Auntie Flo - Radio Highlife

  • Brian D'Souza spans styles and continents on his fourth full-length.
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  • The tracks on Radio Highlife, Brian D'Souza's latest album as Auntie Flo, were made in the past seven years and recorded in Indonesia, Cuba, Norway, the States and various parts of Africa and South America. The artist's British passport makes touring life easy, but a key presence on the LP is the Senegalese multi-instrumentalist Mame N'Diack, who, to perform a single gig with D'Souza in Edinburgh, had to ride trains, sleep rough, crash on floors and queue for hours before securing the necessary visa. It's N'Diack's unrehearsed clattering of rocks we hear on "Magic Stones Skit," recorded in D'Souza's mum's back garden in Glasgow. A song named after him, "Mame's Story," closes the LP. D'Souza's music has drawn naturally from his long-running party, Highlife, which Huntleys + Palmers' Andrew Thomson once described as connecting the dots between "kwaito, UK funky, early Cóméme records, stuff that was getting reissued by labels like Soundway and Sofrito and artists like [Ricardo] Villalobos, Shackleton and Actress." Though Radio Highlife is much less club-focused, it has several joyful, percussive highs. Take the bright and bubbling "Western Princes," which is lifted by N'Diack's talking drum and synth playing from Laurie Pitt, a member of Glasgow bands like Golden Teacher, Modern Institute and Banana Oil. You can hear older styles of music here, too. On "One Guitar," Dan Mugula, who has been making hits in Uganda since the '70s, explains the country's oldest genre of mainstream music, kadongo kamu (or "one guitar"), a style of pop that comes from traditional music played on a bass guitar. With Radio Highlife, D'Souza presents a musical travelogue of the sounds he's heard while on tour, from the echoey township beats of "Cape Town Dub" to the snake charmer reeds and traffic noises in "Radio Souk," while creating his own hybrids along the way.
  • Tracklist
      01. Life Is High feat. Zozo 02. Nobody Said It Would Be Easy 03. Havana Rhythm Dance feat. Andrew Ashong 04. Isbjørn 05. Radio Souk 06. Lights In The Northern Sky 07. Western Princes 08. Inga's Choir 09. Malawi Skit 10. Cape Town Jam 11. One Guitar feat. Dan Mugula 12. Kampala 13. Magic Stones Skit 14. Mame's Story feat. Mame N'Diack
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