MUSIC

When Billy Eckstine's band dissolved in the mid-1940s, adventurous drummer Art Blakey spent two years in Africa, where he briefly converted to Islam; back in New York, he gigged with Miles and Monk, before fronting his own Jazz Messengers. 1957's Orgy In Rhythm drew on the sounds of North Africa and the Middle East, Blakey's unfettered drumming accompanied by Latin percussionists such as Potato Valdez and Evilio Quintero, with Herbie Mann on flute. The musical arrangement is stunning, at times melodic or primordially rhythmic, but never short of pure brilliance. Overall, an excellent and astounding release!

During the mid-‘70s, Switzerland had embraced punk within its cities, informing the subsequent post-punk era of the 1980s as music splintered into freeform musical strands across the whole of the country. It was to become one of the most innovative periods in Switzerland’s modern day music history. “It was like a wild laboratory for all forms of new and strange sounds, rackets and compositional experiments,” explains writer Lurker Grand, “accompanied and inspired by cutting- edge developments in electronic musical instruments. A broad, innovative scene developed and the four different language and cultural regions of Switzerland were no longer perceived to be an obstacle. There was a curiosity for the foreign and the strange. Conflicts for freedom and free spaces took place and this was reflected in the music.” It was unfiltered creativity and this free, non-commercial approach is a common denominator for the songs on this compilation. Many artists operated in their own universe; hardly any of the acts on this album actually met each other at the time. Only Liliput from Zürich achieved notable fame, building on the success of their previous incarnation as Kleenex.

Strut revives a lost recording from the archives in January with a 2002 collaboration between acclaimed South African folk singer Vusi Mahlasela, singer songwriter Norman Zulu and Swedish jazz / soul collective Jive Connection. The links between South Africa and Sweden have long been strong with Sweden one of the most supportive European nations in the struggle against apartheid; the government helped to fund the ANC for decades and Mandela visited the country on one of his first European stops following his release from prison in 1990. Sotho folk singer Vusi Mahlasela, dubbed “The Voice” Of South Africa, performed at Mandela’s inauguration in 1994 and has enjoyed his own long relationship with Sweden, regularly embarking on cultural exchanges and forging a strong bond with the Jive Connection band, featuring guitarist / bassist Stefan Bergman and Little Dragon drummer Erik Bodin within its line-up. Although touring regularly, the collaboration has rarely been documented beyond a lone studio album in 1994. This “lost” recording, discovered in the archives of producer Torsten Larsson, also features songwriter / vocalist Norman Zulu and showcases their natural musical chemistry together. Vusi’s songs have traditionally addressed the struggle for freedom and the need for reconciliation and, here, his lyrics are as powerful as ever, ranging from parables (‘Prodigal Son’) to an unflinching lament on child abuse (‘Faceless People’). Jive Connection vary the soundtrack, bringing in hints of reggae, jazz and post-punk alongside traditional township arrangements. Face To Face is mastered by The Carvery. Artwork features unseen photos from the album sessions along with full lyrics. Produced in association with Torsten Larsson.

he unbelievably prolific Haruomi Hosono is one of the major architects of modern Japanese pop music. With his encyclopedic knowledge of music and boundless curiosity for new sounds, Hosono is the auteur of his own idiosyncratic musical world, putting his unmistakable stamp on hundreds of recordings as an artist, session player, songwriter, and producer. Born and raised in central Tokyo, his adolescent obsession with American pop culture informed his early forays into country music, which he would revisit later in his career. Hosono made his professional debut in 1969 as a member of Apryl Fool, whose heavy psychedelia was somewhat at odds with his influences, which leaned towards the rootsy sounds of Moby Grape and Buffalo Springfield. The latter was one of the main inspirations for his next group, Happy End, whose unique blend of West Coast sounds with Japanese lyrics proved to be highly influential over the course of three albums. After the band’s amicable break up in 1973, Hosono began his solo career with Hosono House, an intimate slice of Japanese Americana recorded inside a rented house with recording gear squeezed into its tiny bedroom. Hosono’s solo career would take many twists and turns from this point forward, with forays into exotica, electronic, ambient, and techno, culminating in the massive success of techno pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). Released in September 1978, a mere two months before YMO’s debut, Cochin Moon is a clear precursor to the groundbreaking synth and sequencer-dominated sounds that would come to define the iconic trio. Credited to Hosono and Pop Art legend Tadanori Yokoo (who created the cover art), Cochin Moon is a fictional soundtrack to a journey into unknown worlds, inspired by Hosono and Yokoo’s trip to India. Initially the album was to be a kind of ethnographic musical document, using found sounds and field recordings made by Hosono himself. Instead, after Yokoo introduced Hosono to the sounds of Kraftwerk and krautrock during the trip, Cochin Moon became something much stranger. Created almost entirely on synthesizers and sequencers with the help of future YMO collaborators Ryuichi Sakamoto and Hideki Matsutake, the music on the album is the perfect encapsulation of Hosono’s concept of “sightseeing music,” transporting the listener to an exotic place that may or may not exist. This highly sought-after album sees its first-ever official release outside of Japan. Admired by artists ranging from Van Dyke Parks to Mac DeMarco, Hosono continues to forge ahead as he heads into his fifth decade as a musician. With the re-release of his key albums for the first time outside of Japan, his genius will be discovered by a whole new generation of fans around the world.

ZZK Records presents Mito y Comadre’s Guajirando, a journey into the reinvention of traditional Venezuelan music For years the ancestral riches of the folklore, culture and traditions of the indigenous peoples of Latin America have withstood the passing of time and the different impositions and trends of an increasingly globalized world that seems intent on pushing them into oblivion. Their fight to stay true to their roots and preserve their legacy means there is more and more interest in sharing these treasures with the world. Guajirando comes from this interest in finding recognition in our roots. This is the debut record from Mito y Comadre, the Venezuelan synth-pop and electronic roots group who with these nine previously unreleased songs take us on a journey through the sights and sounds of their country. The fusion of electronic sounds pays homage to a rarely explored music, one that is profoundly rooted in the territory, creating a dialogue between native percussions and rhythms such as the quitiplás, the malembe and the quichimba of Barlovento, the macizón and perra of the Caribbean coast, the calypso of the heartland, the flauta guajira and the gaita oriental, among other instruments. Backed by machines, electronic elements and the production of Grammy winner Christian Castagno (Bomba Estéreo, Systema Solar, Iggy Pop, Arcade Fire), they seek to bring visibility to these traditional rhythms with contemporary tendencies, creating a visionary fusion that places them on the scene as one of the most promising proponents of experimental Venezuelan music today.

The Medicine Singers groundbreaking debut LP on Stone Tapes, produced by Yonatan Gat, embodies decades of musical genres influenced by Native American music, offering what Pitchfork called a "vivid new context for the sound of the powwow drum, highlighting the debt that rock music owes to Native American music." This monumental album connects experimental music and traditional powwow in previously unheard ways, acting as a guided tour de force, taking listeners through the many different musical styles with roots (still being discovered) in Native American music. From psychedelic punk to spiritual jazz, from minimalism to electronic music. Their live show is the stuff of legend – the Medicine Singers set up, often in-the-round with the audience encircling the band, and go into a trance-inducing set where the walls between band and spectator, as well as between psychedelic rock and shamanic chants, are blurred. Or in the words of Canada’s Exclaim Magazine “the border between audience and performer had all but been dissolved by the sheer power of music. By letting the audience in on the action, [Medicine Singers] evoked a type of bodily experience that transcended mere observation.” Bridging multiple dimensions of sound, on their debut LP Medicine Singers expanded into a remarkable supergroup that also includes ambient music pioneer Laraaji, Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica of Swans, “No Wave” icon and former DNA drummer Ikue Mori, trumpet player jaimie branch and guitarist/producer Yonatan Gat. Half a decade after the spur-of-the-moment story of how the musicians first met and unraveled their sound on an unsuspecting audience during SXSW 2017 when Gat saw Eastern Medicine Singers play on the street and invited the band to spontaneously join his show – the collaboration between the musicians reaches a climax with this breathtaking debut album as Medicine Singers, helping pave the way to this year’s rising wave of Native contributions to experimental music – shining a spotlight on guest vocalists representing indigenous nations from outside of the Northeastern Woodland tribal area. “Where else can you get all these different native people singing together on an album?” Jamieson asked. “On this album you have east, west, north and south all coming together. That’s why we say it’s medicine.” iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 472px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3001077196/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless>Medicine Singers by Medicine Singers

オリジナルは$4,000で取引されたエチオピア産ジャズの77年金字塔的傑作『Tche Belew』を残したことでも知られるレジェンド中のレジェンドによる最新作！エチオピークの重鎮Mulatu Astatkeとも仕事を共にした伝説的ジャズ・キーボード奏者のHailu Mergia。2016年に録音していた秘蔵ライブ・レコーディング音源『Pioneer Works Swing (Live)』が〈Awesome Tapes From Africa〉より堂々アナウンス。2016年7月1日、ブルックリンの由緒ある非営利文化センター〈Pioneer Works〉で行われた彼らの激しいライヴを美しく捉えています。エネルギッシュかつ遊び心たっぷりに、エチオピアの様々なレパートリーから、ハーモニーとリズムの面白さを次々と引き出した現代のエチオ・ジャズの新たなる金字塔！

It's been a long, winding road to Hailu Mergia's sixth decade of musical activity. From a young musician in the 60s starting out in Addis Ababa to the 70s golden age of dance bands to the new hope as an emigre in America to the drier period of the 90s and 2000s when he mainly played keyboard in his taxi while waiting in the airport queue or at home with friends. More recently, with the reissue of his classic works and a re-assessment of his role in Ethiopian music history, Mergia has played to audiences big and small in some of the most cherished venues around the world. With his 2018 critical breakthrough "Lala Belu" Mergia consolidated his legacy, producing the album on his own and connecting with listeners through his vision of modern Ethiopian music. Extensive touring after the record revealed an artist who is in no way stuck in the nostalgia for the “golden age” sound. The press agreed, including the New York Times, BBC and Pitchfork, calling his music “triumphantly in the present” in its Best 200 Albums of the 2010's list.

Mergia's new album "Yene Mircha" ("My Choice" in Amharic) encapsulates many of the things that make the keyboardist, accordionist and composer-arranger remarkable—elements that have persisted to maintain his vitality all these years, through the ebb and flow of his career. The rock solid trio with whom he has toured the world most recently, DC-based Alemseged Kebede (bass) and Ken Joseph (drums), forms the nucleus around which an expanded band makes a potent response to the contemporary jazz future "Lala Belu" promised. "Yene Mircha" calcifies Mergia's prolific stream of creativity and his philosophy that there is a multitude of Ethiopian musical approaches, not just one sound.

Enlisting the help of master mesenqo (traditional stringed instrument) player Setegn Atenaw, celebrated vocalist Tsehay Kassa and legendary saxophone player Moges Habte from his 70s outfit Walias Band, Mergia enhances his bright, electric band on this recording with an expanded line up on some songs. Mergia produced the album which features several of his original compositions along with songs by Asnakesh Worku and Teddy Afro. An artist still reinventing his sound every night on stage during his marathon live sets, this 74-year-old icon refuses to make the same album twice. His creative process in the studio—starting with the core band, then after listening extensively over weeks and months adding more sounds and instruments—is as urgent and risky as his concerts can be, pushing the band to the outer limits of group improvisation and back with chord extensions during his exploratory solos. "Yene Mircha" captures this live experience and fosters an expansive view of what else could be in store for this tireless practitioner of Ethiopian music.

Fans of Coltrane will certainly dig this historical 1970s spiritual jazz album from Argentina which left an everlasting imprint in the local jazz scene. From the eerie "Blues para un cosmonauta" —which could easily fit in the Twin Peaks soundtrack—, to the majestic "Líneas Torcidas" or the mid-tempo groove of "Mi amigo Tarzán", new landscapes in jazz are explored without hiding, at moments, the musicians' bebop pedigree. Venturing into uncharted dimensions, the album breaks with traditionalism and combines jazz and new electronic instruments into a contemporary concept that is both cosmic and sensual, a sound where timbre and space play a crucial role. Here, no track sounds like the other. The charismatic, multifaceted saxophone player Horacio "Chivo" Borraro is joined here most notably by Fernando Gelbard —who pioneered electronic keyboards and analog synths in Argentina, playing here Fender Rhodes and Minimoog— and Brazilian musician Stenio Mendes —who plays the 12-string craviola and contributes two tracks. Jorge González on bass and Néstor Astarita on drums —both part of Gato Barbieri's rhythm section in the early 60s— and Chino Rossi —responsible for much of the unusual percussion and special effects that give the album its unprejudiced aura— complete the line-up of Blues para un Cosmonauta.

Best known for his proficiency on the Oud, John Berberian has been releasing music since the early-1960s. While attending New York's Columbia University, Berberian made his professional musical debut playing the Oud in support of violinist Reuben Sarkisian. While completing an MBA from Harvard, Berberian managed to find the time to become a staple on the Manhattan nightclub scene. In 1964 he was signed to Bob Shad's New York-based Mainstream Records, where he recorded a pair of Middle Eastern-themed instrumental collections. Those were followed by a pair of albums for George Goldner's Roulette and Jerry Schoenbaum's Verve Forecast. Music Of The Middle East was originally released in 1966 on Roulette and showcased all of the composer brilliancy. The group he formed to perform the traditional music of Turkey, Armenia, Greece, Arabia and North Africa, succeeded in creating a vividly exotic blend of rhythms, melodies and improvisations into an early global beat. Still a breathtaking experience.

With this new solar album, Brazilian singer-songwriter Lucas Santtana wishes to re-enchant our life on earth. For his ninth album "O Paraíso" (Paradise), the free heir of the Brazilian tropicália intends to redefine our idea of Paradise. "It is in front of us, we must open our eyes and learn to contemplate it in depth," he explains. The Earth is a living organism also called "biosphere", a unique planet in the solar system where all the conditions are gathered to welcome life. Lucas places life at the heart of his songs and celebrates the collective forces that resist to preserve it. His guitar-vocal songs with bossa nova sounds are mixed with organic sounding percussions, enriched with electronic orchestrations and textures. The Brazilian composer gets closer to his French audience by collaborating with Flavia Coelho, Flore Benguigui (from the band L'Impératrice) or the saxophonist Laurent Bardainne, and by even trying his hand at French on one of his tracks. It's a festive new album, which helps us better understand where we live and with whom we share this heavenly home.

Six years after Chamber Music, the partnership between the two men, nourished by their years of pilgrimage worldwide, resonates louder than ever on Musique de nuit.

Kora - Ballaké Sissoko

Cello - Vincent Segal

Babani Kone - Lead vocal on Diabaro

New quartet Sissoko Segal Parisien Peirani presents "Les Égarés" (The wandering), an album recorded by two virtuoso duos (Sissoko-Segal and Peirani-Parisien), who for years have excelled in the art of cross-fertilising sounds and transcending genres. Les Egarés is more than a record. It’s play space, a locus of musical life, a poetic asylum inhabited by two duos: Ballaké Sissoko (kora) and Vincent Segal (cello) on the one hand and Vincent Peirani (accordion) and Émile Parisien (sax) on the other. In the case of these magicians, 2 + 2 no longer makes 4, it makes 1. Because what they concoct is most definitely a unity of spirit, a single and fluid sound that disdains all forms of egotistical competitiveness and puts each participant at the service of a common musical good. Neither jazz, nor trad, nor chamber, nor avant-garde, but a bit of all of them, all at once, Les Egarés is the kind of album that makes the ear the king of all instruments, an album where virtuosity expresses itself in the art of complicity, where the simple and grandiose idea of listening to one another results in the birth of a splendid song with four parts. A record without solo voice that never stops singing. ‘You walk without knowing where you’re going, letting yourself drift and giving into the pleasure of being lost’ sums up Vincent Segal.

Kaloli is the debut full-length LP from Kampala’s darkest electro-percussion group Nihiloxica. The album marries the propulsive Ugandan percussion of the Nilotika Cultural Ensemble with technoid analog synth lines and hybrid kit playing from the UK’s pq and Spooky-J. The result is something otherworldly. Kaloli journeys through the uncharted space between two cultures of dance music, where the expression of traditional elements mutates into something more sinister and nihilistic.

The album takes its name from the Luganda word for the Marabou stork. Kaloli are carrion birds that can be seen amassing in areas of festering waste around the country, particularly in Kampala, with its heightened levels of urban pollution. Freakishly large in size and riddled with amorphous boils, growths and tufts, these toxic creatures thrive on detritus. Rising skyward on huge air currents, however, their wretchedness is softened as they effortlessly glide above the city. Nihiloxica tread a similar path to the kaloli: a dissonant, polyrhythmic assault on the senses holds a transcendental beauty.

Since 2017 the band have honed their sound in residence at Nyege Nyege’s Boutiq Studio in Kampala, one of the most vital cultural melting pots on the continent. Their debut self-titled EP for the acclaimed Ugandan label was an immediate success. An auspicious project between two UK musicians and a Kampala-based percussion troupe, Nilotika Cultural Ensemble, sparked a musical dialogue across continents with the aim to fuse two distanced cultures of dance music into one aural entity. The synergy between the group was instantaneous. The EP was composed, rehearsed and recorded with a minimal studio setup in the space of a month, giving Nihiloxica a rawness and brutality that pushed it into best-of-year lists across the world. However, this proved to be only a snapshot of what Nihiloxica were capable of. After a year of jamming together and road-testing material live on stage across the world, the second EP, Biiri, showed the band communicating with each other more freely. Their musical vocabulary was becoming ever more intricate. Now, after three successful European tours, this cross-continental conversation has brought us Kaloli.

Recorded with Ross Halden at Hohm Studios directly after a concert supporting Aphex Twin, Kaloli captures the vitality of Nihiloxica’s show-stopping live performances and magnifies it with pq’s honest, powerful production. For five days in September 2019 in Bradford, Nihiloxica laid down the bulk of the album: eight synthetic abstractions of the traditional folk-rhythms of Uganda. At the heart of every song is a groove, a drum pattern to be explored and developed. Each takes us through a different rhythmic territory: Busoga from the east of Uganda, Bwola from the north, Gunjula from the central region, Buganda.

The soundscape is dominated by the ancestral Bugandan drum set, consisting of Alimansi Wanzu Aineomugisha and Jamiru Mwanje on the engalabi (long drums - a tall Ugandan sister to the djembe), Henry Kasoma on the namunjoloba (a set of four small, high pitched drums) and Henry Isabirye on the empuunyi (a set of three low pitched bass drums). Wanzu also plays the ensaasi (shakers). One of the major additions to the sonic palette of Kaloli are the electronic drum sounds used more increasingly by Jacob Maskell-Key (Spooky J), providing an additional link between worlds, evident as electro-percussive punctuation on Salongo and Gunjula. The patterns beaten out by the ensemble are then explored harmonically and spectrally by the synths of Peter Jones (pq), stretching and searching for hooks and sounds among the rhythmic mayhem like kaloli picking and poking through decaying matter.

For their forthcoming release on Crammed Discs, Nihiloxica’s dialogue reaches ever further into new areas. Busoga is dreamy and melodious, while Bwola plunges straight into armageddon. Tewali Sukali embraces the band’s furtive heavy metal influences much more closely. With more running time, the band have been able to sculpt their most personal, revealing work to date: one that stands up as a true home listening experience. Giving listeners a further glimpse into Nihiloxica’s musical process are snippets from rehearsal sessions that took place ahead of the recording in Jinja, near to where Nyege Nyege festival takes place. In the third and final of these interlude we witness Jally drop his engalabi in favour of a hand-made flute to lend the album a tranquil ad-libbed outro, accompanied by an evening chorus of Jinja’s plentiful crickets.


Once described by Gareth Main in the Quietus as ‘the best band on Earth right now’, it’s no surprise that Nihiloxica have plaudits from an esteemed list of sources. Notably by publications such as Pitchfork, the Guardian and Les Inrockuptibles, the group’s sound has been widely described as eerie, hypnotic, floor shaking and body moving. With an extensive touring schedule ahead of them, including dates confirmed at Sonar and Dekmantel, Nihiloxica’s Kaloli looks set to spread its wings in 2020.

Source of Denial is the second LP from Nihiloxica, the Bugandan techno outfit hailing from Kampala, Uganda. It comes after more than three long years since Kaloli, their acclaimed debut on Crammed Discs.

The album points a (middle) finger at the hostile immigration and freedom of movement policies implemented in the UK, as well as across the world. Fueled by their frustrations with this intentionally convoluted system, the group have produced their most cataclysmic effort to date.

Returning to the Nyege Nyege studio in Kampala where the band recorded their early EPs, the band tracked Source of Denial over an intense month of sessions in early 2022. The cover art is emblazoned with an ultra-metallic new logo, echoing the growing presence of metal influences across the tracklisting, while the hi-vis, official-document styling wryly evokes the bureaucratic nightmare at the heart of the project. Tracks like Asidi and Baganga flirt with the dystopian, mechanical patterns and tonalities of djent godfathers Meshuggah, while the gargantuan synth line of the title track summons the spirit of an 8-string guitar, synthesised palm-mutes and all. This is all effortlessly compounded with the molotov cocktail of Bugandan ngoma (drums) and club sounds the group have become revered for. On tracks like Olutobazzi, Postloya and Trip Chug, the drums themselves are reanimated and manipulated more than ever before, further blurring the line between tradition and techno.

The only spoken words we hear throughout the album, outside of studio outtake Preloya, are computer generated. They speak of application processes, character backgrounds, and accountability, blasted through crackled phone speakers. The effect is a Kafkaesque feedback loop: an avalanche of constant call tones, uncanny British accents and rigorous interrogative questioning. The frustrations are a problem the band, a defiantly global outfit, has faced continuously. A whole UK tour was cancelled in 2022, and recently, a UK show had to be performed with only three members due to problems with a certain conglomerate visa agency who “provide services” for the UK, as well as a growing number of countries.

“We wanted to create the sense of being in the endless, bureaucratic hell-hole of attempting to travel to a foreign country that deems itself superior to where you’re from. We’re focussing on the UK as that’s where we’ve had the most trouble, but the problem goes much, much further. In this system if you have a certain passport or have even visited a certain country then you’re an appropriate subject to be interrogated and insulted time and time again just to prove that you’re worthy to enter, and normally this involves proving you have a good enough reason to want to leave again! The arrogance of it is unbearable. This album was a way to express our disdain towards it... What exactly is the source of your denial? Your passport? Your bank balance? Your skin colour? You’ve paid huge sums of money to be thrown from one profit-driven “service centre” to another, each denying responsibility, each limiting your right to freedom of movement as a human being. Despite some other serious humanitarian shortcomings, Uganda accepts some of the highest numbers of refugees in the world. Meanwhile the UK is trying to send them away to Rwanda. That says it all.” - Nihiloxica

To celebrate the 21st anniversary of Juana Molina’s breakthrough album Segundo (2000), here’s a very special reissue, remastered from the original tapes, and augmented by a rich booklet recounting the eventful start of Juana’s musical career, and containing numerous notes, anecdotes, original drawings and previously unreleased pictures.
Segundo is the album which started Juana Molina’s international trajectory as a musician, and its making was a wild story: after dropping her highly-successful career as a TV comedian, and signing with a major company who got her to record her debut album, Juana set out to find her own direction in music and started working on a new record (aptly titled Segundo). This journey took four years, and included sessions in Argentina and in several houses where she lived on the US West Coast, the involvement of several possible producers and of four successive record labels, who each had their own idea of what Juana should be doing... Juana remained untamed, forged ahead and, during the course of this sometimes complicated process, developed her own method and her own characteristic sound. She writes:
From the moment “Segundo” took shape, I began to walk a path that I have not yet abandoned. That is why it’s so important to me. I feel that this was the seed of everything I have done ever since. I discovered the flair of composing in real time, the charm of discarding the very idea of demos, the grace of documenting these moments of searching and finding. Everything else became dispensable.

In 2000, Juana finally self-released Segundo in Argentina. The album semi-accidentally made its way to Japan where it very spectacularly took off, and was eventually picked up by the Domino label in 2003. The reception of Segundo set Juana Molina on course for starting to perform around the globe, garnering a large, devoted fan base, and going on to record five more extraordinary studio albums (including the widely-acclaimed Halo in 2017) and a live record (ANRMAL, 2020).
All this and much more is narrated in the lovely booklet, which includes notes by several people who were involved in these events (including Bruce Springsteen producer Ron Aniello) and by early adopters such as KCRW DJ Chris Douridas, Domino Recording’s Laurence Bell (who discovered Segundo by chance, in Will Oldham’s car), and David Byrne who, as soon as he heard the album for the first time, invited Juana to open for him on his 2003 US tour. 
 

Rio Arriba is the sophomore album from Chancha Via Circuito, who molds local South American rhythms into global artistry. Rio Arriba bubbles up from the Andes like percussive lava, seething as it is soothing. Layers of drums play out like water and earth battling heat - heat brought by Chancha Via Circuito. Chancha has forged a path from his town outside the urban sprawl of Buenos Aires in the east of Argentina up across the border with Bolivia and into the Northern hemisphere where he's bringing new fans to native drum traditions. In his first release, Rodante, Chancha took cumbia into uncharted territory retrofitting the Latin rhythm for a worldly audience. With Rio Arriba, South American folklore takes the reins and, under Chancha’s steady hand, obscure backwoods rhythms take on a top shelf lifestyle as folklore hits the club. Cumbia made Chancha’s first album Rodante a stand out, Rio Arriba takes his sound primal, rooted in rhythm, but worldwide in scope. With recent remixes of The Ruby Suns (Sub Pop) and Gotan Project (Ya Basta/XL Recordings), Chancha proves his production can cross continents and pollinate. Rio Arriba annihilates the obvious - it's a fresh breeze from the city of good air flooding the urban habitat, sending you dancing upstream.

Another side of modern Malian praise songs: an intimate, stripped down, acoustic session from Namian Sidibé. From a rising generation of young Malian divas leveraging social media, Namian has built a following, publishing videos and dedications in song, accompanied by her cousin Jules Diabaté on acoustic guitar. Recorded at her home, with powerful yet restrained vocals that drift over melancholy acoustic guitar, Namian explores epic generational songs and poetry, brought into the Tik Tok age.

Wau Wau Collectif’s second album, Mariage, is instilled with a newfound sense of purpose. Expanding upon the inspirational themes of their acclaimed 2021 debut, Yaral Sa Doom (Educate The Young), this long distance collaboration from musicians in Senegal and Sweden’s Karl Jonas Winqvist is an even more stylistically expansive affair. Joyful children’s songs collide with fuzzy guitar solos and thumping hip-hop beats. Shimmering synths lift off from the plunky percussion of the balafon and versatile sounds of the 22-string kora. Familiar voices from the first album return with more explicitly political lyrics, while the music feels both rhythmically dense and sonically weightless, flowing from one spellbinding moment to the 6 next. For Mariage, band members from each country were inspired to include a wider array of instrumental flourishes unique to their cross-continental collaboration. “Yay Balma” revolves around the cycling riffs of Jango Diabaté’s xalam guitar, as this song’s fuzzy tones and soaring sax solos open side two with a bang. “Pitchi Goubidi” provides a stark contrast, with the kora played like a harp and Gilbert Badji’s gravelly lyrics about “the bird of the night” disappearing into dubbed-out chamber pop. Winqvist’s Omnichord hovers back into focus on “Yonou Natangue,” a free-floating jam that maintains the messages of Wau Wau Collectif’s debut, promoting youth education to address the social issues facing contemporary Senegal: “Peace is the better wealth / The way to wander.”

Mamman Sani Abdoulaye, a legendary name amongst Niger’s avant garde, presents a singularly unique recording of minimalist organ music from the Sahara. Dreamy and hypnotic, the sound is unlike anything coming out of West Africa before or since, closer in effect to early electronic experiments of Kraftwerk.Mamman composes in technique that can only be called minimal, relying on the simplicity and space. It is a remarkable manipulation of sound that uses the silence to invoke the emptiness, a metaphoric desert soundscape. Unsurprisingly, his source material is folkloric Nigerien music, and many of the compositions on this record are reproductions of ancient songs brought into the modern age. Interpreting this rich and varied history of Niger’s dance and song for the first time in contemporary music, Mamman electrifies the nomadic drum of the Tuaerg, the polyphonic ballads of the Woddaabe, and the pastoral hymns of the Sahelian herders. Accompanying this repertoire are a few compositions, such as Salamatu, the deeply personal love letter to an unrequited romance.Recorded in 1981 at the National Radio in Niger, shortly after Mamman discovered an old Italian organ, the album was a spontaneous production, recorded in two takes. It was released on cassette but was a commercial failure, and only a handful were sold. The recordings, however, were a success, and became the themes to the National radio for the subsequent 30 years, securing Mamman’s place in the foundation of Nigerien music.Rediscovered in a cassette archive in Niger and digitized on a portable recorder, La Musique Électronique du Niger was reissued in 2013 on limited vinyl. Now restored and remastered from the original tape material by Jessica Thompson, this new edition is available on vinyl, cd, and a color Newbury Comics edition.

Chìsake [Algonquin]: to chant; to conjure; to cast a spell; this generally involves a shake-house, or shaking tent, in which the conjurer goes into a trance; the conjurer then has an out-of-body experience, going into the future to predict coming events, or into the past; as well as going into any locality in the universe to seek out someone or something generally practiced for ancestral divination. The unaccompanied flute pieces within this album are adaptations of Anishinaabeg shaking tent chants. The Anishinaabeg also known as Anishinaabe are a group of culturally related Indigenous peoples that reside in areas now called Canada and the United States. They include the Odawa, Saulteaux, Ojibwe (including Mississaugas), Potawatomi, Oji-Cree and Algonquin peoples. The word Anishinaabeg translates to “people from whence lowered”. The Anishinaabeg origin myths describe their people originating by divine breath. The shaking tent or conjuring lodge was the setting for a divinatory rite performed by specially trained shamans otherwise known as Chìsakewininì. During the shaking tent ceremony the Chìsakewininì would construct a special cylindrical framework typically of birch or spruce uprights planted in the ground with respective wood hoops to bind it together. This created a tensile structure of which birch bark, deer skin, or cloth was used as a covering. Rattles of caribou and deer hooves, or cups of lead shot, were tied to the frame. The floor was usually softened with freshly cut spruce boughs. The vertical axis of the shaking tent represents the realm of mediating beings, while the horizontal axis the earth or world of humans. The Chìsakewininì would enter the shaking tent at night and once inside would not be visible from onlookers. The singing of chants and drumming would summon the Chìsakewininì’s spirit helpers, whose arrival was signified by animal cries and erratic tent shaking. During this transcendent state, the Chìsakewininì could dispatch these spirit helpers or Manidò to distant regions to answer questions from the onlookers about the most auspicious places to hunt, the well-being of a distant relative, and what would happen in the future. The chants were usually sung using vocables before, during, and after the Chìsakewininì entered the shaking tent. Like many other similar divination ceremonies, singular or collective, the opening chants begin lyrically. They gradually turn to more reductive abstract structures midway and then end in lyrical chants. This symbolizes the performer and listener leaving the external literal world, entering a more abstract state of mind, and then returning. Traditionally all songs were carved on birch bark for record-keeping with mnemonic pictographs or other marks for future use. Tally mark clustering, sometimes used for song-keeping throughout the Anishinaabeg, is used for this album’s track titles and numerical sequence. The album intro begins with the shaking of a necklace of otter penis bone, fish spine, bear teeth, elk teeth and deer hide, gifted from Algonquin Elder Ajawajawesi. It is meant to focus the listener’s attention before the flute pieces begin. The warble or multi-phonic oscillation prevalent in the middle tracks traditionally represented the “throat rattling” vocalization of the tonic note or sometimes known as the horizon of which the melody floats off of. Due to the repetition of multi-phonic oscillation the performer will breathe erratically creating an altered state correlating with the Chìsakewininì ceremonial actions. All songs are repeated seven times to signify the seven sacred directions: east, south, west, north, above/sky, below/earth, and center. -Timothy Archambault

The first-ever compilation of χαβάγιες ("havagies"), the nearly forgotten Hawaiian-influenced music of 1930s Greece, focused on the compositions of Kostas Bezos and his ensemble White Birds. A world-class slide guitarist, political cartoonist and sleepless Bohemian, Kostas Bezos created some of the most unique music of any era: surrealist guitar portraits blending Athens and Honolulu, haunting tropical serenades, wild acoustic orchestras, and heartbreaking steel guitar duets. Incredibly, this is the same musician responsible for the legendary "Kostis" rebetika recordings (see A. Kostis "The Jail's a Fine School" [OLV-002 / MRP-098]).

LP version includes a 32-page booklet with extensive notes by Tony Klein and Dimitris Kourtis, many rare photographs, lyrics, obituaries.

Black Market Brass is proud to present Hox, due out on Colemine Records on September 8, 2023. Their third LP is a new take on afrobeat that combines traditional grooves with heavy, hypnotic, sci-fi sounds that reflect the band’s myriad of influences as record collectors across genres. “We didn’t leave the traditional afro-beat sound behind, but we did allow ourselves to pull from different places with less hesitation.” Shared saxophonist Cole Pulice. Like their previous albums, the 9-piece band recorded Hox live to tape. “The sound and aesthetic of the analog recording process is important for this kind of music,” Pulice explained. “We’re looking to capture lightning in a bottle.” With that, the album features several sections of heavily processed synthesizers, harsh glitches, fuzzed out guitars, and a burning percussion section that pays homage to the traditional drumming cultures of Nigeria and Ghana. The performances are dynamic and confident. The grooves are infectious and hypnotic. BMB has pushed further into musical experimentalism, but at the end of the day, they’re still making dance music. Krautrock, free-jazz, doom metal – the inspirations for Hox stem from all kinds of musical backgrounds, but the sound is far from scattered. It’s a polished, innovative record that’s sure to exceed expectations and keep the listener engaged from start to finish.

1980年代から90年代初頭にかけて、カメルーンのビクツィ・シーンから現れた最もミステリアスなアーティストにして重要人物の一人、Gibraltar Drakusが1989年に残したアルバム『Hommage A Zanzibar』が、アフリカのオブスキュアなカセットテープを掘り起こす大名門〈Awesome Tapes From Africa〉より史上初アナログ・リイシュー。悲劇的かつ謎の死を遂げたギタリストのThéodore Zanzibarに捧げられたアルバム。ベティの伝統音楽とエレクトロニックで非常にリズミカルなギターベースのビクティを完璧に融合させたファースト・アルバムにして、10万枚以上を売り上げた代表的作品！