The Doudou N'Diaye Rose Family
Twenty​-​One Sabar Rhythms

Kolida Babo is the collaboration between two Greek woodwind musicians from separate regions - Socratis Votskos is from Pella, and Harris P is from Athens. This, their debut album, was recorded in improvised live-take sessions beginning on the night of the “Kolida Babo” folk rituals of music and dance in northern Greece in winter 2013. The sessions proceeded over three years, exploring the ancient music of Armenia and the folk traditions of northern Greece’s Epirus and Thrace regions alongside abstract electronics and free jazz.As musicians of modern Greece, the sonic palette is developed in part as a means of processing the country’s immediate actualities: its relation to its regional traditions, its urban centres and its humanitarian and economic crises. In this, the music is at once clearly located in traditional sounds and disjointed from them, at times contrasting or harmonious in both concept and sound.The Armenian Duduk that anchors the project is a double-reeded woodwind instrument made of apricot wood with thousands of years of history and generations of venerable masters - the duo cite Djivan Gasparyan as a main influence, and Harris studied with Vahan Galstyan. Traditionally its music is played in duet: a melody on one duduk, a low drone accompaniment (“the dum”) on another. Kolida Babo preserves and extends the dual nature of duduk music in many ways, replacing the dum at times with the tones of a moog synthesizer to allow the two players to weave harmonies together in duet. And there is a persistent duality in the braid of Kolido Babo’s sonic associations - modern and ancient, local and global - sometimes underpinning one another, sometimes undermining. “Sometimes we mock modern times and sometimes the other way around”, they say - it’s a collision, or an engagement, romantic or pugilistic, and the sense is of an experiment without expectation, without preciousness or exoticism of folk culture. The elements challenge each other and the listener - while the music is very much about texture and tone, the sounds aren’t clearly modern or ancient: it’s futile to identify, we’re reminded, and instead we experience the immediate presence and power of the combination. Influences include Armenian Folk music, Greek Rebetiko, German Kosmiche, Spiritual Jazz, the Fourth World Music of Brian Eno and John Hassell, British Trip Hop, Electrified West African Funk. But where these can be identified they are as sidelong journeymakers through the borderless idiolect belonging to the dialogue between the two players and enabling its free and full execution, subtle markers used to co-ordinate the collaboration.

Acid Jazz Records continue their exclusive licensing agreement with Albarika Store, the legendary record label that defined the sound of Benin and influenced the entire region of West Africa and beyond.'Kpede Do Gbe Houenou’ is a burning piece of Afro-funk from Benin’s finest, the all-conquering Orchestre Poly-Rythmo. With a killer horns line, imploring vocals and a driving groove, this has it all and is just waiting to ignite reopened dancefloors. 'Ma Wa Mon Nou Mi O’ is equally strong, if a little less intense, and features wonderful guitar work to the fore. Without question, this is essential Beninese music. Both tracks were transferred, restored and mastered from the original 1/4 inch tape.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery for the Wilde at heart, but for the Weyes mind it’s a natural note in the songbook of life. For the first recorded Weyes Blood music since her 2016 breakthrough album Front Row Seat To Earth, Natalie Mering shares A Certain Kind b/w Everybody's Talkin', a double a-side 7" of cover songs close to her home but recognizable under any roof with a hearing heart at its hearth.From her DIY days self-releasing CDRs through her ascent as a defining voice of a new folk tradition, Natalie Mering has always possessed a proclivity for exceptional taste. Whether influenced by her bloodline of musicians or the cast of curious coastal characters she encountered while exploring life and sound, Mering always took special care to acknowledge the artists that shaped her music in live Weyes Blood performances.A mainstay of Weyes Blood’s early years on stage, Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” as imagined by Harry Nilsson for the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack is finally memorialized on A Certain Kind b/w Everybody's Talkin'. As a native Californian transplanted to the east coast, Mering identified with Neil and Nilsson's forlorn feeling of east coast isolation and longing for days in the rays. "I'm going where the sun keeps shining. Through the pouring rain. Going where the weather suits my clothes.”Originally recorded on distant shores from where midnight cowboys roamed the same year of 1968, Soft Machine’s “A Certain Kind” was often confused as a Weyes Blood original when Mering introduced the Robert Wyatt penned fusion ballad to her live set. A recording residency at the famed Galeria ze dos Bois (ZDB) multidisciplinary space in Lisbon, Portugal, enabled Mering and her touring band to track the soul-searching rendition of the song present on the record.A Certain Kind b/w Everybody's Talkin' is not only a capsule of Mering’s care for those artists and songs that have helped define the Weyes Blood sound but also a discovery of a different kind — the words and melodies become Mering’s and ours through her intimate interpretation and commitment to seeking culture’s fringes for deeper meaning.