One of the greatest live groups that have ever graced Cafe OTO make a welcome return. A Dakar-Berlin collaboration like no other, pushing Senegalese mxblax and dub techno into whole new territories. 

Speaking about his work with the group, Mark Ernestus said ‘This time around I was beer able to specify what I wanted right from the initial recording sessions in Dakar... and further in the production process I took more freedom in reducing and editing audio tracks, changing MIDI data, replacing synth sounds and introducing electronic drum samples.’

When listening to their last album, right away you hear music-making which has come startlingly into its own. Rather than submitting to the routine, discrete gradations of recording, producing and mixing, the music is tangibly permeated with deadly intent from the off. Lethally it plays a coiled, clipped, percussive venom and thumping bass against the soaring, open-throated spirituality of Mbene Diaa Seck’s singing. Plainly expert, dried and rooted, the drumming is unpredictable, exclamatory, zinging with life. Likewise the production: intuitive and fresh but utterly attentive; limber but hefty; vividly sculpted against a backdrop of cavernous silence. Six chunks of stunning, next-level mbalax, then, funky as anything.