NOTHING SOUNDS BETTER REVIEW with sample: Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band - Juguya

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Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band - Juguya

I happen to live in an area of the country that is rather optimistically dubbed “The Sun Belt,” but whoever gave it that name has never spent a February in North Carolina. We are in the cold, gray days my friends, and Punxsutawney Phil has forsaken us. Thank God, then, for the sunny sounds of Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band to carry us through these dire times. Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band (henceforth BCMB) hail from Burkina Faso and play a heady brew of Afrobeat and folk music rooted in the Burkinan tradition. Their bouncy jam “Juguya” makes you want to dance until you can’t feel your feet anymore, but it’s not just fun and games: there’s plenty of grit to go around.

On “Juguya,” Baba Commandant alternately croons and howls his way through waves of dense funk, his voice shifting back and forth like a nimble reveler threading their way across the dance floor. His donso ngoni, a traditional West African hunter’s harp, skitters underneath the electric instrumentation, giving the song’s monster Afrobeat funk a delicate skeleton upon which it ceaselessly dances. Towards the song’s conclusion a saxophone cuts in and picks up speed, racing pell-mell onward to collapse at the finish line, utterly spent. It’s a sentiment anyone who listens to this track can appreciate. Sublime Frequencies is slated to release the JuguyaLP in late February. I think I speak for all my fellow stir-crazy, frozen-ass Sun Belters when I say it can’t come soon enough.

- Peter Schultz

GROUP INERANE: GUITARS FROM AGADEZ Vol 4 SF069 "Tehiteyman"

Emerging from the political turmoil of the Tuareg rebellion in Niger, Group Inerane's adventurous guitar sounds are well grounded in the tradition of Tamashek guitar music from their region. Originally born in refugee camps, this so-called desert blues spread the Saharan desert and managed to reach international audiences at the turn of the millennium, mainly through Malian outfit Tinariwen. 

Though this context helps put Group Inerane’s recordings in a nice historical context with the rest of the Sublime Frequencies catalog, most listeners on the western side of the Atlantic are likely to be turned on by the mesmerizing riffs and minimal rhythmic patterns that climb their way into full-blown psychedelia. With its simple arrangement and crawling groove, "Tehiteyman" is among the band’s most hypnotic tracks, and even though sometimes it may sound like a fully formed song out of the American avant-garde, it's actually more likely to be heard fueling the dance party at the wedding gigs that they play back at home. 

--Pierre Lestruhaut, International Tapes

Group Inerane: "Tehiteyman" by alteredzones

Sublime Frequencies will be releasing the CD version of Guitars From Agadez Vol. 3 alongside a new 7" as part of Group Inerane's upcoming European tour

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES PO BOX 17971 SEATTLE WA 98127 USA

http://www.sublimefrequencies.com/