Bonaventure first appeared in 2016 as part of Berlin Community Radio’s BCR Incubator program. The graphic designer, also known as Soraya Lutangu, had been through the tragic death of her nephew, which inspired a change of heart and a brand new career path.
She named her new music project after her lost relative and released FREE LUTANGU via PTP Recordings, not long after ‘COMPLEXION’ came out on NON Worldwide. These consisted a vast collection of YouTube-sourced audio of African instruments, Congolese war chants, a Martin Luther King speech and Sister Souljah interview, assembled into a volatile set of audio collages, which were arranged via a workstation visually, rather than sonically. The outcome was a sound that was far more dissonant and aggressive than other artists making so-called ‘deconstructed club music’ at the time. Live, it sounded less like dance music than a noise set.
Mentor is more developed. The layers-upon-layers of fractured and fragmented samples taken from the internet have been pared down and replaced with a compound of styles, including Angola’s Kizumba, Portugal’s Tarraxo, the Ivory Coast’s Coupé-Décalé and European dance music. Last year’s ‘Mulatre’ was a quaking collection of samples, like Ginuwine’s ‘Pony’, Beyonce’s ‘Drunk in Love’ and Rihanna’s ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’; Michael Jackson, 50 Cent, a sound byte of a choir epic and more.
This year’s Mentor opener ‘Physarum’ thumps and crashes over an indecipherably distorted vocal, screams and gun shots before being led out into sine wave atmospherics. Vancouver-based sound and video artist Debby Friday contributes to the industrial crunch of ‘Colony’, while frequent Bonaventure collaborator and artist-writer Hannah Black repeats the words “both apocalypse and utopia are already here” to the growling ambient and hardstyle claps of ‘Both’. This closing track embodies the essence of the whole EP, which is one that’s built on tension.**
Bonaventure’s Mentor EP was released via UK’s Planet Mu on November 9, 2018.
