Reviews

Yours truly got to know the Chilean afrobeat of Newen Afrobeat back in 2017 thanks to the release of their 2 track 'Newen Plays Fela' EP, but now the fifteen-piece band returns with 'Curiche', a new 7 track album.

With 'The Healing', which just like its predecessor, 2018's 'Emakhosini', barely counts three tracks, South African whirlwind BCUC led by front man Zithulele 'Jovi' Zabani Nkosi provides an appropriate final part to a trilogy that started with 'Our Faith' back in 2016.

dub_cmd is the alter ego of Polish dub producer Gabriel Ufir, who migrated to the United Kingdom when he was eighteen and now lives somewhere near Hull on the British east coast.

For the successor to 'Ballébé: Calling All Africans', his 2018 debut album for Clermont Music, Malian vocalist and gourd percussionist Hama Sankare chose to pay tribute to his native village of Niafunke, where colleagues Yoro Cisse and Afel Bocoum also have their roots, and which was really put on the map by Malinese music legend Ali Farka Touré.

Normally flamenco doesn't really belong to our musical frame of reference, but for the refreshing sound of Las Migas we gladly made an exception.

The name Errol 'Don' Mais may not immediately ring a bell, but in the late 1970s this Jamaican producer ran his own Roots Tradition label from Greenwich Town or Greenwich Farm in Kingston.

We've lost count on how many debut EP's Roots Musician Records producer E.N. Young has been worked on to date, but, in any case, introducing the world to new American reggae talent seems to have become one of his musical missions. This time it's Rootikal Yard's turn, a band from Ontario, a small town about 50 kilometers east of Los Angeles.

Listening to 'Fongola', the debut effort by the latest Congolese revelation KOKOKO!, inadvertently reminded yours truly of similar "congotronics" projects like Staff Benda Bilili, Mbongwana Star or the pioneers of Konono N°1, but just like each of these bands had/have their own unique sound and story, that's also the case with KOKOKO!.

Seikos is a nine-piece band founded in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, a municipality near Barcelona back in 2014. Alternating between Spanish and Catalan, the band presents a solid festive mix of ska-punk and reggae.

If you're still looking for the ideal soundtrack for the Yoga On Dub sessions Jah9 has been promoting worldwide for several years now, 'Yoga In Dub' by German producer, sound engineer and multi-instrumentalist Felix Wolter aka Dubvisionist comes highly recommended.