A Spare, Minimalist R&B Video Influenced by Marina Abramovic

March 10, 2015 1:30 pm

The video for “The Fall,” by the musician Petite Noir, whose EP “The King of Anxiety” is out now.

It’s been two and a half years since the debut single “Till We Ghosts” introduced the world to the crooning, beat-heavy brand of indie rock proffered by the Belgian-born, Cape Town-raised, London-based musician Yannick Ilunga, who records as Petite Noir. Since then, he’s collaborated with Mos Def, signed with the U.K. label Domino, opened for Solange and been featured on her “Saint Heron” compilation album. But Ilunga would tell you his most notable achievement to date is coining the term “Noirwave,” a new, ideologically influenced artistic genre that identifies as African first, and everything else second. “The term ‘African music’ is so overused,” Ilunga says, “to the point that when some people say it, it just sounds cheesy. Noirwave was always meant to include clothing, art, photography, music obviously — all types of things. It’s taking the Africa that we know, turning it upside down and bringing people a new black. Solange is super Noirwave. So is Beyoncé. Noirwave is pop culture — it’s coming, but right now it’s just boiling.”

The same could be said of Ilunga himself, who recently released a debut five-track EP called “The King of Anxiety” (“a book of secrets,” as he calls it), a buzzy taste of the full-length album that will drop later this year. Having moved from Brussels to Cape Town at the age of 3, Ilunga grew up eschewing pop and traditional African music in favor of metal, rock, punk and electronica, as well as “whatever my brothers and sisters were listening to, whatever was trendy.” He counts all these genres as influences on Petite Noir, but notes that discovering Kanye West’s album “808s & Heartbreak” was the single defining moment of his musical education. “He was a black guy doing whatever he wanted to do, and he was of my time,” Ilunga says. “Of course, people like Michael Jackson were big influences, but when I started listening to them, they weren’t so big. Kanye was relevant.”

A standout on “The King of Anxiety” is “The Fall,” a pensive, meditative ode to the inescapable changes wrought by time, with a quietly anthemic refrain and minimalist orchestration that might call the XX to mind. Ilunga and his girlfriend, Rochelle Nembhard, directed the video for the track, a series of intimate moments shot in a film-noir palette; they star in it together, too. Ilunga and Nembhard face each other, sometimes gazing at each other with deep affection, other times slapping each other repeatedly in the face or playing the knife game. “The video is based on my real relationship, but it’s overexaggerated,” Ilunga says, adding that the video was inspired by “The Artist Is Present,” Marina Abramovic’s 2010 MoMA performance. “The first video we shot looked more like a timeline, and we scrapped that,” Ilunga says. “This video shows what a relationship in general is: our attempt to lose selfness and achieve unity. When we fall, we fall together.”