LAMIN FOFANA AND THE DOUDOU NDIAYE ROSE FAMILY

TRACKLIST 01. Bench Mi Mode I: In Motion 02. Bench Mi Mode II: Red Eye 03. Bench Mi Mode III: Spectrum 04. Toco Sos INFO Epic, grooving, dazzlingly creative, perfectly attuned blends of complex mbalax drumming, field recordings, thumping kick-drum, and cosmic, bubbling, jamming synths and electronics. The opening is suitably liminal, haunted by a diachronic sense of times past, present, and to come: ancestral ghosts, scratched playback, scraps of old recordings, voices strangulated or just out of range; puttering drums; futuristic, kosmische keys. Part II picks up the pace; III gives the drummers some, and heightens the atmosphere of enchantment. Jon Hassell™s Fourth World music courses through a kind of Dream Theory In Dakar. Toco SOS, the second side, is a thumping, throbbing, mesmeric future-classic; perfect for fahr™n fahr™n fahr™n on the Autobahn„ in a spacecraft. Expert hand percussion, call-and-response singing, bin-trembling foot-drum, spaceways keys. Sleekly funky as prime Popol Vuh. Both sides range expansively by way of Berlin, where Lamin resided for a few years: you can hear something of T++™s brilliant, landmark HJ record on the A, and elements of Mark Ernestus™ crucial Ndagga project, on the B. Half an hour of stunning music; in a beautiful sleeve, with mirror lettering, and an intricate spot-gloss rendition of salt crystals, laid over a photograph of the salt mines at Lac Rose, outside Dakar.