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    Domino Publishing

    DISCOVER Dur-Dur Band ‘Yabaal’

    Analog Africa
    Single Discover
    Posted on 10 March 2021
    Dur Dur of Somalia - Volume 1, Volume 2 & Previously Unreleased Tracks Analog Africa Out 14 September 2018
    Download License
    Yabaal - Fadumina - Jazz Cafe- Dur-Dur Band International

    ‘Yabaal’ from Dur Dur Band of Mogadishu Somalia – Volume 1, Volume 2 & Previously Unreleased Tracks by Dur-Dur Band originally performed 1986

    Watching this joyful hand camera video of Dur Dur Band is indicative that it is impossible to stand still whilst listening to the Somalian funk. It’s too easy for us to forget that before the civil war, 1980s Mogadishu was a thriving cultural hub. It is our loss that, in their heyday, we in the West didn’t recognise the sensational Dur-Dur...

    ‘Yabaal’ from Dur Dur Band of Mogadishu Somalia – Volume 1, Volume 2 & Previously Unreleased Tracks by Dur-Dur Band originally performed 1986

    Watching this joyful hand camera video of Dur Dur Band is indicative that it is impossible to stand still whilst listening to the Somalian funk. It’s too easy for us to forget that before the civil war, 1980s Mogadishu was a thriving cultural hub. It is our loss that, in their heyday, we in the West didn’t recognise the sensational Dur-Dur Band. Dur-Dur‘s doctrine was the fusion of traditional Somali music with whatever rhythms would make people dance: Funk, Reggae, Soul, Disco and New Wave were mixed effortlessly with Banaadiri beats, Daantho and spiritual Saar music. The concoction was explosive and when they stormed the Mogadishu music scene in 1986 with their very first hit single, ‘Yabaal‘, featuring vocals from Sahra Dawo, it was clear that a new meteorite had crash-landed in Somalia.  Abdulahi Ahmed, author of Somali Folk Dances explained: “Yabaal is a traditional song, but the way it was played and recorded was like nothing else we had heard before, it was new to us”.

    The following notes on Dur-Dur Band were written by Analog Africa:

    Analog Africa founder Samy Ben Redjeb arrived in Mogadishu in November of 2016, he was informed by his host that he would have to be accompanied at all times by an armed escort while in the country. The next morning, a neighbour and former security guard put on a military uniform, borrowed an AK-47 from somewhere and escorted him to Via Roma, an historical street in the heart of Hamar-Weyne, the city’s oldest district. Although previous Analog Africa releases have demonstrated a willingness to go more than the extra air-mile to track down the stories behind the music, the trip to Mogadishu was a musical journey of a different kind. It was the culmination of an odyssey that had started many years earlier.

    In 2007 John Beadle, a Milwaukee-based musicologist and owner of the much loved Likembe blog, uploaded a cassette he had been handed twenty years earlier by a Somalian student. The post was titled ‘Mystery Somali Funk‘ and it was, in Samy’s own words, “some of the deepest funk ever recorded”. The cassette seemed to credit these dense, sonorous tunes to the legendary Iftin Band. But initial contact with Iftin’s lead singer suggested that the ‘mystery funk’ may have actually been the work of their chief rival, Dur-Dur, a young band from the 80s.

    Back then, Mogadishu had been a very different place.
    On the bustling Via Roma, people from all corners of society would gather at the Bar Novecento and Cafe Cappucino, watch movies at the famous Supercinema, and eat at the numerous pasta hang-outs or the traditional restaurants that served Bariis Maraq, a somali Beef Stew mixed with delicious spiced rice. The same street was also home to Iftinphone and Shankarphone, two of the city’s best known music shop. Located opposite each other, they were the centre of Somalia’s burgeoning cassette distribution network. Both shops, run by members of the legendary Iftin Band, would become first-hand witnesses to the meteoric rise of Dur- Dur, a rise that climaxed in April of 1987 with the release of Volume 2, their second album.

    The first single ‘Diinleya‘ had taken Somalian airwaves by storm in a way rarely seen before or since. The next single, ‘Dab’, had an even greater impact, and the two hits had turned them into the hottest band in town. In addition to their main gig as house band at the legendary Jubba Hotel, Dur-Dur had also been asked to perform the music for the play “Jascyl Laba Ruux Mid Ha Too Rido” (May one of us fall in love) at Mogadishu’s national theatre. The play was so successful that the management had been forced to extend the run by a month, throwing the theatre’s already packed schedule into complete disarray; and each night, as soon as the play had finished, Dur-Dur had to pack their instruments into a Volkswagen T1 tour bus that would shuttle them across town in time for their hotel performance.

    The secrets to Dur-Dur‘s rapid success is inextricably linked to the vision of Isse Dahir, founder and keyboard player of the band. Isse’s plan was to locate some of the most forward-thinking musicians of Mogadishu’s buzzing scene and lure them into Dur-Dur. Ujeeri, the band’s mercurial bass player was recruited from Somali Jazz and drummer extraordinaire Handal previously played in Bakaka Band. These two formed the backbone of Dur-Dur and would become one of Somalia’s most extraordinary rhythm sections.

    Isse also added his two younger brothers to the line-up: Abukar Dahir Qassin was brought in to play lead guitar, and Ahmed Dahir Qassin was hired as a permanent sound engineer, a first in Somalia and one of the reasons that Dur-Dur became known as the best-sounding band in the country.

    On their first two albums, Volume 1 and Volume 2, three different singers traded lead-vocal duties back and forth. Shimaali, formerly of Bakaka Band, handled the Daantho songs, a Somalian rhythm from the northern part of the country that bears a striking resemblance to reggae; Sahra Dawo, a young female singer, had been recruited from Somalia’s national orchestra, the Waaberi Band. Their third singer, the legendary Baastow, whose nickname came from the italian word ‘pasta’ due to the spaghetti-like shape of his body, had also been a vocalist with the Waaberi Band, and had been brought into Dur-Dur due to his deep knowledge of traditional Somali music, particularly Saar, a type of music intended to summon the spirits during religious rituals. These traditional elements of Dur-Dur‘s repertoire sometimes put them at odds with the manager of the Jubba Hotel who once told Baastow “I am not going to risk having Italian tourists possessed by Somali spirits. Stick to disco and reggae“.

    ‘Yabaal’ was one of the songs that resurfaced on the Likembe blog, and it became the symbolic starting point of this project.

    It initially seemed that Dur-Dur‘s music had only been preserved as a series of murky tape dubs and YouTube videos, but after Samy arrived in Mogadishu he eventually got to the heart of Mogadishu’s tape-copying network – an analogue forerunner of the internet file-sharing that helped to keep the flame of this music alive through the darkest days of Somalia’s civil strife – and ended up finding some of the band’s fabled master tapes, long thought to have disappeared.

    This triple LP / double CD reissue of the band’s first two albums – the first installment in a three-part series dedicated to Dur-Dur Band – represents the first fruit of Analog Africa‘s long labours to bring this extraordinary music to the wider world. Remastered from the best available audio sources, these songs have never sounded better. Some thirty years after they first made such a splash in the Mogadishu scene, they have been freed from the wobble and tape-hiss of second and third generation cassette dubs, to reveal a glorious mix of polychromatic organs, nightclub-ready rhythms and hauntingly soulful vocals.

    In addition to two previously unreleased tracks, the music is accompanied by extensive liner notes, featuring interviews with original band members, documenting a forgotten chapter of Somalia’s cultural history. Before the upheaval in the 1990s that turned Somalia into a war-zone, Mogadishu, the white pearl of the Indian Ocean, had been one of the jewels of eastern Africa, a modern paradise of culture and commerce. In the music of the Dur-Dur band – now widely available outside of Somalia – we can still catch a fleeting glimpse of that golden age.

    BANDCAMP

    VINYL FACTORY

    THE GUARDIAN

    Domino Publishing represent Analog Africa 

    THIS DOMINO DISCOVERY WAS SELECTED BY LYNDEN CAMPBELL

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    Domino Publishing

    DISCOVER Eilisio Vera ‘Capchona’

    Analog Africa
    Discover
    Posted on 08 December 2020
    Space Echo Analog Africa Out 27 May 2016
    Download License
    Eilisio Vera 'Capchona' from the album Space Echo compiled by Analog Africa

    Analog Africa released the compilation album “Space Echo – The Mystery Behind the Cosmic Sound of Cabo Verde Finally Revealed” in May 2016. Compiled and produced by label founder Samy Ben Redjeb, the album consists of upbeat and energetic tracks by various artists from the remote island of Cabo Verde off the West Coast of Africa, originally recorded in the 1970’s when the island was under Portuguese colonial rule.

    The album is synth-heavy and almost futuristic sounding, but what reall...

    Analog Africa released the compilation album “Space Echo – The Mystery Behind the Cosmic Sound of Cabo Verde Finally Revealed” in May 2016. Compiled and produced by label founder Samy Ben Redjeb, the album consists of upbeat and energetic tracks by various artists from the remote island of Cabo Verde off the West Coast of Africa, originally recorded in the 1970’s when the island was under Portuguese colonial rule.

    The album is synth-heavy and almost futuristic sounding, but what really adds to the enjoyment of the compilation is the story behind the making of this music. In 1968 a a shipment carrying various electrical musical instruments and equipment set off from Baltimore headed for Rio de Janeiro. Mysteriously, the ship disappeared off the radar and washed up on the coast of Cabo Verde. A few months later, islanders came across the abandoned ship and local police commandeered the cargo – consisting of hundreds of synths and keyboards never seen before on the island.

    An anti-colonial leader decided to distribute the equipment among schools on the island (largely due to their access to electricity), and young people created a new musical sound that combined local traditional rhythms with a modernised synth edge. The young beneficiaries of this mysterious abandoned shipment grew to become extremely talented musicians with an infectious sound unique to the island, the best of which is presented In this compilation.

    The National review (UAE)

    SELECTED AND WRITTEN BY SAMANTHA POTTER

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    Domino Publishing

    Edo Funk Explosion vol 1. out 26th March 2021

    Analog Africa
    Posted on 24 March 2021
    Edo Funk Explosion Vol​.​1 Analog Africa Out 26 March 2021
    Download License
    Akaba Man & The Nigie Rokets - Ta Gha Hunsimwen [Analog Africa]

    It was in Benin City, in the heart of Nigeria, that a new hybrid of intoxicating highlife music known as Edo Funk was born.
    It first emerged in the late 1970s when a group of musicians began to experiment with different ways of integrating elements from their native Edo culture and fusing them with new sound effects coming from West Africa ́s night-clubs. Unlike the rather polished 1980 ́s Nigerian disco productions coming out of the international metropolis of Lagos Edo Funk was raw and re...

    It was in Benin City, in the heart of Nigeria, that a new hybrid of intoxicating highlife music known as Edo Funk was born.
    It first emerged in the late 1970s when a group of musicians began to experiment with different ways of integrating elements from their native Edo culture and fusing them with new sound effects coming from West Africa ́s night-clubs. Unlike the rather polished 1980 ́s Nigerian disco productions coming out of the international metropolis of Lagos Edo Funk was raw and reduced to its bare minimum.

    Someone was needed to channel this energy into a distinctive sound and Sir Victor Uwaifo appeared like a mad professor with his Joromi studio. Uwaifo took the skeletal structure of Edo music and relentless began fusing them with synthesizers, electric guitars and 80 ́s effect racks which resulted in some of the most outstanding Edo recordings ever made. An explosive spiced up brew with an odd psychedelic note dubbed “Edo Funk”.

    That’s the sound you’ll be discovering in the first volume of the Edo Funk Explosion series which focusses on the genre’s greatest originators; Osayomore Joseph, Akaba Man, and Sir Victor Uwaifo:

    Osayomore Joseph was one of the first musicians to bring the sound of the flute into the horn-dominated world of highlife, and his skills as a performer made him a fixture on the Lagos scene. When he returned to settle in Benin City in the mid 1970s – at the invitation of the royal family – he devoted himself to the
    modernisation and electrification of Edo music, using funk and Afro-beat as the building blocks for songs that weren’t afraid to call out government corruption or confront the dark legacy of Nigeria’s colonial past.

    Akaba Man was the philosopher king of Edo funk. Less overtly political than Osayomore Joseph and less psychedelic than Victor Uwaifo, he found the perfect medium for his message in the trance-like grooves of Edo funk. With pulsating rhythms awash in cosmic synth-fields and lyrics that express a deep personal vision, he found great success at the dawn of the 1980s as one of Benin City’s most persuasive ambassadors of funky highlife.

    Victor Uwaifo was already a star in Nigeria when he built the legendary Joromi studios in his hometown of Benin City in 1978. Using his unique guitar style as the mediating force between West-African highlife and the traditional rhythms and melodies of Edo music, he had scored several hits in the early seventies, but once
    he had his own sixteen-track facility he was able to pursue his obsession with the synesthetic possibilities of pure sound, adding squelchy synths, swirling organs and studio effects to hypnotic basslines and raw grooves. Between his own records and his production for other musicians, he quickly established himself as
    the godfather of Edo funk.

    What unites these diverse musicians is their ability to strip funk down to its primal essence and use it as the foundation for their own excursions inward to the heart of Edo culture and outward to the furthest limits of sonic alchemy. The twelve tracks on Edo Funk Explosion Volume 1 pulse with raw inspiration, mixing highlife horns, driving rhythms, day-glo keyboards and tripped-out guitars into a funk experience unlike any other.

     

    Louder Than War  

    The Vinyl Factory 

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