VIDEO PREMIERE: Dicky Continental Featuring Tia Zakura

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Music

Dicky Continental and Tia-Zakura’s stark, zero-budget video for ‘Hostile Environment’ – dystopian spoken word meets dub-fuelled breakbeats, asking what’s the difference between existing and living.

Rich Thair has been doing this a long time. Red Snapper, Number, and now Dicky Continental – a project built on the same restless curiosity that’s carried him through decades of drums, dub and dusty samples. ‘Hostile Environment’ is the first cut from his forthcoming album ‘Queer The Pitch’ on Ramrock Red Records, and it’s a sharper, more lyrical turn than 2023’s ‘UN’ – live congas and djembe stacked over a pirate radio sample lifted from a cassette that had Rich thinking Abyssinians, Last Poets, and not much else. Then Tia-Zakura got hold of it.

Cardiff’s Tia-Zakura works in ‘flowetry’ – spoken word with its own internal rhythm section, sharpened on stages from the Southbank Centre to the Roundhouse slam final. Here she turns Rich’s breakbeat head-nodder into something else entirely: a document of political exhaustion, written in the run-up to the 2024 vote, when everything felt urgent and nothing felt like it moved. “Tell me what’s the difference between existing and living” isn’t a hook so much as a diagnosis.

The video matches the mood. Shot with zero budget by Tia and Sarah at Altmedia, it’s stark, minimal, black and white – a deliberate vacuum built to hold that claustrophobia Rich wanted from the track in the first place.

Rich Thair: “I felt this track needed a video, there is a passionate, heartfelt aggression to Tia’s spoken word performances. I wanted to capture the claustrophobia of her words. I set Tia the task of achieving this without any budget – fair play to her & Sarah @ Altmedia! Outstanding creativity.”

Tia-Zakura: “This track always felt eerily dystopian to me, even from the moment I received the music, I don’t know why but I was instantly picturing machinery, smoke, and a desolate world. It was at the time Britain was approaching the 2024 referendum, the first one I could vote in, and I remember just feeling so unenthusiastic about any party… I wanted to create a vacuum, I wanted to evoke this unsettling feeling of monotony, I wanted to empower people to create art amongst the grey, and I think we both manage to do that.”

‘Hostile Environment’ is out now on Ramrock Red Records.