mouth music (afrotronica)

[via Nick Zurko]

release rationale:

Khalab has summoned a futuristic afro-centric soundscape by weaving a poly-phonic tapestry of future bass, jazz and field recordings. The LP’s title track tells hard truths from the mind of spoken word artist Tenesha The Wordsmith. Along with her words the LP’s title has been augmented with a date marking the arrival of an emancipated future. 

‘Black Noise 2084’ casts aside the worn and surface level cliché of black music being soul music. Khalab guides us to the beginning of a journey, the journey of rhythms and he takes us within earshot of the voices and spirits that carried them. Soul gained over aeons of terror and forced transportation, soul driving survival against systematic oppression, wholesale against a people. Khalab looks to the noise, the messages, the spirits, and evokes the light of ‘Black Noise 2084’ out of darkness.

From dystopian roots, the beat marabout Khalab has led his assembly of messengers to invoke this myth of cathartic liberation. ‘Black Noise 2084’ features the voices of musical voyagers seeking new pathways: Shabaka Hutchings, Moses Boyd, Tamar "The Collocutor" Osborn, the master Gabin Dabir, Tenesha The Wordsmith, Tommaso Cappellato, Prince Buju and Clap! Clap! Within the tapestry of Khalab’s ‘Black Noise 2084’ the myth moves through its cycle of life, initiations and ceremonies with a cast of unnamed messengers.

Khalab was invited to work with field recordings from the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa of Bruxelles. The museum’s recordings made for a post-colonial World, hold ethnographic and historical insights into the cultures of the region over the last 500 years. The Museum is far from the horrors that Belgian King, Leopold II unleashed during his colonial reign, however it is a dark legacy that is far from absolved.

‘Black Noise 2084’ opens a portal where displaced rhythms, chants, screams and dreams collide with quaking bass, a vortex of shattering synths, jazz rains and emotion all amalgamate. Empires for millennia thrived across the African continent and Empires are being willed to rise.

As Khalab draws the LP to a close he brings light with ‘Dawn’ ft Moses Boyd. A dawn firmly squared-up by its past, hard truths of a barbaric history embarking on the beginning of reconciliation. Drum beats usher in the arrival home for a new glory. 2084 a time when rhythms have shed the cargo of their haunted odyssey. The myth of ‘Black Noise 2084’ is a new dawn where the ghosts of Leopold and all his kind are finally excised. Atonement in hearing the truths carried across the ages, carried in noise, Black Noise. 

credits

and that's why they call it...

Slimzee remembering sneaking, aged fifteen, into Labrynth, his first club, in 92-93, with his mate Geneeus

i wondered if i rubbed shoulders with these lads



Labrynth,  a few years later, in full junglistic mode

the Donae'O dada

rave LPs

Completely missed this enjoyable and extremely thorough survey - by Leaving Earth's Taninian, from a couple of months ago - of the single-artist Rave Album

A curious artifact, with a checkered history, and an uncertain market,  for sure...  but T makes a good case for some classics that came out in the period 1991-1992: the apex of rave as a mass phenomenon

Among the ones I've heard and own, I concur heartily with the verdicts (Experience is the gold standard, Rhythmatic's Energy on Vinyl is a lost gem, as is Sonz's Flowers in My Garden, but Eon's surprisingly unmemorable despite the run-up of killer singles etc etc)

What surprised me: how many I didn't know about....

Especially when it came to the Euro end of things - Germany, Holland, Belgium - where, according to T, there's a shitload of ace full-lengths, with album tracks as fierce and full-on and inventive as the well known singles

Some of these LPs would be pretty challenging to find, I should think - you might find them going  very cheap, but it would probably entail hours digging through vinyl junkyard basements. 

However -  quite a few are on Spotify! So if you've got a spare 7 hours...

I couldn't think of any omissions really.  Unique 3's Jus' Unique has some great tunes on it but it came out in 1990 so doesn't qualify. Likewise - although it's been a long time since I've heard it - i feel a case could be made for The Shamen's En-Tact as both a good album and genuinely part of the rave culture, but that 1990 too. As for their Boss Drum - I can't remember a thing about it, but I don't think any of it really qualified as 'rave', not even Ebeneezer Goode", by then they'd have been on the progressive/trance tip if anything, I should have thought. Tracks featuring vocals by Terence McKenna.

Utah Saints had an album out in 1992 but vaguely recall it being plodding stuff, "Something Good" withal.

Bizarre Inc released the album Energique in '92 but I should imagine they would have shifted towards house music by that point. (More curious about their 1989 album Technological, which is described at discogs as "techno". 1989 is early for a UK techno full-length - who else was there doing that? A Guy Called Gerald, 808 State....  a few more house or sample-cut-up in style like S'Express and Bomb the Bass and Coldcut).

Smart E's actually released an album in '92, would you believe.... and some people rate it



There's a coda to the Leaving Earth survey, which looks at albums that came out after the cut-off point that T's imposed - belated full-lengths that already seemed like curios by the time they were released, what with the music having moved on a long way, in multiple increasingly divergent directions.

Here I can think of one or two that might have been included - except that they're not very good, so perhaps would / should be filtered out accordingly!

Like Liquid's album, which I actually reviewed  - not at the time (1995) but many years later for eMusic.

I don't think T included the Messiah album 21st Century Jesus, from 1993 -  but then again, I'm not sure if was any cop at all.

A very belated debut album is Baby D's Deliverance, which came out in 1996 - and from descriptions seems like its contents are largely radio-friendly toned-down versions of the classic hardcore tracks from several years earlier.

Then there's Genaside II's New Life 4 the Hunted, also from 1996, which suffers from eclecticism - the misplaced desire to show versatility and genre non-confinement.

Well, the one arguable major omission in the missed-the-boat category is Gerald's 28 Gun Bad Boy, from '93, but perhaps that is being construed by T as simply too dark, too jungalistic, to count as "rave"?

Tragic cases of rave-era artists who never made an LP?

Acen would be #1

And a close-behind  #2 - Hyper-On Experience.

just 4 u london

that tune and the two videos got me thinking about the tradition within the nuum of songs about London or repping for specific bits of London - here's a backwards lineage  (suggestions of flagrant omissions please) where it's either in the title, the main vocal lick, or in the lyrics



(late addition via Sadmanbarty)



(ditto)



(ditto)



















"Love for the London Streets" is the title and vocal lick of this 2 Wisemen tune



(with Stamp Crew, wait for the vocal lick at 47 seconds in and repeatedly after)




intro to this ruffhouse monsta divides the city into four quadrants and hails them all











missing in this london patriotism lineage are contributions from two significant phases - I couldn't think of a deep tech or a funky anthem that references london or london massive or even a specific area of the city ... is that because both styles were already succumbing to digi-era delocalisation? Funky if it references anywhere at all it would be a vague Africa. And deep tech is the least London-y of all these sounds.

prehistory to the nuum's London-love








postscript: a suggestion of the illustrious Selectabwoy



perhaps slightly outside the lineage


STOP PRESS/ LATE SUGGESTIONS AND ADDITIONS

a funky example, from man in the comments



dissensus bods suggestions (ta lads)

deep and rude

a deep tech tune from this year that attempted to put some sorely needed rudeness back in the music

courtesy of Lady Saw, via a 2step banger of yore by M-Dubs