The Soft White Hand

Felix Laband's The Soft White Hand is the masterwork of an artist who expresses himself through musical and artistic collage acting together to reinterpret his sources and to express significant elements of his own personal story. The 14-track album is Laband's first full-length offering since the critically acclaimed Deaf Safari in 2015. It is heralded by the single "Derek and Me".

In The Soft White Hand Laband works with source materials that will be familiar to those who know his previous four records which reached deep into the South Africa scene and its political culture to inspire its vocal and music sampling. However, the disengagement he felt from his homeland during his latest album's creation – an abiding sense of untethered-ness to place and space, exquisitely rendered in tracks like "Death of a Migrant" – is perceptible in Laband's desire to illuminate instead aspects of his own life.

"For this album, my source material became almost autobiographical as opposed to African statements I've worked with previously," says the artist. "I have sampled a lot from documentaries from the 80s crack epidemic in impoverished African American communities and believe my work speaks unapologetically for the lost and marginalised, for those who are the forgotten casualties of the war on drugs. In the past, I have had my issues with substance abuse, and I know first-hand about the nightmares and fears, what it feels like to be isolated and abandoned."