Sven Kacirek
Pingipung Rec. Sven Kacirek : The Kenya Sessions (D/KY,2010)***°
When Sven Kacirek met the director of the Goethe Institute in Nairobi the idea was born to plan a trip with a team to record local music for an interaction with Sven Kacirek's own ideas so that the result would become an acoustic road trip diary. For those interested, some background settings to the music were written down and compiled in the booklet related with all the individual sessions. The Kenyan music styles presented were dodo and other local styles from the province of Nyanza, guided by Ketebul Music producer Tabu Osusa, and some cross-cultural ideas from the Kenyan coast, (-with somewhere some noticeable Turkish influence-), guided by Raymond Mackenzie from Afro-Fusion band Kachumbari Seven. The total trip took five weeks.
Luckily, the cooperation with and impressions from local musicians were strong and a real people deal, and connected with it/them enough not to fall back in the kind of overproduced after-productions like we can remember with sadness from the 80s (like Bill Laswell,..), as the kind of common approaches which in the end I think had led to years of disinterest in further world music contributions on a bigger scale. Sven Kacirek had already proven before how he can work with colourful rhythms and that he has a good ear to create the right rhythmical and tone-rich accents, something which he also has done here. And when the bare songs are given more surroundings the spatial environment also is luckily not taken out of the context. The approach on the first tracks reminds me a little of the early works of Musci & Venosta, an Italian duo who on their début used library world music samples mostly with a successful enrichment. In this case the rhythms, glockenspiel, acoustic guitar are that of a small private room, but they fit with the outdoor intimate settings. A bit further they add a lounge and slightly jazzy setting to it with the singers as if they are real live contributions, different than being a sample of something from somewhere else. The musician everywhere remains (and also was) a witness, re-experiencing the tracks a couple of moments like in a dream, then it's approach is more close to being there. The tunes bring you one time into a mixed world, then back to another private world, then returns to the outdoor events. Then we feel as if some local party is going on in the background. We travel along with the recording sessions and have a look inside new places and spaces. To make even more the travel idea vivid, walks and car sounds and environments and public are being recorded and included as well, like images on the road. Then again, lounge rhythms pair perfectly with the local recordings. Danceable rhythms added afterwards combine perfectly with the rhythms of the songs. This really sounds like a musical diary while the visit is at times more than in one place at the time.
