Hiatus Insurrection (featuring Linton Kwesi Johnson)

Hiatus Insurrection (featuring Linton Kwesi Johnson)
Released: 11th April 2011
Format: Digital Download
Watch the video:

Iranian-English producer Hiatus' collaboration with dub reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson is released on the 30th anniversary of the riots it takes as its subject, and which levelled the Brixton streets that both artists call home.

Hiatus - real name Cyrus Shahrad - has long been fascinated by the events of April 1981, a violent retaliation against years of joblessness, segregation and police intimidation among Brixton's black community, and which shook Thatcher's Britain to the core.

"It seems a potent time to release Insurrection," says Hiatus, "partly because of the anniversary, but also because we're once again staring into the cold eyes of a Conservative government oblivious to the dangers of racial and social profiling.

"We're facing financial meltdown and mass unemployment, we're having our libraries closed and our forests sold, and we're seeing disabled protesters ripped from their wheelchairs when they try to sound the alarm on the streets of London. If there was ever a time to reflect on the UK's largest outpouring of community anger in recent centuries, this is it."

Like the punk movement that flowered amid uncollected rubbish in 1979's 'Winter of Discontent', Insurrection is the sort of urgent protest music that can only be born of disenchantment: part warning, part clarion call to action, and a sharp contrast to the strings-driven nostalgia of Save Yourself, the sweeping debut single released to widespread acclaim last December.

The track opens with distorted dub organs and Linton's smoke smothered drawl, before bottoming out with a speaker-shaking bassline and a building sense of menace lent a melancholy edge by a distant piano. It's a tune both brutal and unexpectedly beautiful, and one paired with a video compiled from archive footage of the riots by Hiatus himself (http://bit.ly/dL09YV).

"Not that I want to paint Brixton as a war zone," he adds. "I've lived here for years, and can honestly say that it's one of the most peaceful and culturally harmonious places imaginable. But some injustices are hard to forget, and now more than ever it seems important to remember the dangers of ignoring people under intense pressure."