KPARR DIRÈ – Balafon Music from Lobi Country
(Edition Telemark / MWM)

LP+DVD / download AVAILABLE NOW at MWM bandcamp !

LP plus DVD with full-length movie (125 minutes) of Balafon music of the Lobi
people, recorded in and around Gaoua, Burkina Faso, on a two-week journey in
June 2014, by Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM), Julian Kamphausen and
Arved Schultze. Packaged in a full-colour gatefold sleeve with DVD slide, with
numerous photos and an extensive interview with Dresselhaus, released by Edition Telemark in cooperation with MirrorWorldMusic.

ALL PROFITS generated with downloads & physical formats at MWM bandcamp go to the involved musicians in Burkina Faso !

The Lobi are an ethnic group of about 180,000 people living in southern Burkina
Faso and bordering regions. The primary instrument of their traditional music
is the balafon, played solo or in a duet, usually accompanied by
percussionists. Lobi balafon music serves as a complex language for
communication with the audience but also with ancestors and spirits. Different
kinds of music are used for different purposes and social atmospheres (birth,
death, joy, hunting, war, etc.)

At its core, this music is hundreds of years old and knowledge of its mastery
is passed on from generation to generation, with different styles emerging in
different regions and outside influences picked up on the way. The first
well-known recordings of Lobi balafon music were made in 1961 and published on
the Ocora LP “Musiques du pays Lobi”. While the tunes heard there clearly show
their ancient roots, the music on this release is not isolated from current
influences and carries traces of modern African electronic pop music and
Contemporary R&B that is widespread in the region. This has led to a new
minimalist, poly-rhythmic and breakbeat-laden style prominent in Gaoua, to our
knowledge recorded here for the first time. Yet the pieces are the same
traditionals, played differently from generation to generation and from day to
day.

Musicians on the LP are Martin Kensiè (Da Toh Alain) and ensemble, and Palé
Goukoun. Their fathers – Kambiré Tiaporté and Palé Tioionté, respectively – had
been recorded in the 1990s for the Ocora CDs “Pays Lobi, Xylophone de
funérailles” and “Pays Lobi, Xylophones du Buur” that served as the starting
point for this journey. The DVD features a full-length movie by Arved Schultze,
documenting the trip through various localities and villages, with numerous
performances also including other musicians.

RELEASE PARTY:
22.03.2020 – 17:00 CET @ ausland, Lychener St. 60, 10437 Berlin, Germany – cancelled / postponed !

Screening / Talk / Performance
w/ Schneider TM, Sarata Diallo Koné, Tomoko Mio, Maurice de Martin, Arved Schultze, Edition Telemark & DJs Phonosphere (Werner Durand & Jens Strüver) / Timmytim

Facebook Event

:::

KPARR DIRÈ – Balafon Music from Lobi Country – long story short
(by Dirk Dresselhaus, Berlin 22.02.2020)

When I entered an Afro shop in the train arches near Alexanderplatz in Berlin in spring 2003, I had no idea what this moment would trigger in the years after. So I entered this shop and saw two strange percussion instruments that were unknown to me: a kind of prehistoric xylophones with a lot of calabashes underneath. The nice owner of the shop explained to me that they were balafones that he had brought from an old man in northern Ghana. We quickly agreed and I bought one of the two instruments that I used for the next few weeks while recording a new Schneider TM album. After a while I got curious and went to the world music department of Dussmann, a book and media retailer, to research balafon music from West Africa. Much of the music from Ghana, Ivory Coast etc. I found was great, very pentatonic and sometimes a bit cheesy, but it was only when I discovered the two Ocora releases of Lobi music from Burkina Faso (“Pays Lobi, Xylophone de funérailles” and “Pays Lobi, Xylophones du Buur”) that it really blew me away. The open (dis-)harmonies, very similar to the tuning of the balafon I had at home, and syncopated polyrhythms moved me deeply and were somehow the most futuristic thing I had ever heard. In the years that followed, I often incorporated the two CDs into my DJ sets and mixed some of them with drone & noise music, which somehow complemented each other perfectly. Like two long lost relatives who suddenly see each other again.
In 2013 I received a call from Arved Schultze and Julian Kamphausen regarding a possible study trip to Africa, funded by the TURN fund of the German Cultural Foundation, to look for musicians or artists with whom there should subsequently be an African-German cooperation as a cultural exchange. I immediately thought that we absolutely have to go to Gaoua, Burkina Faso, to find out if the Lobi musicians were still around whose music I had sucked in all the years before and about whom you could otherwise hardly find any information on the Internet etc. The two initiators were immediately enthusiastic and in June 2014 the trip took us via Bamako (Mali) and Bobo-Dioulasso (Burkina Faso) finally to Gaoua:
 TRAVEL BLOG

As luck would have it, my sister knew a university friend who was to build a street for an NGO in Gaoua in 2001 and since then had a good friend in Burkina Faso who had lived in Gaoua for a long time and worked there as a German teacher. We met this friend, Issaka Yameogo, at a bus station on the way to Gaoua, and on the same evening he introduced us to his old friend Somda Desiré, who was very well connected in the capital of the Lobi people and in turn directly brought us together with the balafonist Martin Kensiè. Martin turned out to be the son of one of the musicians who unfortunately had already died at that time and who had played on the Ocora CDs from the 1990s. All of this happened immediately after arriving in Gaoua and was the start of two intense weeks in which we were introduced to the music and culture of the Lobi and Dagara people and deep friendships were formed. This was when the recordings took place that are now released as LP & DVD by Edition Telemark / MWM and that originally were intended only for documentation as preparation for future collaboration. Since there never was a collaboration between Martin Kensiè, his ensemble and us experimental musicians from Europe due to a lack of follow-up funding, we have at least managed to make these unique and magical recordings available to the public after a long period of preparation.


Schneider TM & Jochen Arbeit of Einstürzende Neubauten release an album of ‘urban cosmic freeform music’ on the US label Erototox Decodings featuring musical contributions by Julia Kent (cello), Lucio Capece (bass clarinet) & Claas Großzeit (cymbal).
The album, which almost became an abandoned treasure, was already recorded in winter 2011/12 and stretches out it’s harmonic dissonances between heavy drones, strange noises, industrial-like metal percussion, feedback-ish flutes, melodic freeform drums and organic cello arrangements.

Also available now as LP / CD / download at Erototox Decodings !

Now available as download at MWM bandcamp:

die ANGEL : Entropien I (Cosmo Rhythmatic 2017)

In physics, entropy is a quantity generally described as the measure of disorder within any kind of thermodynamic system, including the universe. It counts the microscopic states that system can assume when open, interacting with others or getting altered by external conditions.
Thus, entropy makes for the perfect description of the way Ilpo Väisänen (Pan sonic, I- LP-O IN DUB) and Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM, A S S, Locust Fudge) have approached music creation since the establishment of their collaborative project Angel (now die Angel) in 1999. Allowing energy to flow freely through machines, bodies and different acoustic conditions, they’ve generated a powerful archive of mutating sonic states. A kind of creative attitude that favors exploring the physical complexity of (un-)structured electronics.
That’s where the title for their release on Cosmo Rhythmatic comes from, “Entropien” being the Finnish word and the German plural for entropy. Getting back to the stripped down set of their beginnings (modular synths, effects and processed guitar), they’ve come out with one of their most, intense, rawest and noisiest albums to date, showcasing an impressing scale of dynamics while attacking the senses with belligerent tones. Oren Ambarchi also shows up on two tracks, intertwining his drums, field recordings and guitar within the duo’s discordant layers.

New die ANGEL album – Yön Magneetti Sine – is out as LP / download on Edition Telemark in cooperation with MWM.

Edition Telemark & MWM present the ninth album by die ANGEL (previously called Angel), an improvisational noise and electro-acoustic project founded in 1999 by Dirk Dresselhaus (aka Schneider TM) and Ilpo Väisänen (ex-Pan sonic).
die ANGEL’s music meanders between the poles of improvised noise and electro-acoustic music, encompassing processed electronic sounds, instruments, and field recordings, with some tracks featuring guest musicians. Yön Magneetti Sine can be considered their most stripped-down album to date, completely recorded in July 2017 in Väisänen’s cottage near Karttula, Finland. It contains five improvised tracks featuring only processed acoustic signals from two self-built one-string resonance instruments and an acoustic guitar. Both one-stringed instruments were built by Väisänen from parts of a weaving loom, a bench, and two barbecue bowls.
All tracks were recorded live without overdubs and, according to Dresselhaus and Väisänen, relate directly to the surrounding landscape and the special atmosphere of the white nights that occur in central and northern Finland during summer. To them, the music heard here is to be called blues, albeit with non-standard instrumentation and structure. Thus, their working title has been “The Electro-Acoustic Blues Album”. Edition of 300 on blue vinyl in full-colour sleeve with various photos of the recording process and the surroundings.

LOCUST FUDGE & GUESTS – Live at Privatclub 2017 :

Live movie (stream) & EP (download) featuring guest appearances by Lucio Capece (saxophones), Werner “Zappi” Diermaier (metal percussion), Gwendolin Tägert (backing vocals), Angela Chambers (backing vocals/transverse flute), Michael Mühlhaus (piano/vocals), Wolfgang Seidel (electronics) is out now as part of the “play loud! (live) music series”.

The “play loud! (live) music series” has been initiated by filmmakers Dietmar Post & Lucía Palacios (responsible for monks – the transatlantic feedback, Reverend Billy, Klangbad, Franco’s Settlers). The series parts from three ideas, Alan Lomax’s work as an archivist and chronicler, John Peel’s BBC radio sessions and the work of Direct Cinema pioneers, such as, Maysles Brothers, Leacock, Wildenhahn and Pennebaker. Filming live shows meant not to do it in a TV style but in a very personal, intuitive and adventurous style – nothing is staged for filming. You go along as it happens. Some of the live performances are filmed with only one camera in one continuous shot without any edits. Some critics have labeled it as “filmed paintings/painted films”.