When Western musicians add their bit to traditional African music it can be disastrous: a programmed beat awkwardly forcing sinuous, sensual music to conform to its rigidity, or some dreadful rock vocalist doing a Bono all over some exquisite interplay of mbira and talking drums. But here we have a London collective working with a bunch of musicians from Nairobi, and refreshingly their presence doesn’t for one moment seem unnatural or intrusive.
The first indication of a London sensibility at work on this debut album appears on the opening track “Gone thum mana gi nyadhi” in the form of the voluptuously rounded bass guitar, provided by Tom Skinner, which simultaneously anchors and drives things along.The one thing that lets down much African dance music (at least from the Western music fan’s perspective) is a good bottom end, so it’s a thrill to hear bottom end aplenty here. Then there’s Jesse Hackett’s borderline-cheesy vintage synth which happily shares sonic space with the dry buzzy twang of Charles Obuya’s djembe on the rolling, cyclical “Odero lwar".
This is a fusion record which actually lives up to the dictionary definition of that word: a true combining of talents, rhythms and sounds - rather than just a tolerable collision or a parallel but discrete meeting - of two distinct cultures. It would certainly appeal to anyone who enjoyed the excellent Congotronics albums as well as other “world music” stuff that’s just too cool for school. A wholly naturalistic production is the lack of icing on the cake that seems to allow you to hear the very air that surrounds these guys apparently just jamming in the yard: if you can’t hear the distant clamorous conversation of monkeys and birds in the trees, you imagine you can. Hopefully there’s some gigs lined up, because this music is desperate to escape the confines of digital data to be performed in front of a crowd.
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