WIDE Recomienda #0011

 

It’s a great week for kizomba, sambe and kuduro. It’s an even better week for blues and alternative hip-hop. It’s a particularly peachy week for really really really conceptual electronica and the electronica which embraces Latin America’s sounds. Poetical soliloquies at the seashore, a party of the Angolan resistance and Black Panthers, parodies of Kurosawa’s filmography, cumbia villera with spiked synthesizers and the hyper-stylized sounds of the future (if there’s any of that left in 2018). This is the sensation palette that Wide Recommends 000000011 offers your discerning musical tastebuds.

 

1. Ekhe – Terracotta Goose Shaped Rhyton

 
Producer Jack Beattie – a.k.a. Ekhe – presents us his first EP Octopush, after 8 years of investigation in the search for the tastiest mix of Balkan and Middle Eastern rhythms with the electronica, dance and bass music of the western musical cosmogony: the result is a collection of tracks with a minimalist build and great variety in their rhythmic and sonic textures, with a focus on extra-mundane synthesizer sounds. An album with a coherent and continuous style, of which Goose Shaped Rhyton constitutes as representative a sample as it gets.

 

2. LISACHRIS – ru a samurai?

 
Japanese DJ and producer LISACHRIS has slowly and steadily built herself a warm and fuzzy musical niche, with a discreet yet very faithful audience that has brought her to stages of such high profile as Tokio’s Boiler Room. On mid April she released the videoclip of ru a samurai? As a heads-up for her most recent EP, Ariake, joining a dark and atmospheric grime track with a parody to her country’s traditional imagery, striking somewhere in between irreverence and tribute: combining the gangsta video aesthetics with hints to those lovely Toshiro Mifune flicks.

 

3. El Hijo de la Cumbia – Huepaje (feat. El Rama)

 
Emiliano Gómez – a.k.a. El Hijo de La Cumbia – is an Argentinian DJ with a recognizable and broad trajectory, acting as a catalizer for the rebirth of traditional genres such as Tango and Cumbia Villera by mixing these with dub, hip-hop and electronica. Additionally, he’s an important collaborator to the Sonidero movement in México. After a 10 year trip exploring various musical wheres, he’s took base in Malmö, Sweden, for the release of his latest album Género Género, working along with other renowned artist such as La Dame Blanche, the Instituto Mexicano del Sonido and Celso Piña.

 

Huepaje is a nice letter of presentation for this album, a track featuring synthesized cumbia and trumpets with El Rama acting as a lunfardo hypeman of sorts: perfect for tokers, dancers and Fernet sommeliers.


 

4. Young Fathers – Toy

 
We wouldn’t and couldn’t expect less of the creators of such pearls as White Men Are Black Men Too. Iconoclastic as ever, Young Fathers make a comeback with Cocoa Sugar an album that pushes alternative hip-hop into the borders of dance punk and indie rock, effectively invading them. The clip for Toy is a sample of the trio’s skill to offer a critique in a brutally honest way which also lacks any hint of self-seriousness, in the manner of children and other true artists.

 

5. PONGO – Tambulaya

 
Just a couple of weeks ago PONGO, the Angolan artist established in Lisbon, took the internet by surprise with the release of her first video, for a track which celebrates her family history and the exodus of her fellow countryfolk with a single word: Tambulaya means, simultaneously, to “take” and to “offer”, like the new ascent towards splendor of formerly oppressed peoples. Sonically, the album makes itself at home in the territories of Kizomba, Kuduro and Tarraxo which have captivated the world all throughout the last decade.

6. Kelsey Lu – Shades of Blue

 
It’s been a couple years since N.Y.’s singer and cellist Kelsey Lu caught the public eye with Church, a delicate and uncomplicate single (recorded on the spot, in a church BTW) which would make her pals with Blood Orange and take her on a tourin’ journey towards everywhere. After a long wait, she’s come back with her debut album Shades of Blue, with the title track already cast in a beautiful video: a two-headed track in which the singer digs deep into the pockets of her newly acquired solitude and independence as she wanders through a plethora of visually engaging scenes and attires.