Skyshaker - Novox 10 (2021)

After a decade navigating ten communities surrounding ten genres of Black music, House of Vemanei founder Skyshaker shares their latest mixtape as an anthology reimagining select cuts from the SVBKVLT back catalog. Produced with the blessing of ten of the label’s artists, Novox 10 is an ingenious take on the remix album as Sky LaBeija commemorates a decade of remixing under the Skyshaker alias

In their own words:

“Novox 10 is a vocal album of the voiceless. With the number 10 pronounced in your own native tongue, this is a collection of electronic music commemorating a decade of Black voices silenced by anti-black racism and xenophobia. The Black experience remains an inspirational cornerstone of popular music worldwide, yet Black artists with deeper skin color remain doubted, dismissed, and uncompensated. Popular music in Asia is no exception, as fair-skinned Asian artists rise to superstardom and financial prosperity off the backs of Black artistry and Black suffering. Novox 10 emerges in Shanghai as a navigation beyond that contempt into a place of autonomy, authority, and commitment towards the shaping of worlds in which Black people best fit.

As a retracing of steps through my own coming-out process, Novox 10 revisits my utilization of diasporic sound as a means of creating surrogate family structures as an unhoused queer youth. After a decade of assimilation and traversing ideologies, skills I considered merely tools of survival are now celebrated as home-grown versatility that both saved my life and built a career unchained by genre. What began as a decision to rest as a songwriter for others has become a reclamation of my own voice, as a singer living with selective mutism. Novox 10 is my return to singing via songs unsung, at once mourning and recontextualizing the silence that came before.

With sounds lovingly gifted by their original artists, Novox 10 is an album within an album for voices not yet stepped into. A show of gratitude for all I gained over all I lost as a ghostwriter. It is more than an homage to the music of my childhood and the DJs that saved my life. Each song is a gateway to other bodies of work directing Black feminine bodies towards the same single truth: There is space to do all we intend to. Our only mission is to arrive and return there.”