Divide and Dissolve are Toppling White Supremacy Song by Song
With Black and Indigenous heritage, this experimental doom music duo pushes us to consider a world without supremacy
If intentions are the voice of the ineffable, then the Melbourne-based music duo Divide and Dissolve is sledgehammering White supremacy with wordless defiance and ancestral support.
Multi-instrumentalists Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill shape their droning guitar riffs and drums into experimental doom-filled sonic darts titled with the ideas they want to drill into listeners’ heads. “Cultural Extermination.” “Black Supremacy.” “Assimilation.” Mostly without words, the duo creates music and participates in actions as art — all to encourage the listener or viewer to contemplate how to end racism. One such action made headlines in 2018 when they defaced monuments of colonialism with urine-colored liquid — a move that angered detractors enough into threatening harm at their shows.
But Divide and Dissolve won’t stop.
“Having to navigate certain systemic barriers in our lives and the industry we’re in is an attempt to silence us,” Reed tells Momentum.
As descendants of indigenous people — Tsalagi/Cherokee for Reed and Maori for Nehill—the very impetus for…
