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May. 24th, 2006 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI've been listening to a lot of Zap Mama recently. I've had their first album, Adventures in Afropea, for years, but I go through phases when I'll listen to it a bunch, and then I have to put it away and not listen to it for a few years. It manages to somehow be mind-numbingly repetitive and completely mesmerizing at the same time.
For a bit of background for those not in the know, Zap Mama is (at the time of the first album) an all female a cappella group founded by Marie Daulne, the daughter of a Belgian and an African (can't find what country right now...), raised partly in Europe and partly by pygmies in Africa. Her music combines pygmy chant, folk songs from all over Africa, European music, reggae, and just about everything else.
In later albums, she added instruments and made the group a much more mainstream hip hop group with a world flavor. But this first album -- quite simply, there is nothing else out there that sounds remotely like it.
Aside from "Brrrrlak," (of Wildcats' song and story) almost none of the tracks have a traditional song structure. Most are built on a repeated phrase or sound, often just two measures long, that repeats for the whole damn song -- hence the boring part.
But, these little ideas are so unusual, and so cool-sounding, it takes seven minutes of repetition to digest them. For me, I am in awe of the versatility of the way the group uses their voices, the absolute purity of their vowels, and their perfect blend, even when they are holding intervals not in the Western scale. The unusual blend of these singers is brought home in a song like "Din Din Din." This is a classic Spanish motet, the sort I've sung a hundred times, but it sounds completely different with these voices.
There are some songs, like "Mizike," that break into a very Bobby McFarren-like reggae sound at the end. There's even one track that's supposed to sound like a car driving (complete with crash and sirens). I mean, this woman puts pygmy-inspired vocal percussion under Syrian chant and makes it work, for god's sake. Many of the tracks have her speaking in French over them, or true ululating cries going on over the song.
It's weird, and funky, and you really have to hear it to see what I mean. My only regret is that the liner notes are sparse, at best, with only a faint indication of where the songs come from, and translations of only about four lines out of the entire album, which is in French, and Zulu, and a number of other languages.
For a bit of background for those not in the know, Zap Mama is (at the time of the first album) an all female a cappella group founded by Marie Daulne, the daughter of a Belgian and an African (can't find what country right now...), raised partly in Europe and partly by pygmies in Africa. Her music combines pygmy chant, folk songs from all over Africa, European music, reggae, and just about everything else.
In later albums, she added instruments and made the group a much more mainstream hip hop group with a world flavor. But this first album -- quite simply, there is nothing else out there that sounds remotely like it.
Aside from "Brrrrlak," (of Wildcats' song and story) almost none of the tracks have a traditional song structure. Most are built on a repeated phrase or sound, often just two measures long, that repeats for the whole damn song -- hence the boring part.
But, these little ideas are so unusual, and so cool-sounding, it takes seven minutes of repetition to digest them. For me, I am in awe of the versatility of the way the group uses their voices, the absolute purity of their vowels, and their perfect blend, even when they are holding intervals not in the Western scale. The unusual blend of these singers is brought home in a song like "Din Din Din." This is a classic Spanish motet, the sort I've sung a hundred times, but it sounds completely different with these voices.
There are some songs, like "Mizike," that break into a very Bobby McFarren-like reggae sound at the end. There's even one track that's supposed to sound like a car driving (complete with crash and sirens). I mean, this woman puts pygmy-inspired vocal percussion under Syrian chant and makes it work, for god's sake. Many of the tracks have her speaking in French over them, or true ululating cries going on over the song.
It's weird, and funky, and you really have to hear it to see what I mean. My only regret is that the liner notes are sparse, at best, with only a faint indication of where the songs come from, and translations of only about four lines out of the entire album, which is in French, and Zulu, and a number of other languages.
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Date: 2006-05-24 10:54 pm (UTC)-mithras