Sticky Skin in the Casamance

I've just returned to Dakar from about 10 days in the Casamance, Senegal participating as an artist in residence at Lando la Casamance Qui Vous Colle a la Peau (The Identity of Casamance that Sticks to your Skin) in Ziguinchor. (Look for the link to Lando on the opening page) I was the sole sound/music oriented artist there, the others being photographers, directors and editors. Lots of unexpected stuff happened.....

One of the unexpected events was the visit of a traditional pulaar music group from Tambacounda called Allah Waly (another way of saying Inshallah or God Willing) that came to Ziguinchor to be filmed and recorded by resident artists. One afternoon was spent working with them recording the full ensemble (stereo recordings) as well as making recordings of the musicians individually with the idea that this material would be used in the future to construct bases (this is a brazilian portuguese word meaning instrumentals which are bases or foundations to be developed - before they become proper songs....I wish there was a suitable word in English for this) to record with rappers. Our makeshift studio was a semi-open garage on the grounds of a large compound which housed a sculpture studio, a woodworking shop, and a large house where all 15 or 20 of us were accomodated for several days on the outskirts of Bignona (about 20 km outside of Ziguinchor) during the bukut (more on this later) in Baila. Equipment-wise, I had to make due with a seriously basic setup - my laptop with audio interface (stereo input only), an sm58 and my m-track flash card recorder and stock microphone. In order to record 3 tracks, I recorded with the laptop and microtrack running wildly and hit some metal things in the garage to create a sync point. Separation was by distance (across the garage so sight lines were maintained) and mic positioning (basically amounted to the sm58 pointing away from the flutes). then I dumped the microtrack tracks into live and synced them up. pretty lo-fi, but it worked.

There are very few examples of hip hop (or other modern electronic based urban musics) in senegal being combined with traditional music or vice versa. It's as though neither party knows how to collaborate. It seemed sort of preposterous to me that this might be the case before beginning the recordings. I figured it would be a relatively simple operation to get each musician separately, give them a click track at various tempos and have them play on top of it. Without exception, they began just playing as though the click weren't even there (even though I had it at full volume their headphones). When I stopped and explained (for the second or third time) and it was translated to them (English to Wolof to Pulaar or Portuguese to Pulaar or English to French to Pulaar depending on who happened to be around at the particular moment), they understood the concept and played in time, but the soul of the music was just plain gone. Evaporated into a mechanical click.
So, it was only when I just gave up on the click and asked them to play freely with the idea that I could then warp it in Ableton Live. Guess you should always let the artist be free to do what they want.....;-)
Eventually, I just recorded the whole ensemble together - more for them to use as a demo or whatever than for me to sample or remix, but who knows? Listen to one of the tracks. They were pretty into the whole idea of working as a collective. No money changed hands. Our group was video taping and photographing the whole scene for future use. The whole idea being to generate art for collective use - everyone contributing something. In the process of working, ideas came up and were implemented, problems appeared and were resolved. Hopefully, this entire experience will contribute to more artistic expression and collaboration not only between urban, electronic musics, but between artists working in different mediums as well.

One of the other unexpected events was hooking up with Yaya Ba Konte, a griot from Zigunichor and a friend of a friend, along with his student Vieux. The idea in this encounter was to record kora on top of some beats that I'd been working on with the intention of returning to Dakar to record with rappers. A brilliant player while playing outside of the restricitons of the (facist) click, he had difficulty locking into my grooves (or my grooves latching onto his groove based on centuries of tradition is maybe more like it). My basslines didn't seem to make any sense to him and he played with tonal disregard to them. As for the percussive side of things, after a bit of time and hand clapping on my part, he latched on to the basic idea, but it was clear that there wasn't any kind of intimate connection between my 75 - 80 bpm tracks and his traditional sound. Anyway, he gave it a good go. Afterwards, I asked him to just play freely without my beats and he played beautifully. ha ha surprise, surprise! ;-) He is a griot, after all.....and who am I but some young guy with a computer? ;-)