Tanzania Albinism Collective - Our Skin May Be Different, But Our Blood Is the Same (SIX DEGREES 2018)

Following their triumphant WOMAD festival appearances (where the Taste the World stage staff said it was “the all-time most emotional performance ever” in the decades’ long series), the Tanzania Albinism Collective return with a set of even more experimental sounds.

Produced by Grammy-winner, Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Zomba Prison Project, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott), the Tanzania Albinism Collective actively pushes the boundaries of what is considered African and “world music,” while continuing to confront the dangers that the collective face daily due to prejudice and persecution at home.

While spending time with the collective, it came to light that it had always been one of the collective’s standout singers, Hamidu’s secret dream to sing. Since he was so often abandoned at home when his mother and siblings ventured out, unbeknownst to anyone else he would sing to himself to curb the loneliness— a classic case of music being medicinal. 

The desire to be heard burned in him so keenly that he even once saved up his meager income in order to approach the one and only recording studio on Ukerewe Island. But despite much effort and sacrifice on Hamidu’s part, the studio owner instead turned him away. Angrily refusing Hamidu’s hard-earned shilling, the engineer shouted in Hamidu’s face that he was just “trash,” that no one would ever want to listen to him, and warned him to never return. The studio owner insisted that no matter what, they would never work with Hamidu.

But due to the success of their debut album, White African Power, the members acquired passports and left their homeland for the first time ever. “We had to travel outside of our country to be heard at home,” says Riziki Julius, the collective member who in addition to his musical contributions, created Our Skin May Be Different, But Our Blood is the Same’s cover artwork.

Across a set of songs that explore themes like “Why Are You Killing Us?,” “I Stay Home (The Killings: Part II),” and “My Life (Abandoned),” one would be hard pressed to find a more singular and mournful tune anywhere than the album’s closing track, “Swimming in Sorrows.”

1 Disability

2 Running From the Sun

3 My Life (Abandoned)

4 White African Power (Reprise)

5 I Stay Home (The Killings: Part I)

6 Why Are You Killing Us?

7 Trapped (The Killings: Part II)

8 Albino

9 Swimming in Sorrows

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3MA: Ballaké Sissoko / Driss El Maloumi / Rajery - Anarouz (SIX DEGREES 2018)

Since their debut record in 2008, the 3MA musicians have been through many individual experiences broadening their knowledge. They meet regularly to give 3MA concerts throughout the world and over the years, new ideas have sprung up, and then have been refined, giving birth to new compositions or reworking existing ideas. A decade after the beginning of their adventure, it was time to take stock and get back into the recording studio. This new album bears witness to their wonderful connection and mature experience. Percussionist Khalid Kouhen joins in on two tracks to add delicate pulses with his Pakistani percussions and Indian tablas and on two other tracks we can even hear Rajery, Driss and Ballaké singing. But for the rest of the record, the string instruments reign and weave their magic alone. Each piece is the result of a unique chemistry in which individual parts are hard to define. The sounds of kora, oud and valiha do not try to stand out over each other, but instead develop a common language. While we never lose sight of the rich traditions which Ballaké Sissoko, Driss El Maloumi and Rajery embody, we hear above all a shared message from 3MA, a message that rallies against the violence of our world, with their soft and invigorating harmonies, vital energy and universal poetry.

1 Anarouz

2 Samedi glace

3 Anfaz

4 Moustique

5 Hanatra

6 Lova

7 Mariam

8 Aretina

9 Jiharka

10 Awal

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Brazilian Girls - Let’s Make Love (SIX DEGREES 2018)

Brazilian Girls return in 2018 with Let’s Make Love, their first album since the 2008 Grammy-nominated New York City. Formed in 2003, the group—Sabina Sciubba (lead vocals, electronics), Jesse Murphy (bass, vocals), Didi Gutman (keyboards, vocals), Aaron Johnston (drums, percussion, vocals)—was born after the four members crossed paths at East Village club Nublu. “Somehow we all ended up at Nublu on a Sunday and it all came together,” says Johnston. The band began playing Nublu weekly, embracing a free-form ethos that helped shape their kaleidoscopic sound. “A lot of the spirit of the band comes from being so open to improvise like that,” says Murphy. Fast earning attention for their euphoric live show—and winning fans like Zach Galifianakis, who later cast Sciubba as a regular on Baskets—Brazilian Girls released their self-titled debut in 2005 and sophomore album Talk to La Bomb in 2006.

Produced by longtime Brazilian Girls collaborator Frederik Rubens, Let’s Make Love came to life over the course of several years. Since they’re now scattered throughout the U.S. and Europe, the four band members assembled when possible to write and record, piggybacking those sessions onto gigs in Istanbul and Madrid and Paris and New York. Despite the distance, Brazilian Girls consistently found their chemistry as kinetic as when they first started out. “It’s a little astounding to us because we’ll go so long without playing, and then we get together and things just happen in this very harmonious way,” says Sciubba.

Pirates

Go Out More Often

Wild Wild Web

We Stopped

Salve

Let’s Make Love

Karaköy

Balla Balla

Woman In The Red

The Critic (Album Version)

Impromptu

Sunny Days

Looking For Love

The Turbans - The Turbans (SIX DEGREES 2018)

In a politically divided time it’s hard to imagine a band comprised of members from across Europe and the Levant as not being inherently progressive. The Turbans, whose self-titled debut album will be released on March 23 (Six Degrees Records), features musicians with roots in Turkey, Bulgaria, Israel, Iran, Greece, Spain, and England. Yet transmitting a political message was not their initial impulse. It was simply music.

And friendship, as it turns out. Oshan Mahony, the “seventh best guitar player in the band” he says with a laugh—the core group is seven members—met violinist Darius Luke Thompson in Kathmandu. The half-Iranian, half-British nomads immediately hit it off. They began busking throughout India, picking up musicians along their journey.

Seven years later The Turbans delivers to global audiences the same high-energy blend of Balkan, klezmer, Gypsy, and sundry other styles they’ve been bringing to venues around the world for years—India, Hong Kong, the Middle East, and all throughout Europe and North America. While the band has pulled from numerous folk traditions for live shows, recording required a new mindset.

“For this album we all went together to the farmhouse where I grew up in Northumberland,” says Mahony, whose parents bought a previously abandoned five-hundred-year-old property on the border of Scotland and England and turned it into a community arts center. “We all contributed about thirty songs. Some were traditional sounding, others were poppy. When you have a classical violinist playing an Indian raga you create something really weird and new.”

The breadth of genres on these eleven songs is astounding, which is why Kurdish percussionist Cabbar Baba called The Turbans “music from manywhere.” This coinage has also come to serve as the band’s reply to where they’re from.

So it was fitting that Jerry Boys would mix this energizing and border-less album. “He likes a raw sound with real energy,” Mahony says, following it up by stating that the master mixer is already prodding the band to begin work on their next album.

Boys kicked off his career at Abbey Road Studios; in his early days he worked on records by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd. The five-time Grammy winner then went global, working with Buena Vista Social Club, Ali Farka Toure, Shakira, Toumani Diabate, and Kronos Quartet. Fellow World Circuit veteran Tom Leader mastered The Turbans.

The Turbans is rounded out by vocalist and guitarist Miroslav Morski, a former Bulgarian pop star who previously fronted the band, Django Ze, and has been described as a “musical tornado” with a broad range of musical styles; Greek folk music expert, vocalist Pavlos Mavromatakis; cajon player and classical guitarist Pablo Dominguez, whose father, Chano, is a well-known flamenco pianist in America; Israeli guitarist Moshe Zehavi, who parents are from Turkey and Tunisia; and oud player Maxim Shchedrovitzki, a native of Belarus.

Beyond the core group the band is always playing with other musicians. On their debut this includes the “Gnawa Master of London,” guembri player Simo Lagnawi, as well as the London Bulgarian Choir.

Lagnawi contributes guembri, a Moroccan bass lute, and vocals on the Gnawa track, “Hamouda,” which leads into a North African exploration, “Chubby.” The latter song is based on the Moroccan pop style, Chaabi. It’s a brilliant segue, from ritual trance music into an uplifting, danceable fusion of guitars, percussion, oud, and woodwind.

“Sinko Moy,” which means “my son” in Bulgarian, was written by Morski, who had to leave his family in Bulgaria when moving to London due to visa problems. The time away from his family inspired this song, which is also the name of a forthcoming documentary on Morski’s life, coming out later this year.

Morski also honors his wife on “Samia,” a happier track about the joys of married life. In fact, most of the album reflects the band’s upbeat spirit. “Riders” is about nomadic life—the band spends half the year in Goa, the other half in the UK—as well as “being taken away by music.” “Aman” is a tribute to flamenco that incites “exclamations of happiness,” featuring lyrics in Greek and Spanish. The upbeat “Hackney” honors London’s most diverse borough, which every band member has lived in and serves as an important musical hub in the UK.

Mahony, the glue holding the band together, is in constant awe over the intensity of his bandmates. “Every single person in this band has such a strong fire inside of them,” he says. “I know so many good musicians in this city, and even around the world, who play perfectly, but when they play they don’t release the passion of the music. Everyone in this band has so much fire.”

The band is intent on letting their personalities and skill carry their message forward. While there are many possible meanings behind the band’s name, Mahony states they would only be applied in hindsight. He can’t even remember why Darius Thompson coined the term, though he suspects it might have to do with the fact that Mahony rode around India wearing a giant turban on his bicycle.

Still, that doesn’t imply a bigger message isn’t getting through. The Turbans is a truly global album with no pretensions of being anything other than the collaboration of good friends. They hop boundaries through instruments and melodies, no singular style dominating. Nothing is forced on the entire album. You feel the intimacy and energy of their live show with every note.

“We try to be politically neutral because we have people from all these different countries. The only message we try to put across is that we believe in one world, one people. We want to play for everybody. We want to show that it’s okay to be who you are. We believe in a world without borders, and it seems to be ringing true with people.”

Riders

Sinko Moy

Zawi

Samia

Kansianitsa

Aman

Hamouda

Chubby

Madhavski Horo

Ruuah

Hackney

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Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society - Cloudface Remixes (SIX DEGREES March 16, 2018)

Once again we have dug deep into the amazing debut album from Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society (producers & analog synth fanatics Garry Hughes & Harvey Jones) and handed over their track “Cloudface” to a handpicked group of artist/producers. 

This time around, Space guitar hero Steve Hillage (Gong, System 7) and musical partner Miquette Giraudy’s Mirror System incarnation, add celestial, glissando guitar and bubbling synth layers to take the track into new Cosmic terrain. 

On a more serene note, Ambient, Pedal Steel guitar master, Chuck Johnson mines the deeper aspects of the track, while Bombay Dub Orchestra steers the song into a blunted, almost “Trip Hop” direction & DDAS themselves contribute a blissful, slow motion reinterpretation that is almost meditative. 

This is the last remix EP that will be drawn from the duo’s first album, as the follow-up, full length, second album Wow & Flutter will be coming from Six Degrees later in 2018.

1. Cloudface (Mirror System Remix)

2. Cloudface (Chuck Johnson Remix)

3. Cloudface (Bombay Dub Orchestra Remix)

4. Cloudface (Slow Motion Remix)

5. Cloudface

Garry Hughes and Harvey Jones are two pioneering electronic music composers. Garry has worked with artists as diverse as Bjork, Sly & Robbie, Killing Joke, The Art Of Noise and the Orchestral Pink Floyd project; he is also the co-founder of the popular Six Degrees act, Bombay Dub Orchestra. Harvey has collaborated with Julian Cope, Carla Bley & Chris Botti among many others.

Kiran Ahluwalia - 7 Billion (SIX DEGREES May 4, 2018)

Kiran Ahluwalia had a small epiphany as she wrote what eventually became the title track for her latest album: The eruptions of intolerance and violence plaguing societies around the world had to be directly countered. Yet the focus on divisions and difference neglected a central fact, that we are all united in our difference and uniqueness. “There are seven billion of us now on Earth and every person has their own unique perspective and set of experiences,” she reflects. “We each have our own way of dealing with things, of hearing things, of moving through life."

Ahluwalia, with over nearly two decades of music making that took her from Punjabi folk and Indian classical music to refreshingly original borderless songs, has found her own way on 7 Billion. (Six Degrees: May 4, 2018) Touching on the need for tolerance and boldness, the songs on 7 Billion encompass all Ahluwalia’s myriad musical fascinations: the guitar twang of Mali, the heavy heartbeat of Southern soul, the gorgeous nuance of Subcontinental sounds.

“I’ve taken aesthetics I love such as blues, Malian styles, and of course Indian forms and mashed them together in my own way,” explains Ahluwalia.

Ahluwalia will celebrate this album’s release with a spring US/Canadian tour, including several dates of her new live project LOVEfest, which bring spiritual performances from the Sikh and Sufi traditions together with contemporary sets by Algeria’s Souad Massi and Ahluwalia.

7 Billion pulls together songs that map out many of Ahluwalia’s interests and sonic loves. “Jhoomo (Sway)” was written to charm a shy lover in a steamy seduction scene in an as-yet unreleased film. “We Sinful Women” commissioned and composed for a dance company’s new work was based on a radical Pakistani feminist’s stirring poem. Yet most of Ahluwalia’s pieces are sparked by the diverse sounds she hears rolling around in her head. They often emerge in conversation with her life and musical partner, the highly acclaimed guitarist Rez Abbasi.

“I translate thought and emotion into sound in a very intuitive way,” says Ahluwalia. “I sometimes develop songs with Rez as we sit on the couch, either referencing tracks that are inspiring me or working on specific ideas that I've been living with. If we come up with something magical, I'll record it on my phone and listen to it later. That’s how songs often start.”

That’s not where they end. Ahluwalia will continue to refine and rethink the songs, adding layers of instruments. On 7 Billion, these layers built on Ahluwalia’s past explorations--Malian and desert blues, Portuguese fado, North American rock, Indian forms--for a sometimes raucous and raw sound that includes a soulful sweep of organ and glittering, growling guitars.

The music of “Khafa,” an impassioned call to set aside the religious strictures and orthodoxies that blind us to one another’s humanity, was inspired by West African styles. “I came up with the melodic idea and would hum it around the house. Rez said, ‘Hey, that sounds great.’ I had all these phrases all over the place, then I decided to develop it more to find meaning for the melody, which lent itself very well to talking about anger against the man made rules of religion.”

Ahluwalia brought similar intensity to “We Sinful Women,” rethinking it for the album. It was no easy feat to set the poem to music for a dance company’s performance, as its Urdu lines simply did not conform to usual song styles accompanying Urdu poetry. Ahluwalia did not let that faze her, and came up with a unique approach that resonated powerfully with audiences.

Yet after the dance piece premiered, the song stuck with her. She longed to hear it slightly differently: “I liked it but wanted to make it less polite and dainty, into a very militant and activist song, a strident battle cry,” she explains. “When I arranged it for the dance piece it had flute, sax, sarangi, and tabla. It was not traditional but softer in treatment. For my own record, I wanted to match the gritty activist nature of it in the arrangement and tonality. I asked Rez, and we spent a lot of time figuring out the heavy, gritty amp sound for the guitar.”

Grit also runs through “Kuch Aur (Something Else),” a bluesy examination of regret and sorrow that came to Ahluwalia after she got into Southern blues rock. A first for the songwriter, Ahluwalia came up with some English-language lyrics, only to translate them into Urdu because they just worked better that way.

The way Ahluwalia flows between seemingly farflung genres is no accident. It’s the natural progression of her exploration of what appeals to her; her refusal to see her Indian heritage as her defining characteristic. “I think of my music as creating a genre that’s on its own, one that benefits greatly from being in the diaspora,” she muses. “This isn’t the way Indian music is in any other part of the world. I hesitate to even call it Indian. We’re doing something that hasn’t been done before. It’s an organic hybrid that's reflective of so many personal and lived influences.” Ahluwalia is an artist and songwriter first and foremost, whose global ear catches frequencies that are hers alone.

01. Khafa (Up In Arms)

02. Saat (Seven)

03. Kuch Aur (Something Else)

04. Raina (Night)

05. Jhoomo (Sway)

06. We Sinful Women

Kiran Ahluwalia Website