OFF Festival Katowice 2012: Rap and Dancehall at the Radio 3 Tent
Let’s take a break from all the guitars for a moment. This year’s Trójka Stage will give you a chance to see and hear the future of rap, taking the form of the phenomenal Dominique Young Unique and the crazy trio Das Racist. And get ready for a taste of Jamaica, London, and America’s best club sounds with the project known as Africa HiTech.
Das Racist
Their 2012 mixtapes Sit Down, Man and Shut Up, Dude rocketed them to almost instant internet stardom. No, wait, that’s not how it went… It took just one track, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” which first caught the ear of Dan Deacon, before getting picked up by Pitchfork, Perez Hilton, and MTV. Das Racist MC Himanshu Kumar Suri recalls the sweet taste of fame: “A girl who ignored me in high school reached out to me through the Internet,” he tells The Village Voice. Was he kidding? With this Brooklyn trio, you can never really tell where the joking ends and the seriousness starts. Luckily, on their official 2011 debut Relax, Das Racist prove that whether you want to call their music comedy-hip-hop or hipster-rap, it’s you who has to acknowledge them, not the other way around.
Dominique Young Unique
Beautiful and dangerous. Beautiful: objectively. Dangerous: especially to other representatives of the new generation of rapping ladies. This young girl is poised to dethrone not just MIA and Nicki Minaj, but even Beyoncé herself. Dominique has excellent flow and the style to go with it: this combination made her the queen of YouTube even before her official debut, and landed her performances alongside N.E.R.D. and Big Boi as well as a slot on the Glastonbury lineup. Check out this Tampa rapper’s last mixtape, Stupid Pretty, and you’ll know what we’re talking about. Make sure to queue up early for this concert at the Radio 3 Tent.
Africa HiTech
Mark Pritchard is an Australia-based producer and DJ who records for such labels as Warp, Hyperdub, and Sonar Kollektiv. Steve White is the backbone of the British band Spacek, famous for their contributions to the vast borderlands of hip-hop and ambitious electronic music. They met over a decade ago, starting with occasional collaborations before finally starting a proper project under the name Africa HiTech, which explores almost every genre of pulsing bass-driven music, from original Jamaican dancehalls to Chicago house and Detroit techno, and even jazz. As one Pitchfork reviewer remarks, “The title of Africa HiTech’s debut album, 93 Million Miles, refers to the distance between the Earth and the Sun, but it could just as well allude to the stylistic lengths spanned by the record itself.
Tickets and passes are now on sale at the OFF Festival website and the ticket sales networks Seetickets (UK).
Available tickets:
1. OFF 3-Day Festival Pass with or without Campground Access: 120/160 PLN — provides access to all three days of the festival at Dolina Trzech Stawów, August 3 to 5. Prices are valid till April 16.
2. Tickets to this year’s OFF Club (May 11–13, Światowid Cinema, Katowice) — available exclusively at the OFF Festival website. Tickets are 30 PLN (until May 10) and 40 PLN (May 11, 12, 13).
