Impossible Broadcasting (2004)
12 tracks, 54 minutes
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Quick announcement up top: as sheer coincidence would have it, Transglobal Underground are playing a very special concert TONIGHT if you're reading this on the day it's published – on 18th May. They’ll be performing at the Islington Assembly Hall in London with an old-school line-up including Natacha Atlas on vocals, and supported by Dub Colossus from TGU founder member Nick Page, who fuse Ethiopian music and dub. It will be a great one!
Transglobal Underground were the first proper gig that I ever attended. I’d been to loads of festivals before, and a couple of sit-down concerts in large halls, but seeing TGU at Telford’s Warehouse in Chester as a 13-year-old in 2004 was the first time I went to see a band in a small, dark, standing venue. They were absolutely brilliant. I managed to squeeze my way to the front to see the group crammed onto the smallest stage, which was overflowing with equipment, and playing the most banging and eclectic mix of international beats, dub, funk and electronica, and with live sitar, tabla and dhol to boot. Everyone was dancing a frenzy and the whole place was hot and sweaty. I had only ever experienced this sort of atmosphere at festivals, and the realisation that I could get that feeling basically any time I wanted – and much closer to where I lived – was absolutely intoxicating. What an amazing show that was. That was part of their tour promoting their new album Impossible Broadcasting.
TGU had already had a lot of success with their earlier material, even charting in the UK in the 90s. Their particular sound was, I guess, less fashionable by this point, but I reckon this album slaps just as hard as any of their others so far. As well as their standard brand of world-spanning dubtronica, they also invite an impressive roster of guests, including two very disparate vocal trios of Trio Bulgarka (Bulgarian choral folk) and Tata Pound (Malian hip-hop). Each piece has its own personality; there is the most terrifying two-minutes-and-thirty-three-seconds in music with ‘Sentinel’, a menacing, psychological horror of a track mixing Egyptian-style strings with synth drones, a wartime public service announcement and some foreboding spoken word from TGU’s TUUP; but you also have ‘Drinking in Gomorrah’, which tells a great and surreal tale of barkeeping and international party-scene homogeneity, with backing that’s groovy as funk. There are tracks that would be sure to fill any dancefloor, and tracks that are much more cerebral, that make you want to sit down and really work out the deeper meaning to the sounds, but they all fit easily alongside each other as one brilliant album.
I realise I am most definitely biased by my personal experience with this album and TGU’s performance of it all that time ago in Chester, but I do consider it one of the best albums of its style for its range, depth and just how much it stands up even 15 years later (oh my god…). At 13, it certainly took me long enough to get that first gig under my belt, but with TGU on such high form, I can barely think of a better way to make that milestone.
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