African music
Katie Colombus and Caspar Gomez
FRIDAY 22 JULY by Caspar GomezWhen my regular festival pal Finetime and I have set up the wibbly, inflatable-poled tents he bought from Lidl, we settle to drinks, his from a chill-box, mine from a 35-pint container of Pilton Labyrinth scrumpy. We attune to the neighbours. Next to us is a tent-corral proudly flying a flag featuring a pink unicorn with penises for legs, spunking out rainbows. They are discussing the history of the Soviet Sputnik programme of the late 1950s. The people from the tents next door, that is. Not the unicorn’s penis-legs.As we will learn, this is the way people Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Spring is in the air and vinyl is, as always, on the turntable here at theartsdesk on Vinyl. We’ve been ploughing through all the latest releases and reissues, played loud on a large sound system, each evaluated as fully as possible. Below you’ll find 7000 words to pick through and locate what sounds good to you. Unrestricted by genre, all musical life is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHJames Domestic Carrion Repeating (Amok/TNS)Suffolk-based James Scott is in more bands than there’s space to list here, most notably punk outfit The Domestics. His solo debut is a complete treat that deserves Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The fourth Ibibio Sound Machine album is produced by Hot Chip (who also contribute musically). However, fans will not hear a drastic step away from their last album, 2019’s Doko Mien. Instead, it has the feel of a logical progression, albeit with just that bit more techno-pop heft in places, and a subtle flavour of the Eighties. Business-as-usual, then? Maybe, but Ibibio Sound Machine’s Afro-inventive business-as-usual stands out brightly from the competition.The London-based band, fronted by Eno Williams, who sings in both English and Ibibio, a southern Nigerian language, open proceedings Read more ...
theartsdesk on Vinyl 69: Andrew Weatherall, Courtney Barnett, Wings, Los Bitchos, Popol Vuh and more
Thomas H. Green
As the year starts to rev up, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns with over 7000 words on new music on plastic, a smörgåsbord of the kind you will find nowhere else. This month we also have a competition for the dance music lovers among you, a chance to win a £50 gift card for the new app Recycle Vinyl (online stock of 10,000 records + 25,000 in their warehouse + 500 more added every week). For a chance to win, simply email the answer to the following question to recyclevinylcomp@gmail.com: who is described in the reviews below as a "Canadian violinist”? (check in on Recycle Vinyl here). That aside Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“As you’ve noticed, I’m really terrible at talking between the songs,” announces Melt Yourself Down singer Kushal Gaya, two-thirds of the way through the gig. He is. But it really doesn’t matter; the genre-uncategorizable London six-piece smash through their hour-and-15-minute set with a lean, giddy forward propulsion that brooks no pause. Consequently, the small, sold-out, low-ceilinged club venue gradually becomes a wriggling, sweaty rave-pit.A lot has been written about the London jazz resurgence of recent years. Names such as Shabaka Hutchings, Nubiya Garcia and Seb Rochford bandied about Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Melt Yourself Down’s last one, 100% Yes, was the most ballistically exciting album of 2020. The band are unique, a six-piece mutation who, as their album title indicates, don’t fit in anywhere. The good news is that they’ve not tempered what they’re up to one jot. Pray For Me I Don’t Fit In amplifies the in-yer-faceness of their music and rampages out of the speakers like a wild beast.Where 100% Yes was underpinned by a lively Afro-indie funk aesthetic, their fourth album ups the ante, becoming closer to the scene that gave them their name (they were named after an obscure album by Seventies Read more ...
mark.kidel
Combining ancestral music with electronic sounds has become so widespread that it’s almost a cliché. Dance floors now pulsate with sounds from around the globe, adding a welcome warmth and heart to the tropes of techno, house and trance. Malian singer Rokia Koné with producer Jacknife Lee stand miles above the rest, and offers an object lesson in working so subtly with the original that the richness of African music isn't colonised by technology but miraculously enhanced.The gutsy authenticity of Bambara music – Rokia Koné hails from Ségou, the capital of the ancient Bambara Empire – is Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Malian kora master Ballake Sissoko is a griot steeped in the musical and cultural traditions of West Africa, whose duets with his cousin Toumani Diabate on the world music classic, 1999’s New Ancient Strings, are rightly celebrated.His duets with French cellist Vincent Segal first appeared in 2009, on the French No Format label; Chamber Music was hailed as a classic of world fusion, and their follow-up, 2015’s Musique de Nuit, extended and expanded that spirit of improvisation, recorded live in a studio in Bamako in Mali – and, more poetically, on Sissoko’s rooftop.That intimate sense of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
If ever there were a year to cherish new music, 2021 was it. Lockdown v3.0 came with unwelcome updates (shit weather, structured home-schooling) and the only end in sight was of the nation’s collective tether.With passports rendered next to useless, the arts offered an escape like never before, and music was no exception. In March, Jane Weaver’s phenomenal album Flock arrived full of psychedelic swagger and propulsive momentum. Retaining the melodic sensibilities and esoteric influences that defined her previous records, most notably 2017’s Modern Kosmology and 2015’s The Silver Globe, Weaver Read more ...
joe.muggs
2021 might not seem the most likely of years for the globalisation of dance music to intensify, what with the lack of travel and the lack of... well... dancing. But, in fact, thanks partly to the enforced time spent online which led to a lot of discovery for a lot of people, and partly to a simple yearning to get back out there dancing, the connections made have been wild. And no record exemplifies this quite like Toya Delazy’s Afrorave. The adopted Londoner comes from Zulu royalty, and is very keen to represent her heritage in her music: this entire album is rapped/sung in Zulu, its Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The first of two December round-ups from theartsdesk on Vinyl runs the gamut from folk-tronic oddness to Seventies heavy rock to avant-jazz to The Beatles, as well as much else. All musical life is here... except the crap stuff. So dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHSimo Cell Yes.DJ (TEMƎT)The latest from French producer Simo Cell is a bass-boomin’ post-trap six tracker that doesn’t play it straight at all. These are the kinds of tunes that should be heard on a giant sound system so that the earth itself rumbles. The enormous head-annihilating spacious tech-dub of “Farts”, a highlight, sits easily Read more ...
joe.muggs
Emma-Jean Thackray is not lacking in audaciousness. This is, after all, a white woman from Leeds barely into her thirties, raised on bassline house and indie rock, making music whose most obvious comparisons are with some of the most revered (in the most literal sense) black musicians in modern history: Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, J Dilla and more. And what’s more, she suggests this album will “simulate a life-changing psychedelic experience, an hour where we see behind the curtain to a hidden dimension”, packs it full of full-bore, third-eye-open omnitheistic Read more ...