Bob Ohiri & His Uhuru Sounds - Uhuru Aiye

Well, I need another breather from all the metal, so lets venture deep into Nigeria and visit with Bob Ohiri and his band. Primarily famous for playing guitar for the legendary Kind Sunny Adé, pioneer of the Jùjú genre, Ohiri breaks loose here and plays a forward-thinking brand of afrobeat colored with bop jazz and gritty funk. I don't have much of a clue as to what's gong on lyrically, as most of the songs are in Yoruba, but two of the English ones express a yearning for freedom and a cry for solidarity. Beyond that, the music is heavily percussive - there must be a dozen drummers and percussionists - and shot through with horn lines, quivering wah-wah, and layered background chants, producing a danceable but vaguely unsettling cacophony. Heady, sweaty stuff for a hot summer night.
Nigeria London Na Lagos

African Sixties Garage vol. 1

Some great stuff on the turntable today, a compilation of sub-Saharan garage from the era where American fifties rock and sixties punk, along with British invasion sounds, began to filter out of the radios of white colonizers and out into greater Africa. There's little information on these bands, and the sounds vary greatly from songs almost indistinguishable from their northern hemisphere counterparts to crazy fusions of local rhythms and patois with off-kilter surf and psych. Twenty three songs, and not a dud among them. This is in the same league as the mighty Nuggets and Back From the Grave comps, but almost from another planet.
No Money No Honey

Rikki Ililonga - Soweto

Rikki Ililonga was a pioneer of the sound retroactively known as Zam-rock, fusing African rhythm and consciousness with psych rock, soul, and funk. His group Musi-O-Tunya was debatably the first to play in the style and perhaps the most varied and ambitious as well. Rikki possesses a sweet high tenor similar to Curtis Mayfield or Jimmy Cliff, and like those men his honeyed voice is used to convey dark, fiery political conviction and righteous anger, as well as more reflective self-examination and the occasional song of love. Crucial, heartbreaking work from a mysterious visionary, Soweto is a monument to a man who should have taken a seat in the pantheon of greats but remains mostly unheard and unknown.
You Got the Fire

BLO - Phase II

Well, wee one, it's still lashing snow and sleet against my window outside, still bone-chilling and grim, but let's try a different tactic than yesterday. One of psychedelia's earliest worldwide converts, Nigeria's BLO fused Cream-style power trio trippiness, James Brown's brand of lean funk, and their native rhythms into a sweaty, clattering whole. This is their second LP, obviously, heavier and funkier than the airy debut and less weird than the third, although side B does get pretty far out. This is a much different sound than the burgeoning Zamrock scene, nor is it connected to Fela Kuti's transcendental seance-funk or the Nuggets-style garage rock scene rumbling on the southern end of the continent. This is pure sub-Saharan alchemy, high-minded and loose-limbed. Only the funk can keep away the cold.
Whole Lotta Shit

Africa - Ritual and Witchcraft Music

Little comment needs to be made about this enthralling 1975 field recording from Kenya and Tanzania, but volumes are spoken by the music. The liner notes pontificate at length about the intertwined nature of healing and magic and music, but you'll find no extrapolation here. This record rattles and shakes and stomps, but continuous tones humming in the background cast a hypnotic spell.
Ngoma ra mrongo

Salah Ragab and the Cairo Jazz Band - Egyptian Jazz, Ramadan in Space Time

In the interest of keeping the Swamp unpredictable and worthy, let's drift away from all the metal into the outer realms of space and time. Egypt's premier jazz drummer and his combo bridge the cosmic gap between big band swing and the wild explorations of Sun Ra and Sonny Sharrock. Prominent throughout are Arabic scales, Islamic prayer, a massive thirteen-piece horn section, and various exotic Oriental instruments.
Declare jihad on squaresville.

Canibus - For Whom The Beat Tolls

Truly the rarest of beasts in the Swamp: Lovecraftian hip-hop. This ambitious album is peppered with subtle quotes from the old gentleman, notably in the startling eleven-minute track "Poet Laureate Infinity v003" which contains the immortal couplet "That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die." In addition the album concerns itself with numerology, pyramids, dead languages, sunspots, preparation for the apocalypse, and all manner of interesting subject matter. The scope is astounding and only draws into focus after several listens - many layers must be peeled back to reveal the swirling nuclear star at the heart of it.
Secrets Amongst Cosmonauts

Fela Kuti - Zombie

Perhaps the seminal work of Fela Kuti, Nigeria's cross between James Brown, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali, Zombie works on several simultaneous levels: as a hypnotic, trance-inducing meditation; a sharp-tongued but subtle decrying of his country's government and military, a horror story of voodoo re-animation, and a blistering funk record. Four songs, none of them shorter than twelve minutes, flowing together in a liquid bath of horn stabs and poly-rhythms. It functions much like the doom metal albums enshrined herein: as a long-form dark poem which rises and falls but in which the tide never goes all the way out, lapping at the shores of your subconscious. This album, upon release, sparked a series of riots in Lagos in which Kuti's compound was invaded and his elderly mother was defenestrated. In protest, he dragged her coffin to the courthouse and, bizarrely, on the first anniversary of the attack he married 27 women in her remembrance.
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