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Scorching live recordings from a knockabout Bamako club in 1995, with Lobi putting his new flanger through its paces. Easing in with the soulful, hypnotic Ni Tugula; Sigui is down to business.
Utterly essential for any fan of Brazil’s legendary counter-culture movement. Gathering all the main players, such an amazing array of talent, this LP acted as a kind of manifesto.
‘Wild ecstatic vocals, distorted electric guitars, rocket bass, and an 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 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. Locally and even nationally renowned bands play 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.
‘What results during these ceremonies is unclassifiable 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.’
Singing, amongst ditlhaka reedpipes, and the lesiba mouth bow.
Originally organized by ex-slaves fleeing the Haitian Revolution, only two Tumba Francesa survive in Cuba nowadays, combining African drums and French patois.
Utterly beautiful contemporary recordings.
Ceremonial music from villages in south-west Turkey, featuring a range of saz lutes, violin, and sipsi (a small oboe).
A liturgy and feast headquartered in the mountains of Antalya, with semah sacred dancing and sung poetry accompanied on the saz lute. Six instrumentalists, two vocal lineups here: from 2004 and 2011.
Two heart-breaking songs and a clutch of rug-cutters from the Taurus mountains in southern Turkey. With accompaniment by Hayri Dev on the uçtelli, or lute. Terrific.
Chris King from Dust To Digital giving a heap of Turkish 78s the pile-em-high, sell-em-cheap reissue treatment. Naff artwork and crap notes, but some marvellous music to wheedle out, no doubt.
Electronic dance collaborations with Damon Albarn, Natacha Atlas, Rachid Taha and others, crossing North African forms like gnawa with clubby takes on dub, hip hop and rock.
Knockout stuff. Superb restorations of original 78s — many original compositions, rare recordings of his violin-playing, ud solos; also his most famous improvisations, recorded when he was only nineteen.