world music
Tim Cumming
Katherine Priddy’s debut album came out in the summer, and it’s remained a high point for the rest of the year as 2021 plays out to the sombre drums and drones of resurgent pandemic warnings, fresh lockdowns, closed venues, silenced auditoriums. Her last gig of the year was at St Pancras Old Church on 16th December. I intended to be there, but Omicron infection rates ballooned to the point that going anywhere seemed no longer possible. Hello, and goodbye, to 2021.So I’m here at home again, hunkering down, listening to the songs from The Eternal Rocks Beneath, astonished again at their Read more ...
Rachel Newton
I am fortunate to be one of the musicians involved in Spell Songs, a musical companion piece to both The Lost Words and The Lost Spells by acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane and award-winning illustrator and author Jackie Morris.There have been some truly magical moments since the project began back in 2018. When we gathered to make our first album, I remember watching as Jackie created the first of the beautiful paintings that went on to capture the essence of each musician, each of us painted as a bird with our musical instrument. The first was an egret perched on a harp, my Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The first of two December round-ups from theartsdesk on Vinyl runs the gamut from folk-tronic oddness to Seventies heavy rock to avant-jazz to The Beatles, as well as much else. All musical life is here... except the crap stuff. So dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHSimo Cell Yes.DJ (TEMƎT)The latest from French producer Simo Cell is a bass-boomin’ post-trap six tracker that doesn’t play it straight at all. These are the kinds of tunes that should be heard on a giant sound system so that the earth itself rumbles. The enormous head-annihilating spacious tech-dub of “Farts”, a highlight, sits easily Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Adams has long been Robert Plant’s guitarist in bands including the Sensational Space Shifters, as well as working with fellow Space Shifter Juldeh Camara in the band JuJu. He is steeped in American Blues as well as its West African and Desert Blues roots, having worked as a producer for Rachid Taha and on some of Tinariwen’s finest albums. More recently, he has produced and performed with the outrageously energetic southern Italian Taranta band, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, and it’s from that collaboration that this new set with CGS’s violinist and percussionist, Mauro Durante, stems.They Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
One of the most interesting tracks on Essiebons Special 1973–1984 Ghana Music Power House is Joe Meah’s mysterious "Dee Mmaa Pe". It’s not mentioned in the compilation’s accompanying booklet, and Joe Meah doesn’t figure in any of the standard discographies littering the world-wide web.Despite this inscrutability, Essiebons Special’s second cut has a surprisingly familiar touchstone. Mainly instrumental with stabbing brass, a sax solo and odd vocal interjections it has a shuffling soul vibe. But the keyboard part dominates. What’s played nods so overtly to The Doors’s “Light my Fire” that it’s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
If you were looking for a word to describe Black String in performance at Grand Junction in Paddington, before the high altar of the church of St Mary Magdalene, itself a pinnacle of Victorian neo-Gothic bravura, then that word would be “intense”. Intensely intense. More intense than a blooming bank of Intensia.They may fold in to their sound influences from global jazz, post-rock, Korean folk and free improvisation, but the array of instruments they use to raise the unholy walls of sound in their music, from ancient folk instruments to squalling electric guitars, makes their performance one Read more ...
mark.kidel
40 or so years on from the first wave of London gigs by musicians from West Africa – many of them at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden – London’s connection with the music of Senegal, Mali and the Gambia has taken a new and exciting turn.The Balimaya Project, a 16-piece band which is taking the UK by storm, is led by percussionist Yahael Camara Onono a second-generation Londoner from the African diaspora. As well as creating a contagiously energetic and joyful sound, this is a music with a mission as well as a message.The great Africanist Robert Farris Thompson, author of "The Flash of the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Hailing from Benin and based in Paris since she was 23, Angélique Kidjo can sing in five languages, has collaborated with an A-list festival line-up of global stars ranging from Alicia Keys and Philip Glass to Herbie Hancock and Peter Gabriel, and had her first albums released by Island, after being spotted by label head Chris Blackwell. Each of them was studded with guest artists, including Branford Marsalis and Gilberto Gil, and featuring covers such as Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child”.She has won Grammys, travelled widely as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and set up a foundation to empower Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
So, blinking, after too much isolation, into a spring evening for a first live indoor gig for over a year was always going to be exciting, if just for novelty value. But for a gentle breaking-in to live music, the London Bulgarian Choir was an inspiring choice. Having 26 singers on stage is an achievement at the best of times. In the excellent acoustics of Kings Place the choir somehow managed to oscillate between the earthy and the unearthly in waves of sound.A wider interest in Bulgarian choirs was prompted by the success of the album series Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares put out in the 1980s Read more ...
mark.kidel
Mdou Moctar is often dubbed as the “Hendrix of the desert”. He is not the first West African musician to be linked with African-American guitar stars. Just as you can hear echoes of John Lee Hooker in Ali Farka Toure, and Taj Mahal could collaborate seamlessly with Toumani Diabate, the young musicians emerging brutally into a world of international mining robbery and fundamentalist terror, naturally find inspiration in music from over the ocean. As with so much in music, the influences flow both way, or, from another point of view, there is an epigenetic kinship resounding through shared DNA. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Things got out of hand at theartsdesk on Vinyl this month and these reviews run to 10,000 words. That's around a fifth of The Great Gatsby. It's because there's so much good music that deserves the words, from jazz to metal to pure electronic strangeness. That said, this is the last time theartsdesk on Vinyl will reach this kind of ludicrous length. So enjoy it. Dig deep. There's something for everyone. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHThe Fratellis Half Drunk Under a Full Moon (Cooking Vinyl)Look, I’m the first one to gleefully, mercilessly dance on the grave of so-called landfill indie (the wave Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A complete fully translated and transcribed Obsidian Rock Audio Anthology chronicling the ancient spiritual technologies and exploits of prehistoric, post-revolutionary afro bionics and sacred texts from The Great Book On Arcanum by Supernal 5th Dimension Bound 3rd Dynasty young Kushites from Azania.”So runs the text on the back of the sleeve of the second album from Johannesburg’s Blk Jks, the belated follow-up to their 2009 debut After Humans. Helping them build from this inscrutable manifesto are guests including guitarists Vieux Farka Touré and Madala Kunene, vocalist Ali Magassa Read more ...