By Ogova Ondego
Published October 22, 2021
You already know that nothing can stop music in Africa, right? You also know that birth, initiation into various stages of adulthood, marriage, work and even death are all accompanied by music, right?
As more people get vaccinated and the world struggles to return to normalcy under the shadow of the Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) that has hung over it since the beginning of 2020, artists are also releasing music singles, EPs, LPs and albums around the world.
Just today, October 22, two singles and a full length album have been released by Congolese-Angolan Batila, Cuban Omar Sosa and Senegalese Seckou Keita, and Britain’s Addictive TV.
Whereas Batila (full name Batila Ange da Costa)’s pop-styled music of the people (bantu soul) titled What About Me celebrates personal independence freedom, Suba, the second album from piano virtuoso Sosa and kora master and singer Keita, is viewed as a hymn to hope, to compassion and to change in a post-pandemic world.
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As for Dr Junkenstein from the UK’s Addictive TV, I shall let Angie Lemon speak as teeth don’t litigate in the presence of the tongue unless they want to lose the case in the court of elders.
Dr Junkenstein is the fun, new electro-jazz track from the UK’s irrepressible ethno-sampling adventurers Addictive TV, who travel the globe searching for unusual and brilliant sounds for their Orchestra of Samples project.
Inspired by the percussive sounds of re-cycled junk andthe idea of creating jazz by ‘stitchingtogether’ disparate parts, Angie Lemon writes, Dr Junkenstein was given life!
Let Angie Lemon finish the fascinationg story of jazz, junk and recycling before we return to Keita and his partner Sosa and Batila and his ode to freedom from stereotypes.
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Angie carries on.
When you spend a lot of time travelling in search of distinctive musical sounds, you can come across some pretty unusual instruments in unexpected places, such as Brazil, home to eco-group Patubatê (pronounced Patoo-bat-ay)who make instruments from a wide range of rejected objects found in skips and junkyards, including pots, pans, telephone booths and even an old car exhaust pipe!
Closer to home, in 2021, Addictive TV recorded a session with Saul Eisenberg, founder of the UK’s Junk Orchestra and former Stomp and Blue Man member, who similarly rock ‘n’ recycles re-invented instruments from the scrapyards of London, from empty gas cylinders turned into drums to the playing of spokes on a spinning bike wheel to create a funky ‘washboard’ type sound! Both artists now feature on Dr Junkenstein.
The track takes its name from both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in which a strange assortment of old body parts are brought together create a new life, but also nods to funk band Parliament’s 1970’s track ‘Dr Funkenstein’.
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Producer Francoise Lamy explains: “Dr Junkenstein is the latest in a whole series of tracks we’ve created by sampling hundreds of musicians we recorded improvising around the world in the last decade for Orchestra of Samples. The project has always been about bringing different instruments together, but that doesn’t always just mean traditional or rare localised instruments, it also means newly invented ones and that encompasses the whole world of musically recycled junk.
The bulk of percussion though on Dr Junkenstein is a classic drum kit played by Ukrainain drummer Sergey Balalaev, which was a fortuitous meeting of musicians while Addictive TV were in St. Petersburg in 2014 performing Orchestra of Samples at the Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art; a recording session that hadn’t been sampled until now!
There’s also a great piano riff on the track created from sampling recordings with Jack Hues – the multi-instrumentalist and lead singer of 1980’s pop sensation Wang Chung, who still perform today!
But the pivotal instrument on Dr Junkenstein is the sonorous saxophone as performed by Petr Kroutil and recorded in 2018 when Addictive TV were asked to play at the Soundtrack Festival in the Czech Republic, as Addictive TV’s frontman Graham Daniels explains, “The festival had introduced us to both the headliner, film composer Eric Serra – who scored The Fifth Element and Bond film GoldenEye, and also to Petr Kroutil who was hosting a talk we were doing. It turned out Petr’s also a leading saxophonist and clarinettist in the Czech Republic, and one of the most distinctive jazz musicians there!
An opportunity we simply couldn’t miss, so arranged to record Petr on saxophone in my hotel room and this later became the lead instrument on Dr Junkenstein!”
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Now in its eleventh year, artists Addictive TV’s project Orchestra of Samples continues to shine a light on instruments from around the world in a fascinating and innovative manner.
Addictive TV are known for their pioneering use of audio-video sampling and since the late 1990s have performed in over 50 countries, from WOMAD in the UK to SXSW in Texas (USA). Hollywood studios Paramount, Universal and 20th Century Fox have all used their AV remixing talents to create alternative trailers for films including Iron Man and Fast & Furious. They were twice voted #1 VJ in the world by DJ Mag alongside their Top 100 DJ poll and have had work exhibited at New York’s Museum of Moving Image and Shanghai’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2021, they were commissioned by the UK’s Journeys Festival to create ‘Sounds of Sanctuary’, a short film collaborating with refugee musicians from Syria, Iran and Zimbabwe, who’ve now settled in the UK and Europe.
Fascinating story of art, isn’t it? From Angie Lemon.
And that isn’t all, says Angie Lemon of the group that is supported by Arts Council England.
On November 10, 2021 is an online ‘Meet The Artists’ Zoom session for Dr Junkenstein, with Addictive TV and all the featured musicians:
- Petr Kroutil (saxophone)
- Jack Hues (piano)
- Fred Magalhães (car exhaust)
- Saul Eisenberg (bicycle wheel)
- Sergey Balalaev (drums).
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Back to Batila and his What About Me digital single.
“I am proud and in love with Congolese music … That’s why I also name my sound Bantu Soul… it’s music for my people by people,” he says. “I dedicate my music to music lovers, people who like to dive a bit deeper without sounding too intellectual. I dedicate my music to the youth and my generation in the diaspora, who are not fighting to be accepted by the white man. I AM, I don’t need permission, I don’t need to be cool, trendy,” says Batila who says he was born in Congo-Kinshasa but was raised between Berlin (Germany) and London (Britain).
He says the name Batila comes from his grandfather and means ‘one who protects, conserves and holds it together’.
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The combined talents of Sosa and Keita, on the other hand, are joined on the Suba recording by the inimitable Venezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles, who also appears at all the Duo’s live performances, Jaques Morelenbaum (cello), Dramane Dembélé (flute) and Steve Argüelles (sequencing, effects, percussion).
SUBA means ‘sunrise’ in Mandinka, Seckou’s native language, and sunrise is his favourite time of day, a time of freshness and hope. “Even if you’re facing certain difficulties, you reset your brain back to normal. You see the sunrise as a new day, a new peace, a new something, good or bad – an exciting something. That was the feeling I had when I was writing with Omar.”
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Though Seckou Keita calls the pandemic ‘a top-level university of seeing the world in a different way’ it wasn’t because of COVID he and Omar decided on the name. “It was Suba for many things: music, art, human beings, compassion, change.”
For Omar Sosa, the album is a heartfelt reiteration of humanity’s oldest prayer. “The concept of the record is peace, hope and unity. In this moment we’re living, when everything’s falling apart little by little, the one thing we have inside ourselves is a divine connection with our inner voice, with our spirit and light and with our ancestors. We try to give hope through music and tell people that we can be together.”
The 11 tracks on Suba tell of friendship and spiritual connection, of travel and loss, of hope and optimism, of dancing and the sea… and, of course, of a new sunrise.
And so, no. Nothing can stop the music in Africa. Not even pandemics like COVID-19.
