Africa
Mark Kidel
If humanity first emerged in Africa, so did music, that’s for sure. The continent provides an endless reservoir of sounds and rhythms that have fed into blues, gospel, rock and jazz and influenced musical culture the world over. Not surprising perhaps that a work as primal and rich in possibility as Terry Riley’s In C should work miraculously well when played and recorded in Bamako, one of Africa’s most vibrant musical cities. The piece is structured around repeated groups of notes and rhythms, taken up by different instruments – strings, percussion, and in this case vocals – which Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
When a play is preceded by a long list of content warnings, it’s hard not to let your judgement be coloured in advance. Sexual violence, strong language, strobe lighting, smoke effects, audience-actor interaction – we’re told in advance that Liberian Girl has them all. As such, the atmosphere as the audience arrives and people find a place to stand on the red sand-strewn set is tense.It is only when the action properly gets underway that you realise that this anxiety is being skilfully manipulated by director Matthew Dunster and writer Diana Nneka Atuona. Given the play’s subject matter Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In Concerning Violence Göran Hugo Olsson has created an almanac documentary drawing on material from Swedish television archives, filmed by a number of directors in Africa, largely in the 1970s. It’s fascinating footage, covering a number of perspectives on what was happening in the continent over that decade, from the frontline guerilla wars with the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, to industrial unrest in Liberia, and apparently matter-of-fact interviews with white settlers in Rhodesia and elsewhere.But Olsson’s masterstroke, which gives this diverse material a uniting context, is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
David Attenborough’s characteristically soothing narration again described the unceasing struggle for survival in the animal world. In astonishing films from all over the world, we witnessed an enormous variety of tactics for finding homes that not only provided shelter, but protection. In nature, he told us, good homes are all too rare, and we were treated to some not-so-subtle allusions to our own housing crises.This episode, subtitled Home, opened by visiting a bushy glade in the huge Zambian plain where a dozen wild dog pups were guarded by an adult male babysitter, as the other Read more ...
Mark Kidel
In reaching out to audiences beyond the African context, Malian musicians and singers have adopted performance styles that don’t always reflect the intimacy and personal communication so fundamental to the praise-singing at the heart of the region’s musical tradition. Kassé Mady Diabaté’s latest release, while not his first acoustic outing, avoids the world music festival staples of rock-tainted histrionics and takes us really close-up to possibly African’s greatest living singer’s warmth, generosity of spirit and deep-flowing soul. Kassé Mady is the epitome of the "cool", demonstrating Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Afrobeats scene is coming to a venue near you. Anglo-Ghanaian artist Fuse ODG, who won the best African Act MOBO last week for the second year running, launched his first album T.I.N.A. last night with a relentless, exuberant performance that brought out the African party flavour to these songs. His album release and tour, on the back of the MOBO success, marks a significant moment in his progression from niche internet popularity to the mainstream. Fuse is a working model of how to create a music career online, and his profile has been raised to its current breaking-through status Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Anglo-Ghanaian musician Fuse ODG – born Nana Richard Abiona – is a leading exponent of the new Afrobeats movement, which combines Western pop and rap with Nigerian and Ghanaian pop, and some stylistic elements from the Fela Kuti-inspired Afrobeat scene. Unlike many of his contemporaries on the scene, Fuse spent many years of his childhood in Ghana, returning to London for secondary school, and has detailed first-hand experience of both cultures. He retains a musical interest in both countries, and is the first British musician to be nominated for two Ghanaian music awards.He’s built his Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Brian Cox has a very beguiling way of expressing quiet wonder. He’s taken on the very largest of subjects in Human Universe, extending traditions of science and natural history broadcasting towards a wider study of how the human race has come to be what it is, where it came from and where it may be going, and he doesn’t raise his voice on a single occasion. Other BBC presenters carried away by their subject matter could certainly take a hint.This first episode of Cox’s five-parter was titled “Apeman-Spaceman”, and we first saw Britain’s favourite physicist at Star City outside Moscow, the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
It was Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers that first really got Mulatu Astatke major Western attention – in same way that Angelo Badalementi’s music for Twin Peaks gave a rich and strange dimension to David Lynch’s TV epic, there was an even greater sense of wonderful disorientation, or as Brian Eno put it “jazz from another planet,” with Astatke’s music.While Astatke values the back catalogue (he played on the same bill as Duke Ellington in front of Haile Selassie in the early 1970s) he has really seized the opportunity that opened up for him to create some genuinely terrific new music.This Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We call it the First World War, but in Western Europe at least, most of the scrutiny is confined to what happened to Britain, France and Germany (with a side order of Russia) from 1914-18. The writer and presenter of this two-part series, David Olusoga, seized the opportunity to emphasise the full global scope of the conflict by throwing fascinating light on the contributions made by troops from the French and British colonies, uncomprehendingly transported from India and Africa to the mud, blood and horror of the Western Front.Beginning with the revelation that the first shot fired by the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Sia Tolno was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, had a violent father, was forced to leave the country due to the civil war and ended up in the harsh world of Conakry nightclubs. Life was no bed of roses, in other words. The inspiring thing about this album is how she now stands loud and proud in the tradition of powerful African women like Angelique Kidjo and Miriam Makeba. This, her fourth and most ambitious album is her take on Afro-beat. Her collaborator is Tony Allen, Fela Kuti’s legendary drummer and co-architect of Afro-beat 40-plus years on from the original sound when Allen was the Read more ...
Simon Munk
Sometimes virtual violence can simply be fun, even morally dubious violence. Sniper Elite III is pretty reprehensible and fairly morally indefensible. It gleefully glamorises violence. Yet throughout, it's fun. Really good fun.Sniper Elite's key selling point, the thing that defines the series above all else, is a repellent, yet hypnotic, slow-motion kill-cam. Improved for the latest game, it shows your long-range bullet entering through skin, muscle, sinew; shattering through bone; destroying internal organs before leaving your Nazi enemy writing in agony on the ground, before expiring in Read more ...