195: Volume 2, by Mariam Bogayogo

Mariam Bogayogo (Mali)
Volume 2
6 tracks, 45 minutes
Awesome Tapes from Africa

This is a strange one for me. I can never really listen to more than a couple of minutes of this album at a time. Nevertheless, I think it definitely deserves its place as a Good Album due to exactly that, really, just for how jarring it is to Western ears. Malian music is huge in world music circles and even in the mainstream in the West, in part because of how closely our two musical cultures align aesthetically, but this one is way out.

I don’t know much about this tape, but the comments section on Awesome Tapes from Africa thinks the original recordings were probably from the 1960s, when the singer Mariam Bogayogo was at the height of her fame. It’s hard to find out any information on Bogayogo online, so I don’t even know what style of music this is, but I know the accompanying instrument is the balani xylophone – the name means ‘small balafon’ and is the ‘pop’ version of the balafon, a version that does not have the same strict associations with the griots. So this is more of a pop style than a deeply traditional one…but that’s all I can find out.

But let’s talk about how it sounds. The original ATFA post describes it as ‘scary’ and ‘apocalyptic,’ and I get that. To my stupid ears, it sounds as if the vocals (of Bogayogo and her backing vocalists) and the balani players are playing in entirely separate keys. It doesn’t even sound as if someone’s out-of-tune, they sound as if they’re just playing two completely different – and opposing – sets of notes. All of their timing matches up too, so it’s not even as if one part of a multitrack recording was played back at the wrong speed. It sounds amazing, to be honest; completely unpleasant to my ears, but in such an intriguing way. I wish I knew what was going on here. On top of that, you have that standard thing of a very, very short melodic section that is repeated ad infinitum on the balani for the entire length of the track over which Bogayogo stretches her brilliant voice, but when matched with that mad tuning, the insistence of the repetition becomes really creepy, helped along by the poor audio quality and echo no doubt created through decades of copies-upon-copies.

See how long you can listen to this tape for. It’s such an exciting sound and a real puzzler for me. Please tell me if you know anything about this at all, but if not, just let those otherworldly tones get deep in your brain and mess things around a bit.