SPITFIRE AUDIO GAIKA — War Island

Expansive industrial soundscapes

A timely collaboration with innovative producer and composer GAIKA, War Island offers multidimensional, evolving sounds from the beating heart of London’s industrial underground. Featuring harsh bassy synth drones, tape-processed drums, pads, leads and warped vocal effects, these expansive sounds are abundantly complex by virtue of GAIKA’s unique and sophisticated processing techniques — made accessible, intuitive and interactive through Spitfire Audio’s dynamic, award-winning plug-in.

Inspired by the sounds of GAIKA’s youth and developed over a number of years, these visceral, abstract environments are inundated with the distinctive buzz of an ever-changing and perceptibly dystopian London, offering a fresh creative lens not only for experimental producers, but composers looking for cutting edge sounds to enhance their scores.

Terrain of tension

A sophisticated yet easy-to-use library of colossal range, these rich, complex sounds have been meticulously curated, deconstructed and developed from a range of analog synths, hardware and experimental processing techniques by GAIKA and producer and sound designer, Felix Lee. The library offers eight controls, a key feature being the dynamics fader, taking you from the reverberant quality of the processed signal up to the immediate direct impact of the original recording, offering significant creative control. To create this processed signal, every sample was played back through a massive sound system in a large acoustic space at London’s Somerset House, and re-recorded, in order to create space and depth around each sound and provide a new expansive and cinematic perspective.

Capturing the intense, industrial quality of GAIKA’s particular sonic world, this comprehensive toolkit is inspired by sounds GAIKA heard growing up in South London - conjuring its rich cultural backdrop of idiosyncratic musical styles, from gothic hip hop to soundsystem culture and classical tendencies as well as retro-futuristic influences, to produce a range of intense, abstract atmospheres resonating with earth-shattering depth — developed amidst the dystopian backdrop of London in lockdown and a result of being forced to reflect on the state of the city in the wider context of the world.

War Island

This venture is part of a larger scale anthology of work by GAIKA also known as War Island — encompassing a record, sample library, an installation, film, writing, and technology — which speaks to the universal experience of modern existence absorbed by and inspired by urban sprawl, in a sharp assessment of the state of post-pandemic Britain and its place in a changed world.

GAIKA

A self-described ‘hard-to-place person’, GAIKA is an experimental rapper, producer, writer, visual and performance artist from South London. His debut album, Basic Volume, and his first art installation, SYSTEM, a vast experiential audio-visual sculpture, were launched simultaneously in 2018. Both projects draw directly on his Caribbean heritage. While Basic Volume is an elegy to GAIKA’s late father, a Windrush-generation immigrant, SYSTEM marked the 70th anniversary of Windrush by exploring the impact of migration on music in the UK, sound system culture and the history of the Notting Hill Carnival. GAIKA’s 2021 installation, Zemel, at the British Art Show, was a smaller-scale relative of SYSTEM, a shrine to his uncle and other Windrush-generation deportees.

GAIKA’s rich sound encapsulates the cultural melting pot that is London, and more specifically the bustling creativity of his native Brixton. Reflective and introspective yet abrasive and rhythmic, his music represents an aesthetic uncommon amongst composers in neighbouring genres. His music has been said to evoke “the sound of the memory of the club… what’s going around in your head once you’ve left, as opposed to being direct dance floor music.”