NKISI

Nkisi forges potent club tracks steeped in African polyrhythms, hardcore techno, and the eerie atmosphere of 1970s Italian horror films. Based in London, the musician and visual artist co-established NON Worldwide, an experimental collective drawn from the African diaspora. Following a series of digital and vinyl EPs issued across the 2010s, her debut album 7 Directions surfaced in 2019.

Born Melika Ngombe Kolongo in Congo and raised in Belgium, she adopted the name Nkisi upon relocating to London in 2012. Drawn to the fiercer edges of dance music while preserving emotional depth and a dreamy quality, she launched into production and began running the club night Endless. Her earliest outputs, 16 and 21, emerged on the Hamburg label Doomcore run by Low Entropy in 2014 and 2015. In 2015 she joined Chino Amobi and Angel-Ho to found NON Worldwide, subsequently featuring on its compilations. From January 2016 she hosted a monthly NTS Radio show, while also scoring installations at galleries across London and Europe in the ensuing years. Her initial vinyl outing, Kill EP, arrived via MW, a Rush Hour sub-label, in 2017. That same year she curated Opaque Poetics, the annual festival staged by Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridge. After Warp revived its Arcola imprint in early 2018, Nkisi released The Dark Orchestra EP on the label. Her first full-length, 7 Directions, followed on Lee Gamble’s UIQ imprint in 2019. The record drew from Bantu-Kongo cosmology, especially the texts of Kongo scholar Dr. Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau.