The album is a sampling wonkfest of jerky beats, odd sounds, meaty synths and solid bass. There are influences from all over the place, Indian style scales and instrumentation sit quite happily alongside African inspired-rhythms and vocal samples.
Tribal Dances by Kappah is a wonderfully wonky collection of beats from Italian producer Christian Kappah Pevere. The first thing that caught my attention was the amazing artwork (by Giovanni Bettinelli) that is the digital equivalent of a cover. It’s so nice to see a proper piece of art attached to music, something that the long-haired music fraternity of the ’60’s and ’70’s knew very well, and maybe we need to re-learn. I for one do a lot of listening on the mini computer which pretends to be my phone (good earphones though—obviously), and when I look at it to see the whole screen taken up by a glorious work of art, well, it just does something for me. Thanks Bedroom Research and for brightening up my day in that simple way.
The album is a sampling wonkfest of jerky beats, odd sounds, meaty synths and solid bass. There are influences from all over the place, Indian style scales and instrumentation sit quite happily alongside African inspired-rhythms and vocal samples. It seems quite natural for American ’70’s soul grooves to nestle up cozily with ’90’s acid rave sounds and Hudson Mohawke tinged foot fooling beats. Tribal Dances jumps about like a one footed man on a hot tin roof with no shoe, but not to the point of being a laboured listen. It has a simplicity to it that is quite endearing too, although at times this simplicity is also a double edged sword.
Tribal Dances may not be the album of the decade, but it certainly displays some great imagination and beat-heavy sampling mayhem. This will be a good selection to have in your back pocket if you are in the business of playing music to groups of gathered people, there are a couple of real gems in there which would be great to pull out half way through a party set. This album is definitely worth owning, especially when furnished with the news that it is available free (name your price deal) from BandCamp for a finite amount of time, so you’d all best get yourselves over there and do the appropriate clicking.
Tribal Dances is available on Bedroom Research.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/31647599″ width=”100%” height=”166″ params=”auto_play=false&show_artwork=false&color=000000″ iframe=”true” /]
