Nazar

Nazar, a kuduro (A type of EDM in Angola which has features of uptempo bouncy and energetic.) producer was born in 1993 in Belgium from Angola but based in Manchester. Nazar’s father was the General in Angola which means that Nazar is greatly influenced by the civil war in Angola during 1975 to 2001, and this made impact on his style of music and way of producing music.

Nazar spent most of his childhood in Belgium grewing up with his parents and siblings, and Belgium is a violent city where involved gangs and crimes leading to a kidnapping on his sister however it failed.

The background of Nazar caused him to have depression and he expresses himself in producing aggressive music and heavily influenced by Justice and Burial and also Daft Punk.

Approaches to Production

Nazar started producing music at the age of 14 by using his father’s laptop through the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) FL Studios (Fruity Loops) but a cracked version. He refines his sounds as ‘rough kuduro’ through mixing kuduro beats and the sampling of war and military sounds such as gun shots, gun reloading and explosions and the title of his songs and album covers are all war related due to the childhood background.

At first, Nazar’s style was mainly Kuduro which is a style in Angola from a branch of Techno and House. However, Nazar refines his style as ‘Rough Kuduro’ since his sounds involves more aggressiveness from manipulating samples of wars and military. Another feature in Nazar’s track is that he uses field recordings such as the track ‘Immortal’, in this track there are sound of raining and the sound of the cicidas which were all recorded by him using his phone.

Nazar inverted Kuduro using the war sounds like gun clicking and air strikes and also layering the cold synthesis with percussions and noises. The conflict in his home country Angola took away hundred of thousands life of people. In his album ‘Gurrilla’ he heavily used samples of war sounds, such as in the track ‘Bunker’ he uses helicopter sounds, bullets flying around and the swing of knives also it involves the acapella of him such as the line ‘bullets in my chests’ shows the frantic style of this album, also it is based on his fater’s experienc in Angola during the civil war.

However, depite the craziness in the tracks of the album, it is still defined as dance music which are played in clubs and in the markets in Angola.