Tags: Tribal Ambient

Review: Brittany's Julien Hairon spent some ten years travelling the world gathering sonic artefacts from field recordings to obscure cassettes before arriving at the point of his musical project, Judgitzu. It's not often a Western artist appears on Nyege Nyege Tapes, but Hairon's extended time spent in Tanzania was influential, where the sound of singeli got under his skin and now manifests in his visceral productions. The relentless 175+ bpms of the pioneers like Sisso, Jay Mitta and Duke are very apparent on this wild ride of a record, where avant-garde sonic approaches collide with the energetic eruptions of East Africa's most forward thinking producers.

Review: Sometimes we get some wonderfully enigmatic notes with new releases and this is one of them. Rather than share them all, enjoy this one line - "Protecting the past by projecting it into the future, preserving identities, encouraging conversations across generations, and above all, safeguarding the island of Procida's vast intangible cultural heritage from extinction." Now you can ponder the meaning of that while getting lost in a collection of global grooves that span dub, downtempo, ambient jungle, Balearic and more with plenty of humid atmospheres, whimsical melodies and a general sense of mystic aura that will keep you coming back for more.

Review: Another exceptional double album deep dive from Umor Rex mainstays Andreas Gerth and Carl Oesterhelt, respectively one-half of Driftmachine, and the artist who debuted with the landmark 11 Pieces for Synthesizer album. As ever, trying to summon adjectives to correctly describe what's here isn't easy, but let's give it a go anyway. Mysterious, dark, haunting, but also ultimately very beautiful - albeit often in a slightly chilling way - it's highly rhythmic patient stuff. A fitting title, it's hard not to picture tribalism, gatherings, premeditated practices and timeless traditions when becoming absorbed by the hypnotic contents here. It's transportive stuff, both in terms of time and place, era and style, a sense of loops and cycles being the real omnipresent thread here. Earthen ambient, strange factory floor downtempo, cinematic synths and more. The kind of record that's only possible when two people haul themselves up in a remote village with an abundance of instruments and see what happens.