“Saved by His Grace:” as the title implies, the completion of Hermas Zopoula’s new album was a miracle.

Recording began in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso almost three years ago, but when the original producer started trying to take control over the album, Hermas Zopoula had to fire him and begin a search for someone he could work with more collaboratively. In a popular studio in the city, Hermas found Ilboudo Sylvain and Nadie Boureima.

The Sylvain and Boreima brought more live instrumentation into the heavily programmed sound popular in West African pop music. They, and Zopoula, wanted to resist the trend towards a texture filled out with synths and computer pre-sets, instead leaning towards the rawer acoustic of live balafons, guitar, and piano. The synthetic sound of Zopoula’s debut is still very much present on Sauvé, but the inclusion of more live instruments has created something richer and more nuanced.

Then, one night late last year, after ten new tracks were recorded and ready to mix, a vindictive artist recording at the same studio sneaked in to delete the hard drive. “Venez Danser” was the only track to survive erasure. Zopoula had to re-record and mix the rest of the songs that appear on the final version of Sauvé Par Sa Grace between his shifts at Air Burkina, the national airline.

But despite the adversity that Zopoula and his collaborators endured throughout their long struggle to record this album, these songs are filled with joy and gratitude, and they’re delighted to finally share them with you. Enjoy!

CD and LP include immediate download of album (MP3).
LP also includes download coupon to MP3.

This Is My Hand began with a question. What is the value of music?

My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden was working on an audio-visual collaboration, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Belper’s six-hour long cine-opera, River of Fundament, set in the automobile factories of latter-day Detroit. In the film, a high school-style marching band is seen in procession through the streets of Motor City and playing in its vast, echoing factory spaces. This struck a chord in Shara, for whom the new album would be a purposeful readdressing of music-making on the most basic, tribal level.

“In the States, the marching band is something that is done in school, so it still represents something inclusive, something anyone can learn,” Shara explains. “I loved the communal quality . . . the way drums and horns travel in large three-dimensional spaces.” But it also sparked a search for more personal meaning. “The genesis of the new album was looking at the changes that have happened in music over my career, and trying to reevaluate what [music] meant to me in the first place. What is the value of music?”

Answering  that became a journey beyond the composition of music, which Shara has demonstrated mastery over time and time again, and into the cultural history of music “I had this ‘back-to-basics’ moment of reading how humans were making sounds before we were using words,” says Shara. “The album started with these fundamental ideas of music’s function. I just made a list: clap, singing along, and so on . . . ways in which people can simply join in with music.”

The opening track on This Is My Hand, ‘Pressure,’ is an invitation. “Diamonds,” Shara sings, “so wild I cannot tame them / so shiny I cannot name them.” Within seconds of lowering the needle, listeners hear a sharp, drum-rolled call to attention, courtesy of the Detroit Party Marching Band What follows is a Shara-choreographed whirlwind of horns, woodwinds, beats, xylophones and synths. The sound propels one of the immediate songs in the MBD canon to date. The ensuing ‘ Before the Words’ (“Before the verse there was the sound”) and the title track are no less direct in exploring and defining the fundamentals of not just pop music, but, well, life. “This is my voice/ this is my heart / this is my choice,” sings Shara. And ‘Lover Killer,’ with its imagery of battlefields encircled by crows, evokes the influence of Daniel Levitin. ‘Apparition,’ the final track, is a Tron-like electronic, slow-motion departure from the physical world.

Produced by Shara herself and keyboardist Zac Rae, This Is My Hand is a bold chapter in the unfurling MBD story. Its exploration of music and its rhythmic urgency escort Shara’s chamber-music aesthetic out of the chamber and back into the dance hall and rock bar.

Double Youth is a spiritual long-lost cousin to the great masters of funk, like Parliament, Prince, and George Duke, whose finely tuned beats married the ear with the body in new ways.

Catalog: AKR123.
CD & LP include emailed download of album in 320kbps MP3.
LP includes download card.

The world is loud. The wind blows hard. We need songs for shelter, and Raymond Raposa can build a shelter from almost anything: the sun-bleached bones of a drum track and a couple spare organ chords; a carpet of creeping synth arpeggios, a scaffolding of multi-tracked harmonies, a few scraps of alto sax to prop up the whole structure. Decimation Blues, Raposa’s sixth release as Castanets, marks a decade of scavenger architecture.

In 2004, Raposa gave us a Cathedral to live in, a Gothic, cavernous first album echoing with the souls of lost prophets and wayward lovers. The arrival of Castanets was sudden and strange, like finding Notre Dame in the middle of a desert, like walking into a dusty clapboard dive in the steel and glass heart of the city. From the start, the reductive, ready-to-hand terms—“freak folk,” “new Americana”—fit Castanets uncomfortably. Raposa’s sensibilities were not nostalgic or curatorial but private, allusive, and avant-leaning.

First Light’s Freeze (2005) and In the Vines (2007) further developed the fractured approach of Cathedral. Raposa has known his share of rootlessness. His songs continuously evoke travel, but long for a still center. That duality is also in Raposa’s voice—think of the deadpan baritone of Leonard Cohen shot through with the high yawp of Buck Owens.

City of Refuge (2008) found Raposa recording alone for three weeks in a motel in a desert town in Nevada, crafting Fahey-like guitar miniatures and stripping his songwriting down to struts and beams. “I’m going to run,” Raposa sings again and again, “I’m going to run to the city of refuge,” but sees the shimmering mirage ever receding into the distance. Texas Rose, the Thaw, and the Beasts (2009) opened things back up, returning to the larger confines of Cathedral. With 2012 came an intriguing excursion: Raymond Byron and the White Freighter’s Little Death Shaker, a collaborative, full-band album that saw Raposa unfurling some loose, late-night energy, covering a surf number, and expanding his aesthetic in every direction.

Which brings us to the new Castanets record, Decimation Blues, the music of a man who’s learned to live and build among the wreckage—twelve seemingly offhand, secretly meticulous tracks that we can hunker down in. “Still always good to be alone in someone else’s home,” Raposa sings. He’ll lend us his place, or teach us how to fix up our own. Come in out of the rain, put your shoes by the fire. The walls might shake, the wind might howl, but you’ll be safe here a while. – Will Boast