MUSIC
7356 products
Underpinned by spoken folktales stretching from Indonesia to Poland, a new collaborative EP from Warszawa/Berlin-based Jerzy Mączyński and London-based Flora Yin-Wong arrives via Accidental Meetings. Demons rising from the wind, unknown beings lurking in the forest – the record conjures a landscape built from heady layers of saxophone and the tormented strings of zither, harp, and kemence. Recorded across two intense studio sessions, the EP also features idiosyncratic contributions from London-based guest vocalists and musicians Aga Ujma and Laila Sakini. Flora Yin-Wong is a London-born experimental sound artist and writer of Chinese and Malaysian heritage, known for weaving field recordings and traditional instruments. Her album »Holy Palm« (Modern Love) and book »Liturgy« (PAN) cemented her as a singular voice in experimental music today. Jerzy Mączyński is a Polish saxophonist, producer, and composer whose jazz training feeds into genre-melting work spanning kosmische, prog, industrial techno, and minimalism. One of his collaborations is a record of free jazz and rhythmic cubism with Chicago’s Hieroglyphic Being.
Cosmic Gypsy Sounds!! In the early 80s, the Ansambl Mileta Petrovica was formed in Nis, in the Serbian part of the former Yugoslavia. Mile Petrovic and his band were pioneers and modernised gypsy music by replacing the accordeon with synthesizers. The result is a psychedelic cocktail of traditional rhythms and spaced out sounds. As ˜Veseli Romi™ or ˜The Happy Roma™ they promoted their irresistible dance music. This album contains some of the best boundary pushing tracks the band recorded between 1986 and 1991.
"Después de llover” is about musical conversations between two people who have only recently met; they come from very different places, do not speak the same languages, and perhaps have little in common other than the resonance of their instruments. This encounter leads them to explore an imaginary world where they share sounds to build a place where they can go and play with the moisture of the plants growing in the water, listen to the pudus playing with the herons, rest on the floripondios, and perhaps stay there waiting for the rain to return. These pieces were recorded on a summer day in 2025 in Indrė’s home with kanklės, txompe, and violin. ------- “ Después de llover ” son conversaciones sonoras de dos personas que se conocen desde hace poco tiempo, vienen de lugares muy diferentes, no hablan las mismas lenguas y tal vez no tienen tanto en común más que la resonancia de sus instrumentos. Este encuentro les lleva a explorar un mundo imaginario donde comparten sonidos para construir un lugar donde poder ir a jugar con la humedad de las plantas que crecen en el agua, ir a escuchar a los pudus jugar con las garzas, ir a descansar sobre los floripondios y tal vez quedarse ahí a esperar a que regrese la lluvia. Estas piezas fueron grabadas en el verano de 2025 en la casa de Indre con kanklės, txompe y violín.
Originally released in June 2009, The Ecstatic stands as a defining artistic statement from Mos Def (now known as yasiin bey) — a richly textured return to form that reaffirmed his status as one of hip-hop’s most adventurous and intellectually engaged voices. Arriving a decade after his celebrated debut Black on Both Sides, the album was widely regarded as his strongest work in years, earning near-universal praise for its lyrical breadth, eclectic production, and thematic ambition. Musically, The Ecstatic weaves a global sonic tapestry shaped by an array of forward-thinking producers including Madlib, J Dilla, Oh No, Preservation, Mr. Flash, Chad Hugo (of The Neptunes), and Georgia Anne Muldrow. The resulting soundscape is both rooted in hip-hop tradition and unbound by genre, integrating elements of jazz, soul, Middle-Eastern inflection, and experimental sample work. Tracks like “Supermagic” and “Twilite Speedball” establish a vibrant, restless energy that mirrors the album’s expansive creative scope. Lyrically, yasiin bey traverses personal, political, and philosophical terrain with characteristic incisiveness, confronting social inequality, Western imperialism, and questions of cultural identity with poetic urgency. Embracing risk and complexity rather than nostalgia, The Ecstatic remains a mature, deeply felt body of work whose ambition, depth, and enduring resonance have solidified its place as a standout entry in Mos Def’s catalog and in modern hip-hop history.
Tsapiky music from Southwest Madagascar features wild ecstatic vocals, distorted electric guitars, rocket bass, and the amphetamine beat! Unlike anything else, this is THE high life music you've always wanted - ceremonial music played with abandon and extreme intent, honoring the living and dead alike. In Toliara and its surrounding region, funerals, weddings, circumcisions and other rites of passage have been celebrated for decades in ceremonies called mandriampototse. During these celebrations – which last between three and seven days – cigarettes, beer and toaky gasy (artisanal rum) are passed around while electric orchestras play on the same dirt floor as the dancing crowds and zebus. The music, tsapiky, defies any classification. This compilation showcases the diversity of contemporary tsapiky music. Locally and even nationally renowned bands played their own songs on makeshift instruments, blaring through patched-up amps and horn speakers hung in tamarind trees, projecting the music kilometers away. Lead guitarists and female lead singers are the central figures of tsapiky. Driven as much by their creative impulses as by the need to stand out in a competitive market, the artists distinguish themselves stylistically through their lyrics, rhythms or guitar riffs. They must also master a wide repertoire of current tsapiky hits, which the families that attend inevitably request before parading in front of the orchestra with their offerings. This work, a constant push and pull between distinction and imitation, is nourished by fertile exchanges between various groups: acoustic and electric, rural and urban, coastal or inland. What results during these ceremonies is a music of astonishing intensity and creativity, played by artists carving out their own path, indifferent to the standards of any other music industry: Malagasy, African or global.
Tsapiky music from Southwest Madagascar features wild ecstatic vocals, distorted electric guitars, rocket bass, and the amphetamine beat! Unlike anything else, this is THE high life music you've always wanted - ceremonial music played with abandon and extreme intent, honoring the living and dead alike. In Toliara and its surrounding region, funerals, weddings, circumcisions and other rites of passage have been celebrated for decades in ceremonies called mandriampototse. During these celebrations – which last between three and seven days – cigarettes, beer and toaky gasy (artisanal rum) are passed around while electric orchestras play on the same dirt floor as the dancing crowds and zebus. The music, tsapiky, defies any classification. This compilation showcases the diversity of contemporary tsapiky music. Locally and even nationally renowned bands played their own songs on makeshift instruments, blaring through patched-up amps and horn speakers hung in tamarind trees, projecting the music kilometers away. Lead guitarists and female lead singers are the central figures of tsapiky. Driven as much by their creative impulses as by the need to stand out in a competitive market, the artists distinguish themselves stylistically through their lyrics, rhythms or guitar riffs. They must also master a wide repertoire of current tsapiky hits, which the families that attend inevitably request before parading in front of the orchestra with their offerings. This work, a constant push and pull between distinction and imitation, is nourished by fertile exchanges between various groups: acoustic and electric, rural and urban, coastal or inland. What results during these ceremonies is a music of astonishing intensity and creativity, played by artists carving out their own path, indifferent to the standards of any other music industry: Malagasy, African or global.
“Noneness” is a work by shakuhachi player Lenzan Kudo, featuring reinterpretations of traditional honkyoku and long-form improvisations rooted in Zen philosophy. Recorded in Hakone, Kanagawa, the album incorporates natural sounds and reverberations, maximizing the breath and spatial resonance of the shakuhachi. The title “Noneness” signifies ‘emptiness’ or ‘void,’ capturing traces of personal spiritual practice and dialogue with nature. The credits include acknowledgments to Ryuichi Sakamoto and Zen master Nanrei Yokota, with a written comment from Yokota also included. Transcending the boundaries of ethno, jazz, and ambient music, the album carries both spiritual and cultural depth.
A collection of short-form compositions by shakuhachi player Lenzan Kudo, rooted in Zen spirit. In contrast to his long-form work “Noneness,” each track on this album spans approximately 2 to 5 minutes, distilling intense focus and spiritual depth into concise musical expressions. Utilizing the breath and overtones of the shakuhachi, the pieces incorporate ambient spatial processing, remaining grounded in the instrument’s traditional sonic world while embracing a contemporary resonance.
On their second album together, Vilnius-based Indonesian composer and instrument builder Johanes "Mo’ong" Santoso Pribadi, best known as one half of Raja Kirik, and Berlin-based Japanese producer Shigeru Ishihara (aka Scotch Rolex) survey their surroundings, dreaming up a vibrant fantasy landscape that teems with life. Manifesting their personal experiences as a sequence of poetic freeform experiments and dancefloor rituals, the duo realize a vast patchwork of resonant, anomalous sonic environments that form a mystifying new landmass. Pribadi and Ishihara see 'ABU' as a guide of sorts to an imaginary volcanic island that they've consolidated from the various physical locations and psychic topographies that have formed their separate identities. Constantly shifting, the "island of ash" vanishes between the borders of the three core sites where it was recorded - in Yogyakarta, Švenčionėliai and Berlin - absorbing local soundscapes and intermingling them, forming unstable, hallucinatory terrain. "On 'ABU', identity dissolves like sound in fog," they explain. "What remains is the pulse of movement, the echo of a voice crossing water and the endless reconstruction of home through noise." This might sound like familiar territory for Pribadi, who's worked extensively with Javanese traditional sounds, rupturing the timeline on 2021's acclaimed 'Rampokan', but for Ishihara it's a more alien process. While the producer has rallied against genre purity for decades, haphazardly searching out the sweet spot between breakcore, trap, dub, chiptune, hardcore and extreme noise, he's rarely examined his own cultural inheritance. So, once the duo had engaged with gamelan in Yogyakarta, working with found objects and self-built instruments, and channeled the Baltic air in Švenčionėliai into breathwork and vocal experiments, they finally reconvened in Berlin where Ishehara allowed himself to reconnect with the rituals, rhythms and soundscapes of Japan. Watching the island of 'ABU' flood with lava, burn and then regenerate itself, Ishihara handled the final mixdown himself, translating the pulse of taiko into rhythmic shockwaves that punctuate the record, echoing through the volcanic topsoil. The resulting record isn't Indonesian or Japanese, European or Asian, it's a sonic ecosystem that's not fixed on any map, floating perpetually. That means the tense, ceremonial atmosphere of opening track 'Hai no uta' isn't all it might appear to be on first blush. An intermixture of Javanese gong hits, rattling wooden percussion and xenharmonic flute blasts thats interspersed with unsettling electronic vibrations, it sounds unusually biomechanical: live and organic, and at the same time meticulously terraformed. The same feeling emerges as the title track takes shape and hoarse chants roll over the duo's unique cocktail of rhythms: tuned, gamelan-like resonances tumble through ordered electro-plated taiko structures, evolving into fractured free improv and harmonizing with syrupy drone metal before the track's complete. And while there's a sense of coherence throughout, the album keeps shifting, fluctuating every time it's properly perceived. On 'Api', the tense ceremonial sounds seem to flirt with hard dance textures, inviting heavy electronic kicks into the mannered mass of flutes and metallophone hits. And on the deafening 'Hino-Tori', Pribadi and Ishehara are no longer teasing, matching their shouts and acoustic instrumentation with carnivalesque synths and hardstyle rhythms. 'ABU' is an island that rewards the boldest wanderers, providing for those who can meet its energy head-on, drifting between continents with the same friction, the same mess of harmonies and dissonances. Wash up on its shores with an open mind and its mechanical tides and digital rituals will reshape your wildest hallucinations.
Fr. Dionysios Tabakis is a priest of the Orthodox Church. He serves at the Church of Panagitsa in Nafplio, the Nativity of the Theotokos, and records alone, at home. The music made in that house does not announce itself. It arrives from somewhere older than genre, older than the distinctions we use to organize sound. Tabakis is a musician of the Eastern Mediterranean in the fullest sense: formed in Byzantine theory and practice, fluent on qanun, oud, cümbüş, ney, zurna, Politiki and Pontic lyra, kabak kemane, yali tanbur. The system he works within is Byzantine, not as aesthetic choice or cultural reference, but as logic. The scales, the intervals, the way a note moves toward or away from another: this is the operating system. What emerges is slow, heavy, meditative, drone that carries the mass of stone walls and sustained prayer. It is still Byzantine music. Two tracks are built around the fretless electric guitar, perdesiz in Turkish, meaning simply: without frets. The fretless instrument is one of the few capable of producing moria, intervals smaller than a semitone, with the exactness the voice has and fixed-pitch instruments do not. Here the guitar does not behave like a guitar. It bends into pitches that Western tuning sealed off centuries ago, moving the way Earth moves in their slowest passages, or the way Scott Walker's later work used sound as weight rather than melody. On two tracks, Evgenia Symela Armeni sings. Her voice is psaltic, trained in the Orthodox chanting tradition, ψαλτοτράγουδο, chant-song, and it cuts through the drone the way a single candle cuts through a dark nave. Χαίρε Παρθένε Σουμελά, a Pontian hymn to the Theotokos of Soumela. Ρόδον Ψυχής, Rose of the Soul. Both devotional. Both immovable. Tabakis is also a writer. His books, among them Into the Abyss with a View of Paradise and The Mad Forerunner, move between Athonite monastic thought and the texture of contemporary life. The music moves the same way. Alienation, depression, isolation, not named as modern problems but as ancient conditions, long described, still present. The stillness of Athos and the noise of the present sit in the same frame, unresolved. Fr. Dionysios Tabakis is of Asia Minor descent, 53, married with three children. This is his first release.
As Brian Eno told us last week, “Leenalchi has changed the way I think about music, dancing and Korea. I have never heard anything quite like this.” There’s so much to say to you about this amazing band—but what will get you to listen? Is it that they play addictive psych pop? Or that they sound like animals talking to each other over tripped out bass lines? They have a new single out today called HERE COMES THAT CROW, which, like all of Leenalchi’s songs, is a chopped and screwed version of a pansori tale (a traditional form of storytelling from the 17th century). Based on a story about the warlord Cao Cao, the song is an allegory about life’s precariousness. The band wrote a poem to explain: Doyung doyung goes the small boat floating down the river. Whether the chased or the chaser, no one can stop—just beneath the boards lies the underworld!
Modern Obscure Music presents The Bubble of Love, a new collaborative album by Pedro Vian together with Ustad Nawab Khan and Naved Nawab Khan — the 9th and 10th generation of a distinguished santoor lineage from Rajasthan, India. Recorded during an intense week of sessions at Pedro Vian’s studio in Barcelona, the album captures a rare and concentrated encounter between traditions, generations, and sonic languages. Ustad Nawab Khan, a 9th-generation master of the santoor and founder of Raaga Science, has devoted his life to exploring the emotional and psychological dimensions of Indian raaga music. His philosophy, “Raag se Ras utpan” — the creation of emotional states through specific raagas — forms a conceptual backbone for the project. Carrying the lineage forward, Naved Nawab Khan represents the 10th generation, bringing a contemporary global awareness while remaining deeply rooted in classical tradition. The Bubble of Love unfolds through four meditations that create a dialogue between ancient tonal systems and modern electronic exploration. In three of the four pieces, the chromatic subtleties and traditional scales of the santoor intertwine with Pedro Vian’s unexpected synthesizers and electronic textures. These compositions form a bridge between Occidental and Oriental musical worlds, where resonance becomes a shared language. In the fourth and final meditation, the collaboration shifts toward a more experimental dimension. While maintaining the same instrumental foundation — santoor and electronics — Pedro Vian explores alternative notes and scale structures, expanding the harmonic field. This movement reflects both understanding and incomprehension, alignment and tension between cultures. Rather than resolving differences, the music inhabits them, transforming contrast into a space of discovery. Released on Modern Obscure Music, The Bubble of Love is not merely a fusion record. It is a concentrated meeting point — lineage and futurism, discipline and experimentation — crystallized in a week of deep listening and creative exchange within an intimate studio environment. At moments, the record subtly echoes earlier attempts to translate ancient traditions through emerging technologies. It recalls the spirit of experimentation found in projects where Moog synthesis sought to interpret the tonal worlds of classical instruments — from the dialogues between Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass, to the exploratory journeys of Ariel Kalma, whose music continues to resonate powerfully in the very walls where this album was recorded. In this broader historical context, The Bubble of Love also resonates with the pioneering electronic explorations documented in The NID Tapes — the collection of early Indian electronic works recorded between 1969 and 1972 at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. Founded with the support of composer David Tudor, who installed a Moog modular system in 1969, the NID studio became a radical space of post-independence experimentation, where composers such as Gita Sarabhai, I.S. Mathur, Atul Desai, S.C. Sharma and Jinraj Joshipura explored analogue synthesis, tape collage, voice and field recording — forging a meeting point between Western and Indian avant-garde traditions. Uncovered and restored through the long-term research of British artist Paul Purgas, and later presented alongside the publication Subcontinental Synthesis: Electronic Music at the National Institute of Design, India 1969–1972, The NID Tapes revealed a visionary chapter in South Asia’s sonic imagination — one where electronic instruments did not replace tradition, but refracted it into new forms. While separated by decades and geography, The Bubble of Love inhabits a similar philosophical terrain: not the fusion of opposites, but the coexistence of lineages — where electronic sound becomes not an imposition, but a listening device. A way of approaching tradition with curiosity rather than control. In this sense, the album stands both as a continuation and a renewal — a contemporary meditation on the enduring dialogue between heritage and experimentation, between memory and future sound.
"On a gloomy weekend in the Pacific NorthWest Oregon coast in November of 2020, we find the eleven piece cumbia orchestra outfit, Orquestra Pacífico Tropical, writing new material in a cabin for what will become their third full length album, "El Poder." The sonic exploration and the cloudy overcast of the coastal forest really gave an inspiration to the overall musical palette of the demos that weekend that eventually became El Poder. Creating a warm & inviting recording session in the living room of a cabin truly allowed for inventiveness & spontaneity to be key in the development of these melodious rhythms & movements. While continuing on the trajectory of the tradition of cumbia, the band has also delved into salsa, psychedelic NorthWest sounds and whole new audio exploration of music that truly feels unique & never heard before..."
From Asmara, Eritrea(formerly Ethiopia) Tewolde Redda revolutionized the sounds of traditional Eritrean music by amplifying his kirar, playing his Eko electric guitar, and recording six singles in the first part of the 1970’s. Including the first Eritrean songs to use a horn section, traditional songs reworked into his new sound, and originals influenced by radio broadcasts from the United States military base in Asmara, Kagnew Station, these ten songs originally released on the Philips, Amha, and Yared labels show off his talents with stringed instruments, a talented back up band, and often the hand clapped beat shifting into double time near the song’s end. Tewolde’s thick, deep voice sings songs of love over somber and joyous tunes. Comes in a “tip-on” sleeve with extensive liner notes, lyrical translations, and unpublished photos. A co-release with Mitmitta Musika of Addis Abeba, Ethiopia. Second pressing coming around March, 2022.
Mala Fama is a Kichwa sound artist from Ibarra, Ecuador. His work is a testament to inhabiting—and creating—multiple worlds at once, while being rooted in Indigenous pride and power. Jichushka is a Kichwa word translating to “Lonely/Abandoned,” marking grief as a pathway to liberation. The 11-track album features the cultural specificities of northern Ecuador's Indigenous communities while also traversing boundless electronic experimentation, and was mastered by Nicola Cruz. Lead single "Mortaja II" is a retextured adaptation of Kichwa funeral music, accompanied by a music video (release date October 21st) that reflects the track’s sacred circularity through movement and land-based ritual. The video was shot in Ibarra, Ecuador by directors Rony Albuja and Hilda Males. Mala Fama wrote and recorded the album between 2016-2022, through ongoing home studio sessions that facilitated close collaboration with a network of artists of musical lineages from the Andean region such as marimba, vallenato, and cumbia– including Afro-Ecuadorian group Duo Anjoa, vocalist Catalina Ortiz hailing from coastal Esmeraldas, Ibarra-based multi-instrumentalist Luis Lema, and Quixosis, a leader of Quito’s underground vanguard. The majority of Jichushka was composed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting a complete revision of a previously-written album to mirror unexpected shifts, and new beginnings. The album is world-making through peaceful, ambient compositions as much as heavy sequencing, inviting melancholic remembrances of times and spaces that no longer exist, but that make way for creation.
After the space-time experience and the translation into music of the Bible of Japanese civilization, the Fulukotofumi, the following year, in 1973, Hiromasa Suzuki pushes his research and experimentation beyond the borders of his own country by venturing, with the usual companions of adventure (Kunimitsu Inaba, Hideo Sekine, etc.), along the lights and shadows of the Silk Road. A backward journey in search of the musical and cultural sources of mainland Asia, from the gates of India to the roots of China. If the Biwa lute characterized the previous chapter dedicated to the profound ancestral of Japan, here, the sitar, the Asian instrument par excellence, becomes a new narrator; Suzuki plans and manages the interventions by juxtaposing it with an opera that, like the previous one, always remains strongly jazz and rock, at times very similar to Ian Carr's Nucleus. A precious find in the endless and seminal musical archeology of modern Japanese music. Gatefold cover with insert.
The Fulukotofumi is the most important and ancient historical chronicle of Japan. The content of this work becomes an inspiration for the creation of a sound transposition of the legends and myths that most marked the spirit and inspiration of Hiromasa Suzuki, as a musician and as a high-level composer. The music that is concentrated between these grooves is a representation of the best that moved in the early seventies in the jazz-rock orbit at an international level; in addition, very strong infiltrations of tradition, characterized above all by the extremely calibrated and perfectly ad hoc interventions of the Biwa (lute of the Japanese tradition once used by blind monks to recite poems) and the Wadaiko drum. From its entirety, a highly evocative and magical sketch in nine suites emerges, a viaticum towards the most ancestral past of Japan, but at the same time also immersed in the modernity and expressive relevance of the land of the rising sun. A masterpiece that, buried for too long in the archives, is finally back reissued on vinyl with original graphics on its gatefold cover and enriched by an insert with the translations of the precious introductory essay contained in its original edition. Accompanying Suzuki's acoustic and electric piano is the crème of Japanese jazz that gives free rein to one's primordial instincts. Some passages come close to progressive, especially thanks to Kiyoshi Sugimoto's Allan Holdsworth style guitar.
Habibi Funk’s new sister label Audible Beauty Records second release: A landmark collection retelling the untold story of Malaysian jazz featuring 9 songs from the legendary composer, arranger and trumpet player Johari Salleh. Salleh played a crucial role in shaping the sound of modern Malaysian music across radio, television, film and live performance and has composed dozens of popular songs in his decades long career. His personal musical passion always was jazz, reflected in this deep selection of jazz works that were previously unavailable unless you had one of the few dozen copies pressed locally in the 1970s. The album doesn’t only highlight his musical statue as a composer but also as a outstanding trumpet soloists bringing together jazz, spiritual undertones and Malaysian folkloric themes balancing slower pacing deep, modal grooves with more upbeat jazz funk leanings. For fans of Salah Ragab, Ahmed Malek, Mulatu Astatke, Dollar Brand and co.
Organic Music Society is an album by trumpeter Don Cherry. Many critics consider this album the one which gives a fuller picture of Cherry as ensemble leader, spiritualist and cultural synthesizer. Indeed, Organic Music Society is a bold exploration of global musical traditions, reflecting Cherry's vision of music as a universal. Here, Cherry makes a significant shift from his free jazz roots toward a more expansive, world music fusion. Recorded in Sweden, the album features a diverse ensemble blending Swedish, Turkish, Brazilian, and African musicians. Cherry himself contributes not only trumpet but also vocals, harmonium, flute, conch shell, and piano. The compositions include his own works, as well as interpretations of pieces by Terry Riley, Pharaoh Sanders, and Dollar Brand. The album's sound is eclectic and experimental, with tracks ranging from meditative chants like "North Brazilian Ceremonial Hymn" to the dynamic "Relativity Suite."
Korlakang, a fresh four‑piece band emerging from Thonburi on Bangkok’s west side, delivers a debut double‑sider 7" on Guruguru Brain. Blending the melodic beauty of Thai traditional music with the hazy textures of 70s psychedelic rock, the group reshapes these elements into a contemporary ethno‑groove.
‘Araya Lam’ is the 3rd album by The Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band. Following on from ‘21st Century Molam’ and ‘Planet Lam’ the band head deeper into the roots of Isan music, collaborating with others traditional musicians on Vocals, Pong-Lang, Pi and Sor. Each instrument brings something fresh to add to the group’s take on Molam music. In addition, the band nod to New York Post-Punk on ‘Zud Rang Ma’ and sounds from across the Indian ocean region on ‘Psych Lam Kor’. Looking back to their roots to move ever further forward ‘Araya lam’ is the next chapter in the always evolving Paradise Bangkok concept.
As Brian Eno told us last week, “Leenalchi has changed the way I think about music, dancing and Korea. I have never heard anything quite like this.” There’s so much to say to you about this amazing band—but what will get you to listen? Is it that they play addictive psych pop? Or that they sound like animals talking to each other over tripped out bass lines? They have a new single out today called HERE COMES THAT CROW, which, like all of Leenalchi’s songs, is a chopped and screwed version of a pansori tale (a traditional form of storytelling from the 17th century). Based on a story about the warlord Cao Cao, the song is an allegory about life’s precariousness. The band wrote a poem to explain: Doyung doyung goes the small boat floating down the river. Whether the chased or the chaser, no one can stop—just beneath the boards lies the underworld!
Shangaan electro, amapiano & gqom fiends take note: Limpopo’s Serokolo 7 breaks thru with a thrilling introduction to Mapanta; a local, traditional sound he’s revived and modernised, somehow resembling amapiano’s taut log drum rhythms and tense atmospheres, but sped to 180BPM, spliced with toasters and FX bombast glittering with modernist melodic sheen. In other words: 100% zingers! Repped by Björk during her DJ set at this year's Venice Biennale, Serokolo 7's debut is an idiosyncratic, adrenaline-filled reboot of South Africa's lesser-known mapanta sound, stirring its 180BPM rhythms with traces of footwork, gqom and hard techno. South Africa’s scene has perfused every nook of the global club movement for years at this point; whether it's the low 'n slow sound of Durban's gqom, Pretoria's kwaito-rooted Bacardi house or world-dominating log drum-laced amapiano, but head north to the country's border with Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and you'll hear something completely different. In Ga Sekhukhune, a village in the Limpopo province, the Bapedi ethnic group have retained their own unique cultural form, mapanta, a "living communal practice" that has been maintained through weddings and youth gatherings over decades. Although its popularity waned after its peak in the 1980s, producer, DJ and sound-system operator Serokolo 7 has been instrumental in modernising the formula, sharing FL Studio tips and tricks and sound packs in the village to keep the music alive. 'Maramfa Musik Pro' is Serokolo 7's first widely-available set and is a great primer to his contemporary strain of mapanta, and although he augments the traditional rhythms with ideas he's skimmed from other interrelated rhythmic forms, the core elements still remain intact. The unique vocals, for example, are considered invocations, delivered in Sepedi, one of South Africa's 12 official languages. And they can't be cleaved from their ceremonial function, speaking directly to mapanta's importance as a community celebration, calling out to family lines and totems. The rhythms themselves, while similar in some ways to the brittle, high-speed work of Nozinja (who hailed from nearby Giyani), sound as if they've been marinated in their own juices, trance-inducing but simultaneously disrupted by Serokolo's unforgettable oddball production choices, whether it's field recordings, screwed voices or delirious sub-heavy basslines. The album opens with 'Naba Ba Papedi', a bleak uptempo ritual that plays like an unwieldy fusion of gqom (that omnipresent synth drone), footwork (those unmissable rushing snares) and Shangaan Electro, with layered vocal chants and callouts filling in the gaps. Serokolo is a restless producer who's out on his own, something that only becomes fully evident as the set develops with the pneumatic 'Roskae', a fusion of vocal micro-edits and pressurised subs, or the electrifying 'Chunku Manabeng', that excites the core pulse with brain twisting polyrhythms and the occasional log drum smack for good measure. On ’Bonkoko Bagana' Serokolo lightens things up with chiming melodic hooks and a feathery manyalo-style beat. Unsurprisingly, it's this track that Björk made the focal point of her recent Venice appearance - a key cut from yet another truly eye-opening treasure from Nyege.