Donso (2010)
11 tracks, 49 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes
This is the first album of Malian music on my list and it took four whole days! Malian music is massive. Musicians from Mali have a worldwide reputation for their prodigious skills, and the country seems to produce a new ‘world music’ star every month. There’s plenty more to come as well, but for now…
Donso stand out from the rest with a mix of styles that isn’t often heard. Their name comes from the Bamana word for ‘hunter,’ so it makes sense that the band’s sound is based on the music of the Bamana hunters. Hunters’ music is incredibly powerful both sonically and spiritually, with its never-ending 6/8 rhythms, bluesy pentatonics and the harsh tones of its two main instruments, the karignan iron scraper and – most importantly – the donsongoni, a rattling, thumping bridge-harp. It’s a fantastic tradition that is unfortunately overshadowed by other styles of the region – particularly that of the jeli griots – in the West.
A music with such deep roots may seem an ill fit with dance music, but that’s just what Donso do, and they do it excellently. The two Malians and two Frenchmen that make up the band mix so much into their music, but at the core is that mix between electronics and acoustics. Donsongoni, jelingoni (a fretless lute related to the banjo), guitar and synths play off each other to create a tapestry of timbre while drum kits, karingnan, tama (talking drum) and drum machine make mad polyrhythms that are 100% designed for dancing, and it’s all tied together by the voice of Gédéon Diarra.
It feels like it shouldn’t really work, or if it did, it shouldn’t work this well. But of course it does. While their spirituality may be different, Bamana hunters’ music and electronica share their focus on repetition and trance, and they lose none of that when they’re combined. Turn your brain off when you listen to Donso, and let it make you feel how it wants you to feel. Play loud and dance out of your head!
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