Various Artists (Puerto Rico/USA) Nu Yorica! Culture Clash in New York City (1996)
16 tracks, 109 minutes (2 CDs) Spotify ∙ iTunes (Weirdly, the digital edition has a different tracklisting than the CD, so both versions contain some unique tracks. But they’re close enough for the purposes of this blog, at least.)
This is one of those compilations that paints such a vivid picture of a specific time and place that it just makes you want to jump into that world, smell its smells, meet its characters, behold their fashions and listen to as much music as you possibly can. And it does it all with 16 impeccably chosen tracks.
The album presents the music of the Latin Caribbean played in a way that could only have come together in a city such as New York, and only in the 1970s. It’s the result of Latinx people from all over the Americas living together, sharing their differences and revelling in their similarities, all the while making music inspired by every sound bouncing around the city at that time. Each track is grounded in Latin styles, whether that’s son, rumba, charanga, bachata, guarancha, the old Afro-Latin rhythms, or, more often than not, a combination of many together, and that is then taken off into flights of everything that was around at the time. There is lots and lots of funk and jazz in there, a few really strong disco elements and even some classical music in Eddie Palmieri’s piano playing on ‘Un Dia Bonita’.
And all of it has a complete lack of that cheesiness that I find inherent in so many Latin styles. The musicians here filter out all of that over-the-top dramatics with a sincerity that leaves only mean skill and pure energy – and without taking themselves too seriously to have fun, either. The outcome of this equation is just liquid coolness.
What a wonderful collection. When I’m listening to this album, there’s really nowhere else I’d rather be than in the late-night clubs of Nu Yorica with a whole load of dancing ahead of me. And if you turn up the music loud enough, close your eyes and let your body move its way, maybe that world doesn’t have to feel quite so far away.
Various Artists lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to (2017 onwards)
∞ tracks, ∞ minutes Stream live on YouTube
lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to is one of the biggest musical phenomena of the past few years. It some ways, it represents a whole new paradigm of how and why people listen to music. And no, it’s not technically an album. If you’ve not yet been exposed to it, let me introduce you to the wonders of lofi hip-hop, compiled by ChilledCow:
I’ve been really excited to write about this, because there’s so much to talk about. Even the format that it takes is very much a 2010s thing: sort of a midway between an algorithmically-generated playlist and a curated radio station, a never-ending and continually updating set of tracks available 24 hours a day. There’s something I love about the infinite but unselectable nature of it. You don’t get to choose to only hear the tracks you know that you like, and you don’t get to skip any, but you can drop yourself in and out whenever you like. The tracks aren’t played in any specific order, but they are very carefully selected – a mix of the automated and the personal.
The music itself is a very specific genre with a very specific ambience. The name ‘lofi hip-hop’ may lead you to expect a little different to what it actually is. It’s an almost entirely instrumental style that is based around the marriage of off-kilter J Dilla-esque beats and samples often taken from relaxed jazz. The whole thing is chopped up and rearranged in a slightly surreal or hypnagogic way, and everything is treated with a production that makes it feel warm and fuzzy, cosy even, using vinyl-like surface noise, a strangely warped and wobbly feel to it, lots of shimmering and glittery timbres and a slow, steady tempo for ultimate chill-out vibes. Bassist, music theorist and YouTuber Adam Neely even looked into the way lofi hip-hop uses harmonies and unusual tunings and posited, very convincingly, that it has much more akin to a new field of jazz than hip-hop.
And for all its weird quirkiness, this isn’t some small niche, it is hugely popular. ChilledCow’s YouTube channel has over four million subscribers. At any given time, lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to has tens of thousands of listeners (at the time of writing – 3pm on a Saturday – it has over 19,000 people tuning in). Neither is it the only one: ChilledCow also runs lofi hip hop radio - beats to sleep/chill to (4,200 listeners right now), and there’s also the marginally differently-titled lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to (2,400 listeners), the festive 24/7 Christmas lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/chill/relax (1,200 listeners) and the list goes on. The music has the same atmosphere, the names are almost interchangeable and even the aesthetic of the artwork is precisely the same – a short looping animation of a cosy but cluttered anime bedroom with a sleepy protagonist relaxing/studying. What makes these so popular?
The clue is in the name. These streams and the music within aren’t really used to be listened to as much as they are to be heard. They provide a background noise that’s meant to manipulate the listener’s thinking: the chilled, atmospheric sounds of the music are interesting enough to divert some attention while being relaxed and predictable enough to still ‘fade into the background,’ meaning that any distractions from the outside world are drowned out while still allowing the conscious brain to focus on something else. It’s perfect, then, to ‘relax/study to.’ For a lot of listeners, these lofi beats don’t even really register as ‘music’ at all; they don’t listen to it because they enjoy the music, they put it on because it fulfils a function and it works. There are two particularly interesting articles on this aspect of lofi hip-hop: one on JSTOR, which takes a positive view on it, and one in the New Yorker, which is much more negative, but I highly recommend both of them.
As that New Yorker article hints at, the popularity of this style of music has also had a backlash, with people angry at the musical movement for its perceived lack of musicality or creativity, for turning the noble art of music into insipid background noise fit only to be ‘used’ like a tool, and for just being plain boring. But it’s impossible to deny its success. For me, all of these reactions are really fascinating, from the music’s quiet but incredible popularity to the venom with which its detractors attack it. Personally, I actually really enjoy listening to the music, even in an engaged, ‘active’ capacity – I just think it’s chill.
As we reach the end of 2019 and get ready to roll on to a new decade, everywhere is full of retrospectives of the past ten years, everyone looking at the best, the most influential, the most definitive. I reckon that, regardless of anyone’s individual opinions on its merits or quality, the phenomenon of the lofi hip-hop YouTube stream as exemplified by lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to is one of the most iconic musical forces of the 2010s. It’s just not something that could have existed at any other time, and certainly not with the same amount of success.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to spend the last few days of the year writing intermittently in a notebook, wistfully looking out of the window with my plump ginger cat, feeling drowsy and listening to some slightly wonky but incredibly comfortable chill af beats.
Various Artist (Botswana) I’m Not Here to Hunt Rabbits (2018)
11 tracks, 43 minutes Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes
I only actually have two albums of Botswanan music in my music library and they both made it into this blog, which tells me I really should be finding more of it to listen to!
Chances are, if you love music (and I know you do) and you have access to the internet (I’m not sure how you’re reading this otherwise), you’ll have come across this video sometime in the last 10 years:
That’s Ronnie Moipolai, playing a guitar with four strings in an unusual overhand manner, complete with little party tricks, and just absolutely bossing it. That video went viral on the musically-interested side of social media when it came out, and it became the impetus for this album: here’s one brilliant guitarist from Botswana making beautiful music, how many more are there?
Well, certainly more than enough. Inspired by the Youtube videos of Bokete7, David Aglow came to Botswana, tracked down a bunch of the musicians captured in the Youtube series – including Ronnie – and got them into a recording studio in the capital Gabarone. The results are wonderful. All 11 tracks are solo performances of singer-musicians, and this lends a real clarity of style on each one. Their acoustic and electric guitars pick out crystal clear patterns around simple chord sequences, and their voices sing joyous sounding melodies around topics of every shade, making melodies that sometimes sound South African, sometime Zimbabwean and sometimes all their own.
The intricate guitars are the focus, but that’s not all that’s on display here. There’s Annafiki Ditau singing with a Casio keyboard backed by one of those preset drum patterns, and there’s also interesting sounds of traditional fiddle instruments: Oteng Piet plays the segaba, a giant and ancient one-stringed instrument played with a bow in a circular pattern, which creates all sorts of crazy harmonics, and Babsi Barolong plays a homemade fenjoro, a three-stringed violin with a plastic tub as a resonator. No matter what instrument, the songs sound just as sweet.
In a time when it feels like at least half of albums of African music released into Europe are reissues or compilations of music made between the 1960s and 1990s, it’s really refreshing to hear an album like this: still a compilation of sorts, giving an overview of an overlooked musical culture, but with musicians that create the music now and recording them especially for this project. The record supports the music as it is being made, rather than looking back into a ‘glorious past’ and, I would hope, remunerating the musicians in real-time rather than relying on luck to find the makers of long-forgotten recordings. And, most importantly, I’m Not Here to Hunt Rabbits is just full of really good music from somewhere that doesn’t usually get the attention it deserves.
The Whirl-y-Gig is a wonderful world of alternative dance music. A parallel dimension of love, light and epic bangers. Well, it is once a month. The Whirl-y-Gig is actually London’s longest running club night, and has been transforming spaces all over the city into pools of peace since 1981. Once upon a time, Whirl-y-Gig was a common fixture at festivals, including WOMAD, and now they have their own – the Whirl-y-Fayre, hosted in August every year in the Vale of Avalon. The décor is a beautiful mix of psychedelic fabrics, colours, flowers, trippy lights, lasers, UV, East African and South Asian patterns and abstract shapes. The smell is a mix of incense and euphoria (and a little weed). Everyone is welcome, and its wide-ranging audience reflects that. Elderly hippies dance with first-time clubbers and everyone feels the love. Until licensing laws got the better of it, it was even an all-ages affair, and the kids were made as welcome as anyone else. An hour before the end (at 6 or 7am), a huge parachute drops from the ceiling, the music turns chill-out and everyone comes down gently into the morning on a gently undulating flow of bliss. What a place.
And behind the decks, every time, for (at least) eight hours a go, is the legendary DJ Monkey Pilot. His sets are as eclectic as the people that attend: there’s techno, trance, drum’n’bass, dubstep, house… but for me, one of the most important roles of the Whirl-y-Gig was as a vibrant centre of the world dubtronica scene at its height in the 90s and early 2000s. So many of that scene came through the Whirl-y-Gig doors, whether as artists or as partygoers (usually both), and the club duly responded by becoming the place to hear the newest and the best in internationally-focused, dubwise electronica. The list is jaw-dropping. Transglobal Underground, Loop Guru, Dreadzone, the State of Bengal, Kamel Nitrate, the Kumba Mela Experiment, Banco de Gaia, MoMo, Zion Train, System 7…I could go on and on. Two of the albums we’ve already covered on this blog even have tracks named after the club – Dr Didg’s Serotonality and Afro Celt Sound System’s Volume 1: Sound Magic – such is its influence.
Which brings us to this album. It’s the last of three compilations in the Whirl-y-Waves series, and it’s basically just a little bit of Whirl-y-Gig that you can make in your very own home. It’s two CD-length mixes by Monkey Pilot himself built up of all solid Whirl-y-classics. The first CD is full-on dancing hard at midnight music; the second takes a more chill-out approach, still with beats, but appropriate for those early morning still-awake peace-outs. Parachute music, in other words. Each of the three Whirl-y-Waves mixes are essential in my opinion, but I went for this third volume purely because of those first four tracks: ‘King of the Sound and Blues’ by Zion Train, ‘Yellow and Black Taxi Cab’ by Transglobal Underground, ‘Tandoori Shakeaway’ by Kamel Nitrate and ‘Ararim (Friends, Family and Lovers Remix)’ by Oojami. To start an album that way is simply obscene – that’s over 20 minutes of just some of the best world dubtronica imaginable. And after that, the vibe just continues.
The Whirl-y-Gig is some proper utopian shit, and if the world were more like it is inside those walls, it would be a happier, and certainly dancier, place. But life can’t be a Whirl-y-Gig all the time, so for the rest of it, this album can help. Light that incense, flick those lights and sail across those Whirl-y-Waves into a better place…
Various Artists (Burma) White Elephants & Golden Ducks: Enchanting Musical Treasures from Burma (1997)
16 tracks, 72 minutes Spotify ∙ iTunes
To be honest, the album that I was actually intending to write about today was Birmanie: Musique d’Art released on Ocora in 1981, but I couldn’t find anywhere for you to listen to it or download it on the internet, so I thought I’d give you this one instead. Maybe Ocora will rerelease that compilation at some point as they have been doing with a lot of their recordings, but either way, if you get a chance to listen to it, it’s a really nice set of all different classical music traditions from Burma, so definitely give that a go. But for now, this is something (ever so slightly) different…
Where the Ocora release deals with only the strictest definitions of Burmese classical music, played on all traditional instruments and in traditional ensembles such as the hsaing waing orchestra, White Elephants & Golden Ducks presents a much more contemporary view of that art music culture. The traditional instruments are still there to be enjoyed in all their glory: the pat waing tuned drums are always a scintillating sound, and the kyey (metallophones similar to an Indonesian gamelan), saung harp, pattala xylophone, hne shawm and palwei flute all play important roles on this album. That’s not all, though – there’s also a variety of western instruments showcased throughout the album, all lent interesting twists in the context of the Burmese classical style.
Although there is violin here, played by U Tin Yi, with its similarities to the traditional Burmese fiddles, it is perhaps surprising that it is not the instrument that lends itself to the styles on show in the most natural way. That would instead be the acoustic slide guitar, played here by U Ohn Lwin. The instrument’s guttural tones put it in the same aural region as the saung, and it is used in a similar way, but its ability to slide, vibrato and bend notes lend the slide guitar its very own place within the style, and it feels completely at home. The instrument that is a real wildcard here, though, is the piano of U Yee Nwe. The way he plays accentuates its status as a percussion instrument, using it in much the same way as the pattala and the pat waing, with all the same sorts of ornaments. However, it has a really uncanny ring to it. Unlike the violin or slide guitar, the piano is locked into playing in western-style tuning of equal temperament, which is at odds with the Burmese way of tuning. In playing the pieces to the closest approximation of the Burmese notes, though, it introduces all sorts of unusual lopsided melodies and harmonies, often with lots of clashing, close together notes played at the same time. The effect is not unpleasant, but it’s played in such a singular way that whether you’re coming at it with western ears or even off the back of listening to lots of Burmese music, it is a really odd sound. Give yourself a moment to adjust and it will all become clear.
The use of instruments in this way is fun, but what I really love about Burmese classical music is that it is so unique. Different elements of the pieces can bring to mind art music from surrounding cultures – Indian sometimes, Chinese others, Thai and even Indonesian resonate in there too – but the way they are pieced together is heard nowhere else. It’s the same thing that I’ve talked about in regards to music all around the world: the way Burmese music is constructed could only ever have occurred in Burma, reflecting perfectly its cultural geography in relation to its neighbours. And obviously it’s true of all of those neighbouring cultures as well, which would not sound the same if it weren’t for Burmese music through the ages. With enough research, I’m sure you could build up a whole global map of music in this way, tracing lines of compounding influence from one group of people to the next to create magical chains thousands of miles long, and steeped in just as many years of history.
If you have never listened to Burmese classical music before (aside from the solo saung of Hlaing Win Maung, which you obviously listened to and loved back in May when I wrote about it here), both White Elephants & Golden Ducks and, if you can find it, Birmanie: Musique d’Art are perfect entry points. There’s lots to recognise in there, but you won’t have heard anything like it before.
Charlie Musselwhite (USA) Harpin’ on a Riff: The Best of Charlie Musselwhite (1999)
20 tracks, 78 minutes Spotify playlist
Being well into blues music during my teens, I naturally listened to a lot of harmonica players, whether they were solo performers or sidemen. Little Walter, James Cotton, Sonny Terry, Junior Wells, the Sonny Boys Williamson…but it was Charlie Musselwhite that really captured my imagination and led me to pick up the harmonica for myself. Specifically, it was this album, a cheap’n’cheerful compilation that shows off some of his wildest cuts from the 1970s to the 1990s.
In presenting such a wide time-frame of Musselwhite’s music, it also shows how wide his output has been too. There are the straight-ahead blues pieces (‘Finger Lickin’ Good’, ‘Hear Me Talkin’’, ‘Taylor’s, Arkansas’, the acoustic ‘Fast Life Blues’), swaggering balls-out blues-rocks (‘It’s Getting Warm in Here’, ‘Crazy for My Baby’, ‘Harpin’ on a Riff’) and laid-back, cheesily jazzy soul (‘Revelation’, ‘Yesterdays’); there are even hints at his interest in Latin music with the track ‘Azul Para Amparo’, which he eventually explored further with a collaboration with Buena Vista Social Club’s tres player Eliades Ochoa.
While it is interesting to hear the directions that Musselwhite takes the harmonica and how he adapts his playing to the different scenarios, I actually do prefer it when he’s sticking with the most on-message blues styles. It’s in these that he gets to stretch his legs and really show off the acrobatics that he’s capable of. His playing feels so much more natural and free on those tracks – ‘Finger Lickin’ Good’ is a great example because it’s just a simple repeating 12-bar groove that he spends four minutes improvising over and holds the ear rapt with the playfulness and lyricism of his phrases.
This compilation may not be as cohesive as his albums proper – especially the two that he released on Real World Records, Sanctuary (2004) and Delta Hardware (2006), which I love – and maybe that’s why I feel that some of the pieces here are a little weak in comparison to others. Nevertheless, I include this album primarily because it shows just how well Musselwhite has expanded the range of the harmonica into previously inaccessible territories while always remaining a figurehead for the blues style of which he is a master. And, y’know, for helping me to develop a handy, pocket-sized skill that I can annoy people at parties with, too.
Tenuously-related footnote
I mention this here because I wouldn’t have an appropriate place to do so otherwise. I basically just wanted an excuse to post this video and rave about it. It’s a clip from the film Blues Brothers 2000. As a whole, that is one dire piece of cinema from start to finish, a rubbish sequel to a classic film that didn’t seem to understand where any of the original’s charm came from and instead ramping everything up to stupidly bombastic degrees that flop harder than a beer-bellied Brexiter when presented with a swimming pool at a Spanish all-inclusive resort. All except for this one five-minute scene, where that bombast comes up trumps. The set-up is that the Blues Brothers Band is taking part in a battle of the bands, and their unknown competitors, the Louisiana Gator Boys, go first. This is what happens:
The first time I watched that, my jaw was on the floor. In fact, every time I watch that, my reaction is exactly the same. That is quite probably the best blues supergroup ever to have existed. Every few bars, the camera cuts to another blues legend doing their bit. So much so that every time I watch it, I’m amazed that I forgot that so-and-so was in it. I mean, just check that line-up: B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Bo Diddley, Charlie Musselwhite (see, there was a connection!), Koko Taylor, Jack DeJohnette, Stevie Winwood, Billy Preston. Dr John popping in right at the end! Jimmy Vaughan and Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter just chilling out in the groove; Isaac Hayes as a backing vocalist! The face-melting four-way horn solo by Grover Washington Jr, Clarence Clemons, Joshua Redmond and Jon Faddis, which ends in them all improvising wildly over the top of each other in a noise from heaven itself. My word. That audience is real, by the way. A few hundred people actually got to witness that crazy performance live. If I were there, I don’t think I’d ever be able to talk about anything else.
And that’s literally it, that’s all I wanted to show you. Bloody good though innit? Now you don’t have to see the rest of the film, you’re welcome.
Robert Johnson (USA) The Complete Recordings: The Centennial Collection (2011)
42 tracks, 111 minutes (2 CDs) Spotify ∙ iTunes
I’ve named this specific album because it seems to be the ‘canonical’ one, but the name of the compilation itself doesn’t really matter – by now there are plenty of releases that give you exactly the same 42 tracks, maybe just in different orders. That’s because 42 is all there is. For us living in the now-times, Robert Johnson’s work consists of just 29 songs and 13 alternative takes – and one of those was only found in 1998. And yet there is a good argument to be made that he is the most influential single musician ever to have lived.
Robert Johnson is known as the ‘King of the Delta Blues.’ His sound is, by now, almost archetypical of the style, such is his impact. The well-known story is that when he first started out, playing his guitar in the Mississippi jukejoints, he was notoriously terrible, to the degree of being chased out of the door. He went away for a while and came back with a prodigious talent that seemed for many to be unaccountable. People say he ‘sold his soul to the devil.’ More likely he just went away and actually learnt how to play. Either way, he’d developed his own style and a way of playing that was exciting and engaging. In his own time – in the 1930s before he was, in all probability, murdered by a jealous husband at age 27 – Johnson was a pop star. We know him for his delta blues, which is where he excelled and what he recorded, but he played all sorts of styles and popular songs of the day, even including show tunes, touring all over the US and even Canada. Only months after his death, he would have performed at Carnegie Hall.
But those short years have turned into almost a century of music. The stuff we listen to today simply would not be the same if it weren’t for Robert Johnson. His playing and singing have struck musicians from every generation, from his contemporaries and protégés to those just hitting the scene now. Even a list of artists who have directly covered Johnson’s songs is a roll-call of genre defining musicians: Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Led Zeppelin, Cream, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Dylan, Cassandra Wilson, Gil Scott-Heron, the White Stripes, Red Hot Chili Peppers…and that doesn’t include all of those that have cited him as an important influence on their work.
With all of the talk and acknowledgement over how influential and important Robert Johnson’s music has been within blues, rock and everything that followed, it’s easy to lose sight of just how good he really was. I know I forgot sometimes, taking his legendary status for granted until whim takes me and my ears are astounded all over again So take a listen, and try to bring fresh ears if they aren’t already. You can take your pick of the tracks: ‘Sweet Home Chicago’, ‘When You Got a Good Friend’, ‘They’re Red Hot’, ‘If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day’, ‘Last Fair Deal Gone Down’, ‘Come On in My Kitchen’…or literally any other of his songs – ‘Me and the Devil’ how could I forget!; ‘Love in Vain’ – and be taken back to the Mississippi Delta of the mid-30s. His high-pitched voice is spellbinding and his guitar has that deliciously (and deceptively) simple sound. There is something incredibly special about these recordings that is difficult to explain. It’s haunting, which makes sense for the most low-down and heartfelt blueses, but even when he’s doing his dancier, wittier party pieces, there’s still that strange essence that floats through the speakers, carried on the graininess of the recording and across the ages. The superstitious would say that’s the devil, of course, and indeed some of it may just be the baggage of mystique that Johnson’s music carries with it. But I think part of it must also be the brain’s innate sense of a unique, overwhelming talent.
Robert Johnson’s life and music are – occasionally quite literally – legendary. Even this collection, ironically named The Complete Recordings can’t tell the whole story of Johnson’s recording career. He actually made over 50 recording, but all the rest have been lost to history. I don’t even think we know what those recordings were. They might have been different songs entirely. We will probably never know, although considering the last ‘lost recording’ was found in 1998, maybe there’s still a little hope to be had. But that slight unknowableness, of his life, of his skills, of his music and of just how all helps to make Johnson that bit more, that bit mythical and that bit magical. This is special stuff.
Various Artists Music and Rhythm: WOMAD 1982-2007 (2007)
45 tracks, 220 minutes (3 CDs)
Unfortunately I can’t find anywhere to stream, download or buy this compilation. It seems like your best luck would be to lurk around on the album’s Discogs page and see if anything ever crops up. Or alternatively come round to my house and we’ll have a listening session!
I’ve mentioned WOMAD a lot on this blog, but I’m not sure I’ve ever talked about it specifically. So for those not in the know: WOMAD is the World of Music, Arts and Dance, a music festival that started in the UK in 1982 and has since put on events all over the world, with an annual festival in the UK as its flagship event. Nowadays, WOMAD festivals are held every year in Australia, New Zealand, Spain (one in Extremadura and one in Gran Canaria) and Chile as well as in Charlton Park in Wiltshire.
Ever since its founding (famously with the help of Peter Gabriel), the aim of WOMAD has been the same: to present the most exciting music from across the world on one stage*. Many people think of it as a world music festival, but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. It’s much wider than that. In fact, in its early years, the term ‘world music’ wasn’t even in common parlance (that came about in 1987). Artists from all over the world – from megastars to up-and-comers to humble, unknown masters – are invited to WOMAD, and their style actually matters very little; styles such as rock, hip-hop, jazz and dance music are all represented each year, but not at the sake of traditional, classical, tradimodern or pop styles from anywhere else in the world. I wouldn’t go as far as saying you can hear every type of music at WOMAD, but it’s not too far off.
This compilation was released in 2007, to celebrate 25 years of the festival as well as its first edition in its new UK home, having moved from Reading just that year. It’s a really beautiful thing too. It is all packaged around a 96-page book full of breath-taking photographs from over the years and many interesting, intriguing and amusing recollections from the people involved with the festival, from producers to artists to attendees. And, perhaps most importantly, it comes with three CDs full of great music. It’s not just your usual compilation of tracks taken from albums. Well, some are album tracks that represent important moments from across the festival’s history, but most were recorded live on stage, capturing some of the most special moments that came to define WOMAD as a whole. Although there are too many gems to name them all, there are a handful from the first CD that are extra special: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s ‘Mustt Mustt’, recorded during a stunning all-night performance at WOMADelaide in 1995; Echo and the Bunnymen’s ‘Zimbo’, a live performance at the very first WOMAD in 1982 in Shepton Mallet alongside the Drummers of Burundi, showing exactly the spirit of open-mindedness and equal footing that the festival facilitates; and ‘Raindrops Pattering on Banana Leaves’ by the Tianjin Music and Dance Ensemble, a popular Chinese sizhu piece – this is a recording of the very first piece of music performed at that very first edition. The discs here collect music by artists from at least 28 countries (on my count) and really shows the breadth and depth of the wonderful music that the festival brings to tens of thousands of people every year.
I think to say that WOMAD has changed my life would be less of an understatement and more of an inaccuracy: it hasn’t changed my life because it has formed it. I doubt I would have been a music journalist had WOMAD not existed, nor would I have studied ethnomusicology, nor would I have even heard of a large percentage of my favourite artists. Before I was even one year old, WOMAD has been a crucial element of my life, and no matter what happens in the future, it will always be so. Listening to the music on this triple album is nothing like being there in the flesh, of course, but then WOMAD only lasts for four days a year (unless you can jet-set at will). Music and Rhythm will help you keep the spirit alive for the rest of them.
* Metaphorically speaking, of course. Some of the festivals have one stage, some have many.
Various Artists (Cameroon) Pop Makossa: The Invasive Dance Beat of Cameroon 1976-1984 (2017)
12 tracks, 67 minutes Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes
The thing with reviewing albums for publication is that you usually cannot base your opinions on the long-term, slowly matured listening experiences that people who buy the album would typically get. There just isn’t the time. You can listen to it once and gain the important first impressions, maybe give it a second go through to give yourself a chance to catch things you missed the first time, usually while reading the sleeve notes and doing a little deeper research, but by then the deadline is already closing in and you have to write the bloody thing. Perhaps you listen to one or two specific moments to inform the specifics of your review, but then it’s written and you have to send it off to get printed and then it’s crystallised in ink-and-paper for posterity.
I’m not saying that album reviews are bad – of course I’m not, I do a big bunch of them. I think they can give potential audiences a useful window into the music and its wider context and be very helpful in deciding whether the album would be right for them or not. Besides, reviews can be entertaining to read in their own write (lol).
But human brains are weird. When we listen to things once, we don’t hear it in the same way as when we listen to it for the second or 30th time. The brain makes new connections and neural pathways with every repetition and it changes how we think and feel. That’s why you can listen to a crappy pop song on the radio and near-despise it, but then a few weeks of enforced exposure later you’re singing along and buying tickets to see the artist live. The results of this repeated listening are usually difficult to gauge – and near impossible to review.
I reviewed Pop Makossa for a magazine when it first came out a couple of years ago, and I gave it an overall positive review. I talked a bit about the history of the makossa genre and its importance to the Cameroonian people; I talked about the particular sub-genres that this compilation represents, mentioned a couple of highlights and expressed my admiration for its in-depth accompanying booklet. It’s all true and I stick by what I said, but reflecting on it now, I reckon I’d write something a bit different.
Because the tracks that have stuck with me, two years later, aren’t the ones I expected. Of the two tracks I mentioned in the review, I wouldn’t have been able to recall how they sounded if I hadn’t have relistened to it just now (and they’re still good). In fact, it’s actually the very song that I disliked most the first few times around, the one that made me cringe in its cheesiness, that has slowly become a track I come back to again and again. It’s my go-to track from the album, now. No matter how embarrassing the synth lines are, or that most of the backing sounds a bit like some dodgy disco keyboard setting, the fact is that it’s catchy af and a little part of my brain has been singing it over and over ever since I first heard it. It’s just been lodged in there and the repeated brain-listenings have completely won me over. It’s my favourite track on the album now, and I love it with no irony whatsoever.
Album reviews are an important part of how we interact with music, and they’re a valuable part of the recorded music ecosystem. But they can only ever really discuss the album as it hits the ear. They can’t review how its contents rattle around your head after you’ve listened to it, after a week, or a month or years later. That’s the adventure that you have to take for yourself. And you never know quite where it will lead you.
The best track on this album, by the way, is ‘Nen Lambo’ by Bill Loko. Have a listen to it. Maybe you’ll like it or maybe you won’t, but let me know how you feel in 2021.
The great thing about this album – and its equally good predecessor, with the subtitle Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz & Molam in Thailand 1964-1975 – is that it explores such a wide range of music, all connected by the broadest definition of molam and luk thung. The pieces here may have a soul-funk feel (such as Saksiam Petchchompu & Pornsurapon Petchseethong’s organ-led ‘Jeb Jing Jeb Jai’), or a surf-rock vibe (Banyen Sriwongsa’s ‘Lam Plearn Kon Baa Huay’), or a sultry jazz sway (Angkanang Kunchai’s ‘Kid Hod Chu’). And they all have different relationships to the traditional source: for some, only the subject matter or poetic structure remain the same; for others, it’s just a couple of amplifiers and a rock drummer that separate them from the music’s deepest roots. My favourite track of the whole thing falls into this latter category, the sparring khaen and electric phin of the Petch Phin Thong Band on ‘Bump Lam Plearn’ bringing all of the inherent funk of the molam to the fore while still sounding irrefutably Thai at every juncture.
Since recorded music has been the norm, styles can change rapidly. Musical forms with long histories can spin off into hundreds of sub-genres and hybrid styles. The Sounds of Siam compilations do a great job of documenting the explosion of molam and luk thunk from traditional Lao and Isan music into pop styles of many different faces from the time when these musical experiments were at their height. The result is a wonderful musical tree with united roots and excitingly diverse fruits. It’s an extremely pleasant 67 minutes to swing among its bows.
Various Artists (United Kingdom) World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol. 3: England (1955)
30 tracks, 48 minutes iTunes
A couple of days ago, I discussed field recordings in relation to the Ocora series in general, and the album Burundi: Musique Traditionnelles in particular. Field recordings, and the spheres of anthropology and ethnomusicology at which they’re normally aimed, are very rightly often accused of ‘othering,’ looking at other cultures in terms of their opposition to Western cultures. Sometimes this is in a paternalistic way, sometimes in a clinical way, and very early work is sometimes downright insulting, but the common theme is that the recordist or researcher is positioned as an aloof, educated and superior observer, more akin to a wildlife documentarian than a fellow music enthusiast meeting with equals*.
That’s why I was so fascinated when I first listened to this album, part of the superb World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series. This was the first time that I’d ever heard ‘my’ culture presented in the same way as music from everywhere else in the world has been recorded for study. These are field recordings from England, presented in a series alongside music from across Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The music here shows the sound of English folk – that is, English people – from the late 30s to the early 50s; the pieces were recorded up and down the country (and just over the border into Wales too) in pubs and village halls, at fetes and in the street and in the homes of regular, musical people. A wide range of styles and functions are covered, from chanties to ballads to dances and drinking songs. Equal importance is placed on the rhythm and rhyming games of schoolchildren and the mumming plays of Dorset pubs at Christmas as on recordings of famous singers such as Ewan MacColl, Bertie Lloyd and Isla Cameron. The accompanying notes give detailed context for each piece, noting its participants, dates and locations as well as the histories of the pieces or cultural artefacts from the perspectives of both the performers and of researchers. In short, it is an amazing collection of anthropological recordings presented in the exact same way as music from any other, ‘other’ culture**.
It really gives a glimpse into the lives of non-urban English people of the time. At this point, folk music wasn’t something that was the result of revivals, songs learnt from recordings and performed in concerts or in folk clubs one night a month above a pub. This was entertainment and heritage, passed through by oral tradition. It was performed at work, at home and out-and-about or even – shock horror – in the downstairs of pubs. It was just part of what you do, music as life. It’s not just the contexts that make this interesting either. The music itself is fascinating, and a fair chunk of it is even good to listen to! Isla Cameron’s version of ‘Died for Love’ bowled me for six the first time I heard it; such an agonising and emotional song with a performance to boot, and with such a seemingly simple melody. This is the English blues. That recording is still one of my all-time favourites.
In his notes accompanying the LP, Alan Lomax – who compiled the album with Peter Kennedy, edited the entire series and even recorded a lot of the music himself – writes, ‘The vigor and charm of these living English folksongs may surprise most listeners; perhaps most of all the British.’ After all, these were the traditions of the countryside, the village and the small towns – they had already all but vanished in the big cities. This album and those like it were some of the catalysts of the second big English folk revival that came to a head in the 1960s. Nevertheless, I feel the album can still have the same impact on listeners today. The world that is captured in these recordings doesn’t exist anymore – or if it does, in very quiet ways. Listening to this album brings it to life once more. It also allows English people like myself to appreciate our own culture as an outsider, in much the same way as we listen to music from other cultures. A valuable listening exercise from many perspectives.
* These fields of study have improved upon this stance in the last 30ish years, making leaps and bounds in considerations to academic ethics, positionality and decolonisation of theory and practice, although there is undoubtedly a long way still to go. However, the popular imagination of anthropologists, ethnomusicologists and field recordings is still much as I have described, despite their advances.
** Well, almost. Most of the performers here are credited by name except in the instances of large group or ensemble recordings; in other volumes of this series (especially those not recorded in Western Europe or North America), performers are more likely to be anonymised – ‘woman from the such-and-such village,’ or ‘man singing and playing lute,’ for example. It was still the 1950s after all.
Once recorded music really took off as a widespread and household form of entertainment in the West, the first way that people really heard the music of other cultures was in the form of field recordings. Field recordings are, understandably, music made ‘in the field,’ a slightly over-academic way of saying that the music is captured in its intended context as opposed to being recreated in the acoustically precise but culturally sterile recording studio. These sort of recordings were often made of traditional music, primarily for the use of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists for close study of the cultures of which they represent, but they quickly found a market among non-academic listeners who wanted to explore the world in sound. These field recordings marked one of the earliest inklings of the future phenomenon of ‘world music.’
Ocora (now Ocora Radio France) was – and remains – one of the most valuable sources for listener-friendly field recordings of music from all over the world with an astounding breadth of catalogue, releasing albums since the 1950s. One of the releases from those early years was Burundi: Musiques Traditionnelles and – and this is a claim for which I have absolutely no proof – I would guess that it is probably the most popular album they’ve made. Certainly one of the most influential – as I’ve mentioned before (now that I think of it, I should have left this nugget of revelation for this post, but I obviously didn’t think that far ahead), it was this album that introduced the world to the royal karyenda drummers whose sound went on to inform the music of Joni Mitchell and new wave artists such as Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow.
This album is more than just drumming, however, and features all sorts of traditional Burundian styles. Almost every track shows off a different instrument or ensemble – inanga (trough zither), umuduri (musical bow), indingidi (one-string fiddle), ikembe (lamellophone) and an unfortunately unnamed but very cool fife-like flute are all featured, as well as several different vocal techniques. It’s these vocal styles that I find the most intriguing, as some of them sound unlike anything else. Two of the tracks feature greeting songs by young girls, one solo and one a duet; the sound that they make is astounding. I think it is like yodelling – where the voice flips from chest voice to head voice and back – but very rapidly and without changing what note is being sung, for a really uncanny effect. When the two girls sing in a very close canon, the effect is magnified so much more. Then there are two tracks demonstrating the ubuhuha technique that I honestly have no idea how it’s made, and even less idea on how to describe it. Maybe it could involve buzzing one’s lips into a cupped hand, or perhaps singing into a reed-like leaf? I would love to know.
With the near-ubiquity of produced and polished studio recordings for music all around the world, field recordings are falling out of fashion for their dry, academic gaze. Nevertheless, these on-the-ground recordings offer a very different way to listen to, experience and appreciate music, including styles and instruments that have never been (or can never be) recorded otherwise. If you’re looking for a place to start, the Ocora Radio France catalogue is a wonderful resource, and Burundi: Musiques Traditionnelles is a particular highlight.
In this blog, we’ve looked and listened to some of Zimbabwe’s most joyous and danceable pop music in the forms of the jit of the Bhundu Boys and Biggie Tembo and the sungura of the Four Brothers. Those styles are guitar-based and heavily influenced by Cuban music (via the Congo and Kenya) and were – in their time – the music of the bars and beer halls of Harare. Today’s artist – a guitarist – had a great impact on those styles, but was also foundational in the creation of another most important Zimbabwean style.
We need to go back a little bit first, though. The mbira is the iconic instrument of Zimbabwe. A lamellophone, it is constructed from tongues of metal attached to a wooden frame, which are plucked with the thumbs and fingers in an interlocking pattern – first plucking a note with one hand and then the other. This way, the mbira creates wonderful rolling tunes that can go on indefinitely. When played acoustically, it is usually covered in cowrie shells (or bottle caps) whch shimmer and resonate to create a buzz when the tongues are plucked. It is very easy to ‘fall into’ the sound of the mbira, and its main historical purpose for the Shona people of Zimbabwe was to induce trance; mbira is said to talk to the ancestors and bring their spirits to commune with the living. As such, it is an incredibly important and powerful instrument.
During the colonial period, the music and esoteric powers of the mbira were seen as Satanic by British and later Rhodesian rulers, who banned its use. While the practice of mbira in spirit ceremonies persisted in an underground fashion, far fewer people learnt to play the instrument – especially for non-religious reasons – and the tradition began to die out.
That’s where Jonah Sithole comes in. Based in Harare, Sithole was a guitarist in soukous bands including the famous Lipopo Jazz Band, where he styled his playing on the great Congolese guitarist Franco. During his time with the Lipopo Jazz Band, however, he also began experimenting with his own style. He would translate traditional mbira pieces onto guitar, using the strings in the same interlocking manner as the tongues on the mbira. By playing in this manner in the context of the soukous band, Sithole became one of the main pioneers of mbira guitar. In doing so, the ancient and culturally iconic sounds of the mbira became a popular sound once again, and the (secular) tradition was carried on in the open, on the medium of guitar.
Sithole’s most famous work was made alongside the singer Thomas Mapfumo. Mapfumo’s music was a radical new genre called chimurenga – struggle music – and Sithole’s guitar-work was key to the sound. Chimurenga was music of protest, against minority rule and for black liberation. The lyrics were obviously all important, but the music was different too. It was still heavily influenced by the Latin sound, but unlike jit and sungura, had much more rock’n’roll to it and often used mysterious minor keys rather than the sunny-sounding majors. But it was also deeply Zimbabwean. By incorporating Sithole’s mbira guitar and replicating the distinctive 6/8 rhythms of the hosho gourd shakers on the hi-hat, Mapfumo and Sithole invoked these powerful symbols of Zimbabwean resistance alongside the political lyrics. It’s a potent sound even today.
He worked with Thomas Mapfumo and his band the Blacks Unlimited for stints of varying lengths from 1975 until his death in 1997. He also worked with other bands and, as is presented here, recorded solo material too. Although the chimurenga music of the Blacks Unlimited is probably the definitive context for mbira guitar, I chose this compilation of Sithole’s solo music because it has elements from all across his career. The mbira guitar is the main element, of course, but here you can hear it across different styles from soukous to jit to chimurenga, and even alongside real mbiras too. Jonah Sithole isn’t as well-known as some of the bigger names in Zimbabwean music such as Thomas Mapfumo, Oliver Mtukudzi or Biggie Tembo, especially abroad, so it’s only right that he gets his own recognition. In creating a unique way of playing the guitar, he helped to save the music of a very different instrument, and an incredibly important symbol of Zimbabwean and Shona heritage.
Various Artists Club Meets Dub, Vol. 2 (1996)
12 tracks, 72 minutes YouTube playlist
This is what happens when dub…meets the club. It’s the purest form of what I insist on calling dubtronica. There’s all sorts of club music represented on this compilation, with trance, house and techno at the top of the list, all of it approached with a dubwise frame-of-mind. You can even hear the roots from which styles such as dubstep evolved. Tracks are included from big names such as Zion Train, Dreadzone and Iration Steppas, as well as a bunch of previously unreleased tracks from lesser-known wonders.
Dub usually lends itself well to the ambient side of electronic music, but this is no chill-out session: this is UV sculptures, psychedelic Celtic-/Indian-inspired artwork, laser shows and strobe lighting and going bonkers at 3am music. The tracks are also well-mixed by Quark of Acid Rockers, meaning that if you want a banging club night in your own living room, all you need is some right chunky speakers and Club Meets Dub. Bonus points if you get someone to flick the lights on and off in time with the music. Sorted.
It’s hard to really call this compilation a ‘greatest hits’ disc, if even just for the fact that it doesn’t contain some of her greatest hits. Its lack of ‘Feeling Good’, ‘Sinnerman’, ‘Mississippi Goddam’, ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’, and the original studio versions of ‘I Ain’t Got No (I Got Life)’ and ‘I Loves You Porgy’ basically disqualify it from such a label. Which just goes to show the profundity of Nina Simone’s performing and composing genius that this collection of not-even-greatest hits is so deeply soul-touching on many different levels.
Released is quite a focussed compilation, with 16 out of the 21 tracks being taken from three album between 1967 and 1968, Nina Simone Sings the Blues, Silk & Soul and ’Nuff Said!, and it works as proof to just how fruitful that period of Simone’s career was. As well as passing through a number of different styles in these tracks – primarily blues, soul and showtunes with elements of gospel, jazz and folk too – they also show the width of her emotional range. Just in the space of these 21 tracks in this collection, Simone comes across as feisty, funny, deadly angry, bitter, soft, seductive, bereft, joyful, pensive and heavily political. She takes you across the spectrum of human emotion and every one of them is delivered in an entirely sincere manner.
For me, there’s none that captures this more than the song ‘Why (The King of Love is Dead)’. It’s a lament for Martin Luther King, powerful, despairing and agonised yet celebratory of this great man. This recording was made live, during a performance at Westbury Music Fair on 7th April 1968 – just three days after Dr King was assassinated. The song was written by bassist Gene Taylor and then taught to the band in just one day, and it’s one of the rawest, saddest songs I know. Truly heart-wrenching. It’s such a simple piece too, a slow, gospel blues with all the instruments just quietly doing their thing, no flashiness, but it is so intense. Whenever I hear it, I have to stop – this is not background music – and it makes me teary every single time without fail. I can only imagine how it must have felt to be there on the day. I am sure that the audience must have been in floods. Although Simone would play it at future shows, the group never gave it a studio recording, because it simply didn’t need one. This performance was its perfect rendition, and must surely be close to a perfect song.
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Can we also just take a small moment to acknowledge what a mean piano player Nina Simone was?! People focus on her voice, and rightfully so, but what she created with her fingers contained as much mastery as her vocal cords. She was classically-trained but was just as comfortable playing dirty, barrelhouse blues or righteous gospel too, and each in such an effortless manner to make it seem completely natural, as if the music was radiating from her, and manifesting in the vibration of the piano strings. The one that stood out particularly in this listen through was ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’, her rendition of Blind Willie Johnson’s holy blues. It’s just Simone on voice and piano, and those keys are so forthright. This is the blues, and she ain’t here to mess around. Her fingers introduce the subtlest little ornaments to the piano’s accompaniment and her classical background seems to inform the shape it takes, but at the same time it is 100% blues. Listening to this particular recording, I am sure it must have been a huge influence on Diamanda Galás; her playing has exactly the same darkly beautiful but no-nonsense feel.
Even though Released is a compilation album, I listen to it like I read a favourite book: maybe I’ll dip in occasionally, picking out the best bits and feeling their various feels, but listening to it all the way through provides its own joy, and I find something else to fall in love with on every go around. What an amazing musician Nina Simone was. And this isn’t even her greatest hits…
Various Artists (Comoros) Sambe-Comores: Modern Traditions from Grande Comoro (2000)
9 tracks, 62 minutes
Nowhere to listen or download anywhere online, unfortunately. The closest I can point you is to AllMusic, where you can hear ~30-second snippets of each track. If you want to hear the whole thing, let me know and we’ll work something out.
I got a little obsessed with Comorian music a year or two ago, listened to as many Comorian albums as I could get my hands on and found out as much as I could about the islands’ musical culture. Which, as it turns out, is ‘not many’ and ‘not as much as I’d hoped,’ respectively.
I guess that’s a little understandable. The Comoros is a small country, made up of an archipelago in the Indian Ocean roughly sited between the northern points of Mozambique and Madagascar. There are three main islands and the whole country has a population of just 850,000 (although Mayotte, the third largest of the Comoro Islands but a part of France rather than the Comoros – it’s a little confusing – has another 280,000). So, with such a small population and its out-of-the-way position, it seems like the Comoros has been somewhat overlooked in terms of international music study and business.
Which is actually a little infuriating. The Comoros has a really interesting and unique culture. Its population descends from waves of settlers from all over the Indian Ocean, including East African Bantu, Arab, Persian, Malay and Malagasy people. The people are Muslim, and the country is the southernmost member of the Arab League – even though Arabic is only a minority language behind the majority Shikomori (a Bantu language similar to Swahili). As you would expect, all of this has an effect on the music of the country. That’s where this album comes in!
While there are all sorts of styles across the islands, this disc focuses on mshago music from the island of Ngazidja (the largest of the archipelago, also known as Grande Comore). Mshago is essentially the local pop music that developed directly from the classical style of twarab. Classical twarab is very much in the Arabic tradition, performed on oud, qanun, ney and as many violinists as you can muster and with melodies based on the Arabic maqam scales. However, after the dominance of twarab for about 50 years, in the 1970s, people wanted a different sound. Twarab already had many rhythms based on African ngoma music, but in making mshago, the musicians brought in sounds from everywhere to turn the classical style into real music for the dancefloor.
Mshago, then, has the guitars of Congolese soukous, the close harmonies of Malagasy salegy, rhythms from across Africa, Latin America and the Arabic world and other cues from reggae, Bollywood, rock and funk, all while keeping a strong Arabic root to the melodies and bringing in lots more influence from traditional Comorian styles such as sambe and twari. From a small group of islands, a world of music! This album also does a good job of showing the variety of mshago across five different groups – you can hear the difference between the Congolese-and-Cuban influenced Sambeco, the modern-day twarab of Belle Lumière (complete with synths galore) and the particularly strong South Asian vibes of Taanchik.
If you want to know more of the amazing and under-heard music from the Comoros, let’s make a difference! Recommend it at work, request it on the radio and tell your local discotheque to only book the prime exponents of Comorian music or risk losing your business. There’s literally tens (or at least, more than ten) of us, so let’s rock the boat a little bit. All being right with the world, every household will have their own small stash of Comorian music, and this album can serve as an excellent starting point in those collections.
Various Artists (USA) Fat Possum: Not the Same Old Blues Crap (1997)
11 tracks, 44 minutes Spotify ∙ iTunes
We heard from Fat Possum Records right at the beginning of this big mad project, back in the third week with Takes One to Know One by Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early. The awesome power of that record was not a one-off – today’s album gives the proof.
This compilation is a label sampler – usually quite dull affairs that come free with magazines and give you a pleasant tour around the catalogue whatever record label coughed up the price. Not this one. Not the Same Old Blues Crap, aside from just being a simply glorious title, says it all: it’s three-quarters-of-an-hour of messy, noisy and impolite blues.
The front cover advertises it as ‘cheap price sampler,’ but I reckon they’re playing a delicious irony with that one. Samplers are usually inexpensive and a bit rubbish, but this one sounds cheap – it’s lo-fi to the extreme, the instruments are old, the performances are imprecise and the amplifiers sound like they’re just about to give up, and that’s exactly how it’s supposed to sound. This ain’t no haute couture, it’s dirty, covered in grit and tastes like smoke and moonshine.
Not the Same Old Blues Crap is still a representative distillation of Fat Possum’s early output, when they shone a spotlight on the new music of the old musicians of Mississippi. So Williams and Early are there, and the label’s most successful names of R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and T-Model Ford and others such as the Jelly Roll Kings and Hasil Adkins, who all play that modern-day delta sound that leans very close to punk through some sort of convergent evolution. Also featured are a couple of younger-generation punk-blues bands such as 20 Miles and The Neckbones to complete the circle; they fit in perfectly.
Nowadays, Fat Possum’s output is less exciting (to me at least), focussing on more standard rock and indie stuff. But their early releases, as so brilliantly illustrated here, really exploded notions of what down-home Mississippi blues was and could be – and that the old bluesmen were still, and always had been) edgier than any blues-cock-rocker could hope to be. This wasn’t the same old blues crap, and it’s still an exciting, powerful listen today.
We’re back with another volume of the legendary Éthiopiques series. The series is mostly known for digging out the best in the classic era of Ethiopian jazz, soul and funk, but Volume 21 is different from any other. That’s because the music of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou is entirely unique.
As with so much of the best music, hers is simple yet so complex. It’s all solo piano. There’s nothing outwardly virtuosic about her playing, but there doesn’t need to be. Every note she plays is perfect. The languid rubato, the ever-so-slight pause that she takes on some notes all give every key press a real weight and sincerity behind them.
All sixteen of these pieces are her own compositions, and no-one else writes piano music like her. Emahoy Guèbrou is completely devoted to her life as an Ethiopian orthodox nun (Emahoy is equivalent to the English ‘Sister’), and her music is deeply indebted to that devotion. From her fingers come the sound of the giant begana lyre and the solemn chants of psalms, with their connections to the ancient Ethiopian scales and rhythms, but when translated through the piano (and her time studying European classical music before her sisterly vows), it becomes something different.
I hear so much in those flowing runs and playful tinkles. There’s a real impressionist vibe, all washed-out and dappled with sunlight and shade like the best of Debussy and Chopin. I even hear some unexpected things too – zydeco and kora melodies echo in the swirls of notes, entirely in my own head, I’m sure. Above all, it is relentless in its gentleness. I evoke water metaphors a lot, but I hear it so strongly in Emahoy Guèbrou’s music. It trickles and it gushes, it swells and wanes like waves, always calm but with an ocean’s worth of awesome but benevolent power behind each note.
The recordings that make up this compilation were recorded between 1963 and 1996 (by which time she had moved to a hermitage in Jerusalem, where she lives to this day), and that wide span just shows the timelessness of her work. Emahoy Guèbrou’s music is unique because it is her own; no-one could have come up with the style because it is her own life story told in washes of sound. In the last decade or so, people have begun to wake up to the genius of this music, but none can capture the same immense beauty of her own playing. In a small, simple room in Jerusalem, surrounded by holy symbols, a nun in her mid-90s is playing music that will resonate for a long, long time.
When I started to set out writing about this album, my first thought was ‘this is probably the most embarrassing album on the whole list.’ But really, that's bullshit. You should never be embarrassed to like any music at all – unless it is music that oppresses others by its existence, in which case it belongs in the sea. But as a general rule, the whole concept of ‘guilty pleasures’ in music just shouldn’t be a thing. If you derive enjoyment, pleasure or meaning from it, in whatever form that may take, and it doesn’t hurt anyone, then it does its job as art, and is therefore good. And if I derive enjoyment, pleasure or meaning from it, then it is Good, and warrants its place on this blog. So bearing that in mind, I’m going to resolutely try to be entirely unashamed of this pick, while secretly hoping that no-one is laughing at how much of a nerd I am.
What is it then? It’s music from the Pokémon games for the various Nintendo handheld systems from the Gameboy to the DS. The tracks featured here are mostly from the first two generations of Pokémon games, whose music was based on sounds that we now think of as chiptune. You know the sort – bleepy and bloopy but with a surprising range of timbre, percussion that was just different types of white noise, and very short compositions that looped around and around depending on which in-game area you found yourself in at the time. The music of the Pokémon series was really good considering its limited resources, and could sound idyllic like a small rural village, ancient like a traditional Japanese temple, funky and action-packed for fight sequences or just one of the creepiest pieces of music ever composed.
BUT that isn’t what we’re listening to today. Not quite. Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks is an album made by the OverClocked ReMix community. OverClocked ReMix is a fun little corner of the internet where people work with video game music of all kinds and put their own spin on things. This includes remixing, remaking and reorchestrating video game music in every conceivable style, as well as making music inspired by certain games or pieces. Everything on OC ReMix is vetted before it gets posted – so the quality is usually very good – and everything is available for streaming and downloading entirely for free. Occasionally they release ‘albums’ of music based on a specific theme or game, and that’s where Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks comes from.
The way the OC ReMix project works means that the music on Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks is incredibly varied. Some tracks are obviously better than others, but the project’s vetting and compilation process means there’s very few duds in this whole set, and when the tracks are good, they’re really good. Super inventive too. There’s standard chiptune-y type remixes, but there’s also full metal rescores, piano covers, even R’n’B sort of things and original songs. But my absolute favourite has to be the remix of ‘Team Rocket Hideout’ from the original games, Pokémon Red, Blue & Yellow. This is what the original track sounds like. And this is what the remix, ‘TEEM.ROKIT’ by producer Tweex, sounds like:
How great is that?! That’s some proper industrial techno and psytrance vibes right there. I would not be embarrassed to drop it during a DJ set as long as the mood felt right. There’s dirty dub bits in there too. And I love that it still stays remarkably true to its source material – it has a lot of the same bleep-bloop atmosphere and obviously bases itself almost completely around the same melodies and countermelodies of the original, but it just ramps it up and up to the next level. It sounds (appropriately) like an evolved version of the 1996 original, and the vibe it creates is so perfect for the in-game context that I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this is exactly what composer Junichi Masuda would have had in mind if the system at the time would have allowed.
It just brings me back to a thing I seem to say way too often and that you’re probably bored of: video game music is a really untapped source of brilliant compositions, programming and ideas that are very rarely heard out of context, but that really do deserve a wider listener base than just the people that happen to play those specific games. So here’s me doing my own bit to get a wider audience, this time through the great work of the OC ReMix project. Maybe I’m still slightly embarrassed to be writing about Pokémon music on my (mostly) serious blog about the wonders of music from every bit of the world…but it’s good music, so who am I to argue?
The Première Anthologie de la Musique Malienne is a legendary set of six recordings by Bärenreiter-Musicaphon from Germany. They weren’t quite the earliest studio recordings made in Mali, but as far as I recall, they were the first recordings commissioned by the Malian government. The country was only 10 years independent by the time these records were released, and they were meant to instil in Malians a pride based on the heterogeneity of their new nation. So, of the six recordings there is an album by the Instrumental Ensemble of Mali, whose members represented a broad range of Malian cultures; one by Fanta Damba, a Bamana jeli (griot) who was considered the best singer of her generation; Cords Anciennes, a famous recording – the first ever – of instrumental kora duets and trios featuring the masters Sidiki Diabaté, Djelimady Sissoko and Batourou Sekou Kouyaté among others; and then three compilations of field recordings arranged by ethnicity, one on the music of the Mandinka, one of the Fula (or Peul) and one of the Songhai. All six are exquisite records of wonderful music and I urge everyone to listen to all of them.
Buuutttt, I’ve chosen to highlight the Songhai album in particular, for no special reason other than it’s quite rare nowadays to hear the ‘traditional’ music of the Songhai, who mostly live around the Niger bend in the north of Mali, including the cities of Timbuktu and Gao. There is quite a lot of Songhai music available nowadays – guitarist Ali Farka Touré is probably the most famous exponent – but so much of that music takes a lot of cues from rock and blues. That’s not a slight either, a lot of it is absolutely brilliant, but it does mean that the older roots of the style are heard much less outside of Mali than the rocked-up versions. This album gives a glimpse into what those traditions sounded like in the 1960s.
Because the album is part of an anthology, it makes sense that this compilation traverses a number of styles from the Songhai people. Most of the pieces are songs or recitations, performed by men and women and usually with the accompaniment of the ngoni, the boat-shaped lute found throughout Mali (although I don’t know the Songhai name for the instrument, sorry). Because there’s such a variety, each piece has a different aspect to it that you should definitely check out, but there are two tracks that really electrify me.
The track ‘Takamba’ (which is actually the name of the style, rather than the piece) is simply stunning. It’s a solo ngoni piece and it’s 7000% blues. I sat down today and tried to play it on the guitar. Obviously I couldn’t do it (my guitar skills leave much to be desired), but what was clear was that all the way through, the ngoni is playing exactly what we would call the blues scale, every one of the notes lines up, all the bends are in the same places along the scale, and even the hammer-ons and pull-offs are exactly what would be expected from a delta blues player. There are even points where you could slip right into the riffs from ‘Rollin’ Stone’ and there would be no clashes in there at all.
There’s also a really fascinating track, here entitled simply ‘Moorish Guitar’. Most of the tracks have at least a small description of the song, its lyrics and its cultural meaning (although the description for ‘Takamba’ is literally just ‘Played on a three-stringed guitar’), but this one says nothing other than it was recorded at Banamba. So this is a guess, but from what my ears are telling me and the ‘title’ of the piece, this is a Songhoi musician playing the oud in a sort of half-ngoni way, including tapping the soundboard of the instrument to provide percussion, and of course with all the bluesiness along with it all.
One of the reasons Malian music has been so successful internationally is because there’s just so much of it, with such huge variety of different styles and sounds to be heard across the length and breadth of the country. If you want to have a little bit of a primer to the more traditional side of things in Malian music, the Première Anthologie de la Musique Malienne is a great place to start.
