Over the past couple of years a little black has been making a lot of noise. Truth be told, Petite Noir is far from little.
Dressed in all black with a short back and sides, flanked by his equally sable-threaded "Drones Goddess" Rharha Nembhard, the "King of Noirwave" resembles a lanky vampire. Happily one's jugular never feels under threat.
If Petite Noir - born in Belgium to a Congolese father and Angolan mother, who know him as Yannick Ilunga and with whom he moved to South Africa when he was six - is indeed a blood sucker, then he is one of those that avoids human blood for ethical reasons.
"I try to have positive vibes and be as selfless as I can," he says in a pensive drawl.
For those not paying attention, his rise has been faster than that of a cat sitting on a hot stove. If you like your music weird and radio-unfriendly, your first contact with Petite Noir is likely to have been his EP King of Anxiety, which dropped earlier this year. It set him up as one of the most exciting and original artists of the year.
"King of Anxiety was about overcoming your anxiety. The EP is a representation of that in musical form. It was a form of letting go, being as free as I can and not being guided by what kind of music people think I should make," he said.
His new album, La Vie Est Belle/Life is Beautiful, continues in that vein.
The 11-track piece of musical post-modernism is a sensual and viscous mix of influences. If you listen carefully you'll catch a little Fela Kuti, a smidge of Joy Division and a dash of Mos Def in his reincarnation of Yasiin Bey.
Ilunga, however, hasn't just thrown the sounds of other artists together and claimed them as his own. His scent is all over the album in the form of a timorous vulnerability and a spacious, earthy sound that, for unfathomable reasons, reminds me of moss. The album is a continuation of his foray into freedom, something he feels most music lacks.
For Ilunga the pressure on artists from executives at major recording labels to make music fit for mass consumption does little more than flood the market with low-grade bubblegum.
"There is a lot of bad energy behind the commercial stuff being put out. Ordinary people don't realise just how powerful music is. It defines the way you dress and speak. I can assure you 1000% that label people know exactly what they're doing when they put that stuff out," he said, going on to explain how, particularly with commercial rap, mainstream artists became cogs in a perpetual cycle of negativity. "That stuff is dark, it's about shooting people and stuff, and what does that actually do to your subconscious? It sits inside of you."
Said Nembhard: "As an artist you have to realise that you are not just responsible for yourself but also other people. A lot of artists have moved on from the streets yet that [lyrics about guns and violence] is still the message in their music."
Watching the two of them opine about the nature of the societal beast is hypnotic. They express themselves like a two-headed Morpheus warning Neo about The Matrix. There is something undeniably alluring about their desire to raze existing paradigms and replace them with something more fluid, more honest.
"I think the world is caught in this mindset of what being black or being white must mean. Like there is a certain way people think you must be if you're a white person and a certain way people think you must be when you're a black person. A lot of it has to do with media," Ilunga said.
Radio and TV, he said, had created bizarre ideas of how people should behave through systematic targeted marketing practices. People who come from similar backgrounds end up accessing similar types of media, most of which paint a certain picture of what blackness or whiteness is supposed to look like. Hence, if you were the angsty black kid listening to Linkin Park, you were probably chastised for listening to "white music".
"It's almost like brainwashing," he said. "I think the whole idea of black music and white music is an industry thing that gave that mentality to the people. The intention behind our music is different, honest. Everyone is trying so hard to be different that you end up being the same so for us it's less about being different than it is about just being yourself.
"People feel the music more and relate to it more ... when you make music with an open and free mind."
We live in a world where everyone is trying to be the most ostentatiously unique snowflake, forgetting that when you walk through the snow all that specialness blends in to one dirty white mass. What ultimately makes Petite Noir the black stone in the snow field is not his difference but his eschewal of difference for difference's sake. He is comfortable with being uncomfortable in his own skin and with knowing that he is not alone in that regard. Rather than trying to carve out his own path, he is simply walking, sometimes taking the road never travelled, sometimes taking the highway, but always following his own feet...