LP / CD / DL
Out Now
8.5 / 10
A new compilation from Glitterbeat Records featuring one of
Africa’s most endangered peoples.
This is the sort of thing that makes ‘World Music’ so fascinating. Music in its most basic organic form. Music played on hand-made and /or adapted traditional
instruments. Words sung by people who
really have no concern if they are pitch perfect because they sing to express
feeling and emotion. This is music for no other reason than to exist as music.
The Abatwa (‘pygmy’) are one of the most threatened races in
the World and with it comes music that too is scarce and isolated and which is
incredibly compelling. There is a
remarkable texture to their sound largely made up of string instruments
including the one-string Umuduli and eleven string Icyembe but also battery operated
loop machines which click and beep like a child with a new toy. Night Street Walker, Who Will Care For My
Children? by Jean Claude Nzabonimpa even features found metal and rattle
distorters.
This is lo-fi, D.I.Y. music in its (im)purest form. You can imagine walking into an Abatwa
village in the Rwandan borderlands and coming across these people playing their
sounds and music to each other and maybe even to themselves.
Songs filled with passion and such emotiveness that it would be hard to peel yourself away until they pack up their sparse backing and move on. Nineteen year old Rosine Nyiranshimiyimana performs an improvised rap on The Child From The Streets with nothing more than the battery operated loop machine and backing vocals, and the result is stunning.
Songs filled with passion and such emotiveness that it would be hard to peel yourself away until they pack up their sparse backing and move on. Nineteen year old Rosine Nyiranshimiyimana performs an improvised rap on The Child From The Streets with nothing more than the battery operated loop machine and backing vocals, and the result is stunning.
There are more vocal oriented tracks like I Will Serve by
Emmanuel Hatungimana the short album opener AIDS Is Bad and, incredibly emotive
tracks like War Song performed by Beatrice Mukarungi a sixty-seven year old
mother leading her sons.
As ever with compilations from Glitterbeat, this album is
enthralling in the extreme and offers an insight into yet another musical
strain hidden away in this huge planet and, as the poignant sounding title
track closes the album another gem has been witnessed.
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Published on Louder Than War 24/08/17 - here
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