0

Your Cart is Empty

by World Music Network January 25, 2013

TAGS:

New Release: Monoswezi - The Village

Afro-Scandinavian adventurer's Monoswezi launch their debut album, The Village on Riverboat Records

Monoswezi = The Village

Monosweszi’s music sounds fresh and wide-open; traits that owe to the band’s marvellously multi-cultural inspirations. Expect gentle mbira, looping percussion, memorable sung melodies, and subtle saxophone. 

Buy now on CD, Download and with subscription


'A hypnotic blend of Norwegian saxophone and Zimbabwean mbira' 4**** stars, Financial Times

'The songs are traditional, given life by the supple, at times spectacular vocals... Classy stuff' 4**** stars, The Observer

'The Village largely whispers rather than shouts, and it's all the more powerful for it' 4**** stars, The Independent On Sunday 

CNN - Interview and feature

'A fine recording... Breaking moulds of both gender and nationality' 4****stars, Songlines 



The Village is a collection of rearranged Zimbabwean traditional songs blended with a cool Nordic edge. What the band prize about Zimbabwean music is its inherent openness, a quality that shares much with that fresh airy feel inherent in the Scandinavian jazz sound.


Monoswezi

Creatively Monoswezi carve a musical link that not only sounds entirely new, but crosses the oceans, eschews politics and embraces wholeheartedly the values of cross-cultural collaboration. With members hailing from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Norway and Sweden the boundary-crossing band’s sound is entirely unique. Articulated mbira rings out atop colourful woodwind and the gentle rhythm section.

The music is structured via looping cyclical riffs that lock down into solid rhythmic patterns. The band describes their music as ‘strong’, a term that communicates well the steady, circuitous nature of the music. It is an idea that has been a source of interest for other composers, including minimalist maestros Philip Glass and Steve Reich, whose parallel influence can be heard on works such as the cell-like track ‘Metal Drum’. Here the atmosphere conjures up the same spooky, anticipatory feeling as Glass’s Glassworks or Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood.

Hope Masike, who can be heard playing mbira and singing throughout the album, is a remarkable musician, trained in traditional music, jazz, dance, and more. Not only can she interlock tight rhythms while singing with a smooth unforced voice, but she is one of a relatively small number of females who play the mbira. Following in the footsteps of pioneers such as Stella Chiweshe, Hope plays the instrument – which has historically been male-dominated – with pride. Hallvard Godal’s saxophone technique is clean and unadorned, a sound that locks in perfectly with the struck aesthetic of the mbira. Calu contributes gentle rolling vocals which he sings in Ronga, his Mozambican mother tongue.

Listening to the quirky cool sounds on this collection, the Monoswezi brand is set to expand even further afield, and who knows where their next experiment could take this back-bendingly flexible band…