203: Space Echo – The Mystery Behind the Cosmic Sound of Cabo Verde Finally Revealed!, by Various Artists

Various Artists (Cabo Verde)
Space Echo – The Mystery Behind the Cosmic Sound of Cabo Verde Finally Revealed! (2016)
15 tracks, 69 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

This was a weird one when it came out. To me, the prospect of psychedelic synth music from Cabo Verde was enough to get me interested, but perhaps the wider listening public needed a bit more persuasion. So when the record label, Analog Africa, announced the album with a press release, where there would normally be a story of how the musical subculture came to be, and how the album came to be compiled, there was…well, a different story instead. It started with a strange but plausible story of how a shipment of synthesisers and electronic music equipment disappeared between the US and Brazil in the late 1960s, only to appear in Cabo Verde a few months later to kickstart a wave of synth music there in the 1970s. But then the story evolves, with the ship appearing to have fallen from the sky and for modern research to reveal that it had in fact fallen from space – a truly cosmic origin for the music’s intergalactic sound.

It’s an amusing story – and you can read it in full on Bandcamp – and I was taken in by it to start off with before the fun reveal. But the amount of times the first part of this story was recounted as fact by respected music journalists and papers such as the Guardian actually baffled me. Surely they did more than skim the press release before regurgitating it into their piece as fact? Maybe I have too much faith in music journalism. The writer of the Guardian article did say they asked the label, Analog Africa, to confirm the ‘true’ parts of the story, but even that doesn’t really stand up to much scrutiny. But there we are.

It seems I’ve not left much space to really talk about the music, so let’s power through: it’s really good, of course. There’s synths all over it, as you’d expect from the above, and there’s lots of influences from the Americas with each track showing varying amount of soul, disco, funk, rock and even Mexican and Cuban music. But those are all just influences – all the music here is so Cabo Verdean. The pieces may have the blingy instruments and flashy foreign sounds, but they’re all based on the Cabo Verdean forms of morna, coladera, tabanka and, most excitingly, funaná. The latter is traditionally the music of accordions and iron scrapers, replaced here with synths and hi-hats. All of the styles, with their unique soulful longing, the saudade that makes Cabo Verdean music sound so heartwrenching, may seem like a strange fit for the up-tempo astral voyages of synthfunk, but it all works so well.

There have been so many reissues and rereleases of African music from the 60s to the 80s over the past decade, and along with them so many amazing and surprising rediscoveries to be had among them. Space Echo is a wonderful example of this, but also perhaps a lesson not to let your surprised amazement have you believe every fanciful and exotic story you read in a press release…