King Ayisoba
Makkum Rec. King Ayisoba : Wicked Leaders -LP/CD- (GH,2014)***
This is a contemporary folk album from Ghana, an expression, which features everywhere a local folk instrument, a one-string guitar, which plays and leads the rhythms and songs in combination with more hand-clap-alike layers of rhythms, performed spontaneously with musical ears and a local folk richness in it’s interpretation. Often lead voices or a few response voices have grotesque features, reminding me off voodoo music spells. The voices are powerful, expressive, energetic. You can hear a personal voice, the voice expressing the subject of bad leaders in song, while the group response voices give it a social context. In one track it’s expression also features and electric guitar amongst the other instruments. One wonder what one can do about it’s facts and subject, and who needs change can have an ear too. In one song (track 6) one imitates goat sounds, where “beihhh” sounds pretty much like “bad” in this case. The grotesque voices are sharp and angry, while the group energy also give it a not just a response, but also represents with it a responsive way to catch one’s actions, emotions, proportionally in a group, the way it should be, having the ability to make one voice more powerful when received in harmony by the group entity, sounding louder and with qualitative contrast as a result, or how one voice can become more when it alone is supportive by being engaged for it as well, totally, like a true leader which is nothing else but a voice of the whole which at the same time is expressed by the whole variety and combination of the others as well.
