In news that suggests the industrial scene should have its festival lineups vetted by UNESCO, the experimental band Xiu Xiu revealed on Instagram that African Imperial Wizard—the “tribal industrial” act claiming Angolan liberation-war pedigree and an ancestral hotline to the spirit world—is actually just a middle-aged white man in a hood. A hood, of course, modeled after a Klan robe, but sewn from (what white people think of as) “African” fabrics and patterns, like a Spirit Halloween collaboration between Joseph Conrad and David Duke. Because as it turns out, slapping the word “African” in front of “Imperial Wizard” (or Ankara prints onto a hood) doesn’t make a white guy in a KKK robe any less of a white guy in a KKK robe—it just makes him the world’s first self-appointed faux “diversity hire” for white supremacy cosplay.
When the hood finally came off backstage at the Hradby Samoty festival in Bratislava, Slovakia, Xiu Xiu said they were confronted not with an Angolan revolutionary but a white European man doing perhaps the most elaborate racist LARP the industrial scene has ever seen, and that’s really saying something. As Xiu Xiu wrote on Instagram last night:
“African Imperial Wizard is a middle-aged white man. We had the extreme displeasure of playing with him last night not knowing who he was until he came backstage and, to our shock, took off his hood. The Imperial Wizard (which is a term for a ‘Ku Klux Klan’ leader) obscures his white identity to the extent that he even wears gloves to cover his hands all while projecting a pastiche of Black African ‘tribal’ imagery on screen. He also claims to be part of an imagined pan-African armed struggle and calls for his African brothers to join together to play on his records. These records are actually just made with Ableton samples. In the great and horrible tradition of Western music, he is taking the art and lives of Black people and crazily perverting them for his own bizarre edification and profit. This is extreme blackface and a profound level of racist appropriation.”
This would be comedic—and on some level almost is, because what the actual fuck?—if it weren’t such a museum-grade specimen of racist delusion. The project’s entire mythology, as spelled out in tortured Bandcamp prose, is a deranged fanfiction of African resistance, as if the artist skimmed a middle-school unit on the continent and decided he was now qualified to role-play “Pan-African Warlock of the Gritty Streets.” He claims the act was “founded in the old low town of Luanda” and that its “armed crews” trekked across Africa to record tracks honoring ancestors, svikiros, warlords, and “ride-or-die youngins.” In reality, it seems to have been founded in the old low country of France by a single man trekking across his living room to fuck around on Ableton for a few hours in 2019. The whole thing reads like a ChatGPT model trained exclusively on National Geographic captions, Marvel villain monologues, and 2006 hip-hop slang from Urban Dictionary. It doesn’t celebrate African culture so much as bludgeon it with stereotypes, kicking an already-dead horse so hard it comes back to life only to get kicked to death again. Take this Instagram caption from the band’s now-privated page:
“Us, proud folks from the OG continent, are sayin’ today that we ain’t backin’ down from defending our ancestral land against any invaders. Our ancestors, the warriors who roamed these plains, gave us the strength and guts to protect our legacy. We ain’t scared of no enemy and we’ll fight hard to keep our culture and pride alive. Let our roar be like lions, announcing our resistance and victory.” (Like, Jesus fucking Christ, right?)
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The album covers are, of course, stock photos—of Xhosa boys undergoing a sacred circumcision rite, of a random Mursi woman holding a Kalashnikov gun for a travel photographer—with the band’s logo slapped on top. Anything vaguely “tribal,” no matter the country, language, or context, goes directly into the band’s “lore.” It’s continent-as-prop: a scavenger hunt for human images to drape over a concept that has never once approached authenticity. The project doesn’t even pretend to know anything specific about Angola—it tosses around “voodoo,” “ancestors,” “spirits,” “colonizers,” and “sacred lands” like a racist Mad Libs generator caught in a feedback loop. Hell, it’s not just appropriation; it’s incompetently executed appropriation, which is somehow even worse.
And what even was the endgame here? What kind of person wakes up one day and decides that instead of being a European electronic musician—something the world is already tragically oversupplied with—they will instead invent an entire African persona, complete with rituals, fabricated involvement in a guerrilla movement, and a hooded performance aesthetic that evokes both colonial violence and the Klan? I’m wracking my brain here for what he possibly could’ve been thinking, but the flowchart keeps leading back to the same endpoint of pure racism. Xiu Xiu called it “extreme blackface,” which might be the understatement of the decade. It’s the colonial impulse re-skinned as concept art: take the land, take the culture, take the images, take the stories, take the language, take the drums, and hope no one asks what’s under the hood. In this case, someone did (again, thank you, Xiu Xiu). And what they found was the thing everyone—or, at least, one guy on r/industrialmusic—suspected all along: the only “wizardry” here was the disappearing act performed on ethics, accountability, and even the most basic understanding of the cultures being plundered. Happy Monday.
