Room To Breathe by noaccordion

Onah Indigo (a.k.a. noaccordion) merges trip-hop beats w/ political-punk energy in a Divine Femme-inspired social critique of the patriarchy on new single “Room To Breathe”

Oakland-based electronic producer, accordion maverick, and performance artist Onah Indigo (a.k.a. noaccordion) is adept at handcrafting eclectic EDM, hip-hop, trap, and R&B beats to take listeners on inner journeys of self-discovery, with thoughtful lyrics that deliver progressive, sex-positive, and universal messages to the consciousness and hypnotic grooves that make the body move.

The newest emanation of that signature ethos, noaccordion’s latest single “Room To Breathe” (out March 11, 2022, via Symphonic) merges a Divine Femme-inspired social critique with the raucous energy of political punk while leveling the chill of a trip-hop beat against the liberatingly dissonant poetics of spoken-word revolt — to hold a creative mirror up to the great blundering man-spread of social patriarchy.

Whether in the political, personal, or professional spheres —and whether motivated by malice or by an equally intolerable lack of male self-awareness — the masculine is all-too-often encroaching on the feminine. As a creative attempt to reclaim some sense of spatial and spiritual autonomy, “Room To Breathe” represents a kind of exorcizing incantation against unwanted penile proximity.

“This song speaks about using my voice to create those healthy boundaries in life,” Says Onah. “When speaking for myself and a lot of my female friends, we may choose not to say anything a lot of the time. It depends on many factors including location and timing. Sometimes I am more tolerant in the work environment as opposed to a public space. Too often, we just kind of take it because we don't want to be impolite or draw attention to ourselves”.

But then the pandemic happened. Says Onah, “For me, as a femme, it has actually been really nice having this six-foot distance in public spaces from a few male individuals who in the past have just gotten too close. It’s almost like there’s been a reset: whereas before we’d just think ‘okay, you're kind of gross, you kind of stink, you're kind of close, but I'm just gonna cope,’ …now we are proclaiming our right to these healthy boundaries …to say ‘actually, you're standing too close, step back a couple of feet,’ and feeling confident and okay with standing up for ourselves like that”.

Indigo’s sharp, distorted keys punch in and out of the track’s surging, repetitive rhythms, propelling listeners deeper into the heart of the matter, while her tight, meditative vocals and playful lyrics are punctuated with explosive exclamations of defiance:

We will not be silenced
We will speak our mind
We will not be broken
We respect all humankind

Those combined elements manifest as nothing short of a sonic invocation of the goddess, enacting a kind of reverse conditioning that manages, at once, to lull and shock her fellow femmes back into their own sovereign bodies — yet, now empowered to proclaim their own voices through the maelstrom and to expel the colonizing thought-streams imposed by a touchy-feely patriarchy.