage to not let a broken world colonize every aspect of your life down to your subconscious and warp the roots of what you want out of life. It’s probably impossible to fully escape that conditioning without some work but the story of the song points to how your dreams, operating outside the usual boundaries of conscious and logical thought, operates outside easily controllable systems of social control, can be a place of freedom and purity and by extension, your imagination too. It is the place where positive change can happen first most easily, in your own mind, and where it is possible to envision something better even if life and the world around will always be a work in progress. It’s not a song about revolution but one that suggests that personal revolution begins in your mind and spreads by sharing and evolving ideas and ways of living and being that can be suppressed but not taken away. Cyberpunk came to be about gadgets and clandestine affairs when the early work, and the best work later, was about ideas and freedom and resistance to dehumanization this song is like a soundtrack to that aspect of science fiction. Listen to “Kandaka” on Soundcloud and follow Eastern Foreigner at the links below.