Recent posts: Francis Bebey

Label: Born Bad
Release date: 01-07-2013
Source: WEB
Format: MP3
Quality: 320 kbps
Size: 71 mb
Genre: Electronic
Style: House, Experimental, Electronic

Tracklist:
1. Bissao (Pilooski edit)
2. Forrest Whistle (Daphni edit)
3. Le domaine réservé du Colonel (It’s a Fine Line mix)
4. Coffee Cola (Young Marco mix)
5. New Track (Populette mix)
6. Bissao (Etienne Jaumet mix)

Review:
“There’s no improving upon the work of the Cameroonian polymath Francis Bebey, a journalist, novelist, and musician who mixed African and Latin styles with jazz and electronic music, sounding at times like some dream combination of Afrobeat and Kraftwerk. (Born Bad’s anthology of his work, African Electronic Music 1975-1982, was one of SPIN’s 10 Best Reissues of 2012; I also covered it in my Control Voltage column.) So you could, understandably, be suspicious of an attempt to remix the work of the late musician, who passed away in 2001. Fortunately, the artists commissioned here appear to have approached the source material with the respect it deserves (yet also, fortunately, without being too dainty about it). Pilooski — the French producer whose bootleg re-edit of Frankie Valli’s “Beggin'” ended up as a minor hit on a major label — keeps his intervention to a minimum in a rework of “Bissau.” The core of the song — mbira, flute, disco-funk bass line, quavering vocal harmonies, foghorn reeds — is all there in the original; Pilooski mainly busies himself with stretching and hammering elements of the track over drum machines and synths until it has the feel of a hand-soldered assemblage, a riot of spinning wheels and honking horns. I don’t know what the original of “Forest Whistle” sounds like, but Daphni’s edit manages to preserve the playful, slightly otherworldly spirit of Bebey’s music while sounding very much like himself, weaving drums and flute and contrapuntal voice and guitar parts around a rickety skeleton of no-frills rhythm box. But that makes sense, given how much of Dan Snaith’s work as Daphni is schooled in Bebey’s own futuristic roots music.

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