Jaymie Silk remix Byron The Aquarius - The Legend Of Jack Johnson EP [label sleeve]

Recording info

Shall Not Fade welcome the France based artist Jaymie Silk to the family with his EP "The Legend of Jack Johnson".

As a true modern nomad, born in France to an Italian mother and a father from West Africa, as a French and Canadian citizen, Jaymie has quickly attracted attention to his music being immensely prolific through a number of remixes, EPs and albums.

This EP follows up on his video clip "Brain Dead", depicting the daily life of marginalized people, and his article for DJ Mag highlighting the relationship between racism and mental health for a black artist in the electronic music scene. Following a year 2020 marked by social movements, the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, the discussions around racism, the place of Black people and POC in the electronic music scene and the cultural appropriation, for Jaymie, Jack Johnson was to be the theme of this new opus.

Jack Johnson became the first African American to be able to compete against white men, and to win the world heavyweight boxing title between 1908 and 1915, in a country where segregation was strongly present, where interracial love were forbidden and black people were hanged daily. Based on period recordings by Jack Johnson, interviews with Mohammed Ali and radio broadcasts, Jaymie recounts the life of the boxer as he explores club rhythms mixing breakbeat and 808 (Knock You Down) and sounds reminiscent of late 1910s jazz, as in the track Jack Johnson, remixed by Byron The Aquarius. The B side approaches the life of the boxer under a more melancholic aspect with the song Illegal Love, evoking the illegality of interracial marriages, and the track Unforgivable Blackness, where Jaymie lets himself sing on guitar samples supported by tribal percussions that have made his musical trademark.