XXJFG


9th December 2011

Ye Ye Fever

Featuring:

Nâ Hawa Doumbia & Osayomore Joseph

Today’s guest post comes from the people of  Ye Ye Fever, so without delay, over to them!

It’s been a whole year since the first Ye Ye Fever & we’ve loved every minute of it, i still remember that beautiful moment at the Green Door opening night party when you all went crazy to Pepe Kalle – pon moun paka bouge whilst waiting for Cold Pumas to grace the stage…it was at that moment that the fabled Ye Ye moto was born, the moto which has united everyone underneath Brighton station so many times into a one glorious, albeit slightly overheated african dance party, so for the last time this year join us as we sing together ‘lights down low // vibes up high’

Ye Ye faves  Awesome tapes from Africa, the much respected blog, and now shiney new record label, have rightfully seen fit to reissue this beautifully stripped back hypnotic 1982 masterpiece from Nâ Hawa Doumbia. These four sprawling, minimal & repetitive didadi soundscapes provide the perfect plane for Nâ Hawa’s mesmerisingly imperfect voice. we need not know the true meaning of her words to be able to catch the vibe that this is the urgent voice of youthful frustation. real.

Awesome tapes from africa are doing things properly and will be widely available, working on 50/50 artist/label split. snap em up from your local record store.

Nâ Hawa Doumbia – Kungo Sogoni

Taken from Nâ Hawa Doumbia : la grande cantatrice malienne vol.3

From what I have gleamed about Osaymore Joseph he recorded a lot in Nigeria & a thread of social conscience & activism purveys his work.

However it was not lyrical meaning or any particular message that made this one of my favourite African records. The higher percussion parts create rolling hypnotic loops, right at the forefront of the mix. The wonky half-step of the kick & snare gives an irresistible swing & drive to the beat.

A touch of Funk occasionally peeks through (the little ‘Huh’s that jump off with the rhythm in the breakdown at 4:45). The band’s horn lines are powerful enough to have a strut to them but this is touched with melancholy, I think owing to their tendency to conclude riffs moving down the scale rather than up. There’s such tight rhythmic interplay going on between all the melody instruments & then with the vocals too. They flit in & out of doing call & response things & one big, complex groove.

The flute jams & cool sudden ending really float my boat. Bit of a crackly intro on this one :)

Osayomore Joseph & The Creative 7 – Unmarried Mothers

Want more?

Well, there is….

Ye Ye Fever’s end of year party

HIGHLIFE & SOUKOUS TO AFROBEAT & KWASSA KWASSA

Dec 9th - 11pm-4am - £free – The Green Door Store, Brighton

Music to make you sweat -
‘LIGHTS DOWN LOW // VIBES UP HIGH’

And if you cannot attend we’ll have a special Ye Ye podcast tomorrow on this very blog.

 

Add a comment

✎It's nice to comment...


Epilogue -
This post is tagged with



8th December 2011

Episode 14 : 120 Megabytes

Featuring:

Africa Hitech, Blondes, Egyptrixx, Golden Axe, slugabed, Steve Roach & zAKMATIC

120 Megabytes – Episode 14


brought to you in association with @markbrown and our friends over at Network Awesome

Add a comment

✎It's nice to comment...


Epilogue -
This post is tagged with



7th December 2011

Popolis

Featuring:

Chevalier Avant Garde

There exists a city atop a hill.  Like all good cities it’s grown in a chaotic fashion.  Street drilled through street, buildings reaching up towards the sky in a constant struggle for light.  Competition and vested interest mingling with egalitarian dreamers and poor cynics.  This city grew high and grew rich, until the those at the top could no longer clearly discern the vibrant streets below.  Welcome to the Great Metaphorical City of Pop.

The upper echelons of ‘true’ Pop live superficially gilded lives with access to money and materials. Their use of publicists: as integral as the studio and deployed with more devastating effect. Plugging more important than plug-ins…as it ever was. Their tendrils reach out into the world of the internet smashing through the paper thins walls that separate sites, great meaty slabs of tentacle attempting to wrap their suckers around the eyeballs of users (the writers being so numerous as to make supply a non issue when it comes to finding a compliant gatekeeper).

There exists another pop, a pop of the street level in this metaphorical city.  A pop with a lineage in bedrooms.  A pop wrenched from the controlling forces of studio time, freed by cheap hardware and the Faustian pact of piracy.  It is the pop of Maus and Pink.  Now, it seems it is the Pop of emails with links to Bandcamp  (one of the post-apocalyptic heros in a post-MySpace world).  It is an insurgency within the last bastions of profitability within the part of the music industry which can still claim to be an industry.

We love this Pop.  But then, we also love the idea of rampaging tentacles smashing up the internet.

It was a struggle to select one track from Chevalier Avant Garde‘s beautiful album Heterotpias and we hope you don’t think us lazy in selecting the first one.  Heteroptopias has been on repeat in our freezing office tower and when it loops back round this never fails to warm our frozen heart.  Missing opening and all.

So yes, it starts as if we came in half way through.  We’ve no idea whether this is a glitch in the Matrix Bandcamp or whether intentional.  We kind of like the bumpy nature of being thrown into something as gorgeous as this as the whole thing’s hit its stride.  A little bit of Maus, a little bit of Merritt and a little arpegiation fuse into what would be crystalline pop if that didn’t conjure something cool and unapproachable rather than the cosy basement club of our past, all warm and inviting against the harsh winter rain.

Chevalier Avant Garde – Over The Fountain

Chevalier Avant Garde’s album  came out on Skrot Up very recently and you can buy it here.

Comments

We ♥ your comments...

  1. “

    There are in fact, so many breaches in this pop milieu, a puckered landscape of Kimberlite pipes and smouldering rifts, one’s mind begins to wander. The vast and murky depths, dank and discontent, are a real gas. Those tendrils? So what! Let me lie there, in the purest shimmering samite.


    Yours sincerely

    Sean Orr

    7th December 2011


  2. “

    It starts like that, I’ve had it (and have been meaning to write about it) for a while, I’m glad you did it, it’s awesome!


    Yours sincerely

    20jazzfunkgreats

    7th December 2011


  3. “

    After reading your blog consistently for many years, I sincerely hope you one day compile all these beautiful extended metaphors and bizarre imagined scenarios into a published book. you have real, undeniable talent, and it catapults the quality your blog beyond the mere excellence of your song selection into something truly unparallelled. please never stop, but if you do, please make a book out of it. seriously.


    Yours sincerely

    yo dionysus

    8th December 2011


Add a comment

✎It's nice to comment...


Epilogue -
This post is tagged with