#HGStreams: Kumail Featuring Sid Vashi's Music Video Is A Cross-Cultural Ode To Street Culture

#HGStreams: Kumail Featuring Sid Vashi's Music Video Is A Cross-Cultural Ode To Street Culture
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2 min read

The newly released music video of ‘Ease Up’ by Kumail featuring recording artist Sid Vashi is an ecstatic low-fi beat ( though not conventionally confined to any genre) celebrating street culture. Off his 2019 label debut “Yasmin” on Brooklyn’s Bastard Jazz Recordings, this joyous affair was shot in January and stars a troupe of local dancers, clothed in modern Congolese fashion by local designers and stylists, in multiple public spaces across the Ville de Kinshasa.

The bright, and defiantly celebratory visual marks Kumail’s ambitious first venture into music videos, involving a sprawling international team in Kinshasa, Paris, New York City and Bombay. Directed by Jason Shomba Lokanga, ‘Ease Up’ as a music video creates a cross-cultural elasticity and depth to Kumail and Sid Vashi’s intricate music. The entire music video was performed and produced in Kinshasa, Congo. The dynamics of the song is constantly morphing and shifting to create a repetitive emphatic sonic atmosphere with electronic hints.

Kumail is a producer, performing artist and DJ from Mumbai, India. Over the last four years, he has ascended to the very top of India’s burgeoning culture of electronic music on two parallel paths - as a roughneck DJ notorious for breaking ankles, and as a gifted musician and bandleader drawing expansive canvases of rhythm, texture and emotion. In 2018, those paths led him to a DJ set at Dimensions Festival 2018 in Croatia and a string of several live festival dates across India over the next two years. In the past, he has shared the stage with the likes of Shigeto, Four Tet, DJ Koze, Teebs, Ratatat, Mount Kimbie and Kutmah, and been featured on boxout.fm, Boiler Room, Sofar Sounds, DJMag and Resident Advisor. The onset of winter 2019 heralded the release of a brand-new album, Yasmin, via Brooklyn record label Bastard Jazz Recordings.

Click here for Kumail’s latest album Yasmin.

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