Angelo Antonio Valerio, known as ANGEL-HO is a South African musician, producer and a founding member of the NON records collective. NON is a collective of African artists, and of the diaspora, using sound as their primary media, to articulate the visible and invisible structures that create binaries in society, and in turn distribute power. The exploration of 'non, prior to the adjective, gives intel into the focus of the label, creating sound opposing contemporary canons.’
In his practice, ANGEL-HO is negotiating club/gallery spaces as a colonized space where queer people of colour are excluded and cannot participate in those spaces because to compromises to enter those spaces reinforces a history of violence on brown bodies. Music not being acknowledged as being birthed from queer spaces, and forming part of the DNA of music, has formed an agency to disrupt the mainstreamed consumption of appropriated [club] culture by the patriarch. In creating a safe space through a spiritual purge, ANGEL-HO becomes a messenger of sorts starting their dialogue existing outside of these oppressive structures, quacking and rattling the foundations from within.
Angel-Ho is performing together with Dope Saint Jude and Koko Hubara at the Aalto University's In-Between conference's art program that is curated by Ahmed Al-Nawas and Chirstopher Wessels. Read more about the conference here.
Listen: Angel-Ho's Soundcloud