The Afro Celts Take To Seed
After 2001’s incredibly successful Volume 3, which saw them topping the Billboard world music charts for ten weeks and garnering them the ‘Listeners Award’ at the first BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music in 2002, anticipation has been high for album number four.
And it’s been worth the wait… although, as they admit themselves, there’s been a slight shift in direction.
The line-up does remain the same however: Simon Emmerson (guitars), James McNally (keyboards,piano, bodhran, bamboo flute), Iarla O’Lionaird (vocals), Martin Russell (keyboards, programming & co-production), N'Faly Kouyate (vocals, kora, balafon), Myrdhin (harp), Moussa Sissokho (percussion), Johnny Kalsi (dhol drum, tabla), Mass (drum programming) and Emer Maycock (uilleann pipes).
The band have not only dropped the ‘sound system’ from their name, but they’ve also created their first fully-developed band album, recorded and produced in their own studio in Islington (once owned by Pink Floyd)
Says Simon: "When we started seven or eight year ago, what we did was a very radical idea. Now everyone's using DJs and programmed loops and ethnic samples over the top. We've moved on and what you hear on this album is a product of all the years of playing live and interacting with each other as musicians.
Adds James McNally: “We've found our own space and it's almost like we're starting again. We made three sound system albums. This is the first fully-developed band album. It's called 'Seed' because it really does feel like a new beginning. There's no way we could have made a record like this when we started."
Now here’s your chance to find out about Seed from the band themselves…
Cyberia
"We've used this song in the past to open our live shows and we could have put it on the last album but there was something missing. Then we saw Estrella Morente play in Madrid and it sparked the idea of finding a track which would allow a collaboration with the flamenco tradition. We were big fans of the fantastic guitarist Jesse Cook and it turned out that he was a fan of ours too… so we invited him in to play on ‘Cyberia’. To join African and Celtic music, you have to go through Spain and the rumba rhythm is like the missing link between the two. Adding the flamenco flavour seemed to gel all these different cultures and make them
sound as one."
Seed
”We often use acoustic guitars, but on ‘Seed’ we wanted to be more adventurous in exploring electric sounds with a harder edge, and to use a real live bass to give the song a more powerful groove. The bottleneck slide guitar has a really dirty, swampy sound and brings out the melody on the pipes as well. N’faly sings one of his best songs to date and his vocals seem perfectly happy swimming in a sea of blues. It could easily have come out sounding like dodgy folk-rock - but fortunately it doesn't!"
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