Alabaster DePlume
Ana Mendes
Anto <3
Arsenal Mikebe
Asa-Chang & Junray
Aunty Rayzor
Carolina Billvik
Daito Manabe
Esy Tadesse fastmusic
Fauna
Florence Adooni
Johan Jönson
Jupiter & Okwess
Kahil El’Zabar’s
Ethnic Heritage Ensemble
El León Pardo & Los Gaiteros de Punta Icaco
Les Soeurs Doga & Viktor Marek
Majur
Merope
Nadah El Shazly
Sandra Fredin Shabaka
Shahzad Ismaily
Sheherazaad
Sirin Sponga
Broadsheet is the oversized format in which morning papers were once printed. It was without a doubt unwieldy and awkward. Opened to its full spread it took up the entire breakfast table, the newsprint stained with drips of morning coffee and splotches of fallen cheese. But nonetheless, at least there was room for important news, for big news. And that’s precisely what we are bringing –earth-shaking news from the world of adventurous music beyond borders.
It is – with few exceptions – not particularly likely that you will read about these artists anywhere else. It is also unlikely that you will see them perform at other festivals in Sweden. At least not for a while. Sometimes it happens a few years on, but in most cases, the artists we invite to the Clandestino Festival don’t perform anywhere else in Sweden.
The word clandestino still means secret, hidden. It is something out of earshot, beyond the noise, beyond the flows of meaningless and misleading information that plague our daily scrolling.
For over two decades, from the crevices of resistance of the global cultural scene, we have sent up air bubbles of hope for diversity, bubbles that float through the reactionary right-wing populist tsunami of our time. The need has never been greater. Against prefabricated categories, we persist in a world of music and arts beyond genres, beyond the temporal divisions of “tradition” and “avant-garde”, beyond national and continental borders.
This year we will be located at Stigbergstorget, once a vivid gathering place for Swedish emigrants seeking fortune in America. The Seamen’s Church (a.k.a. Skeppet) will play host to more world artists during a single weekend than ever before. In total, nearly 100 musicians, artists and writers from more than twenty countries will participate in the 23rd edition of the Clandestino Festival from May 29th to June 1st.
A few words can be read about them here. More info can be found on our site. Everything of consequence can only be experienced at the festival.
www.clandestinofestival.org
Thursday 29 May–Sunday 1 June, Skeppet, Allmänna Konsthall, Gathenhielmska Huset
Ana Mendes Ana Mendes is an acclaimed writer and visual artist addressing topics such as language, memory and identity. Her work is conceptual, process-based and created with an economy of means. Mendes creates works that are timeless and openended, posing questions rather than providing answers.
Since 2019, the artist has worked regularly in East Asia, namely Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, exploring historical narratives between East and West and drawing from local philosophy, namely animism and Shintoism. Her work is often described as poetic and minimalist.
For the opening of Art & Literature at Clandestino she is elaborating a new work within her Map Series, where the expansions of colonial powers are stitched on ancient maps. What will happen when she feeds maps of the USA into her sewing machine?
Carolina Billvik
Carolina Billvik is a Stockholm-based visual artist, with a masters degree from Kungliga Konsthögskolan.
She works primarily within and against the traditions of photography. With a fragmentary visual language and a mix between still and moving images she seeks to deconstruct space and seeing, to create new spatialities where definitions are in a state of dissolution.
In addition to photography and space, Billvik continuously explores identity and memory through her work, often based in queer theory. Fragments, gaps and dislocations become important elements both visually and conceptually.
For the festival, Carolina Billvik will showcase both textile works and a video which touches on the history of Stigberget to tell a personal story about her ancestors’ poverty-driven emigration to America. In the spaces in between language, performative acts and history the viewers are invited to reflect on the fluid nature of identities and meaning.
Johan Jönson
The Swedish poet Johan Jönson was born in Borås, just outside of Gothenburg, and had his big breakthrough with the awardwinning collection Efter arbetsschema (According to work schedule) in 2008. However, his first book of poetry came out in 1992 already, and in total he has written over twenty collections, many of them massive, challenging tomes of text. Despite his uncompromising output, he has become one of Sweden’s most popular living poets and the winner of a number of prestigious awards. He has also maintained a longstanding collaboration with the free theatre ensemble Teatermaskinen, writing a number of their plays.
His poetry delves into subjects such as wage work, sexuality, pessimism and capitalism, but the most central theme is always language itself. Utilising techniques like collage, sampling, and repetition, he combines and collapses texts in an antiaesthetic but still somehow enjoyable lyricism.
Jönson’s new book I hängmattan (In the hammock) is a more concise work, part prose, but with typically sudden shifts in style and perspective. As part of the festival’s art programme the poet will marathon-read his latest work in its entirety.
Sandra Fredin
With video and performance as her main tools, Sandra Fredin explores questions about hierarchies, morality and ethics from a fundamentally misanthropic perspective: her focus is most often on the destructive capacities of humanity. Using allegory and symbolism, she posits dilemmas of responsibility, agency and passivity.
During her BA at Konstfack, Stockholm, Fredin has developed a peculiar visual language, specialising in stop motion animation. With elaborate costuming she activates her video works during performances that draw the audience into the puzzling action.
Sandra Fredin will present her multidimensional work Dream Scenario for the festival, in which an animated short film is combined with an ongoing performance where visitors are invited to play a game with the artist. What choices are really yours to make?
Sirin Sponga Obsession with wool. Wool, not in the manufactured, convenient form a modern consumer might encounter it, but as a timeconsuming, unwieldy engagement. Sirin visits farms; meets sheep; assists with the shearing; and then scours, cards, dyes and fulls the wool together with friends.
Thursday 29 May, Skeppet
Salvador, on the east coast of Brazil, is ground zero for Afro-Brazilian culture, and has been called Roma Negra, the Black Rome. This is where music forms such as samba and bossa nova can trace their roots, and the city is famous for artists such as Gilberto Gil and Novos Baianos. It is also where Majur dos Santos Conceicao grew up, now a proud custodian and innovator of the tradition. She was raised within Candomblé, a religion that emerged from the meeting between Catholicism and African cultures such as
inherent rhythmicity of the Japanese language the music turns into a feast of metres, polyrhythms and counting (sometimes literally, like in the 1-12 mantra of Juunisetsu). While the band certainly does not shy away from melodies, even the catchiest hook soon finds itself dissected into syllables, triplets, staccatos… In fact, on close examination many of the disparate musical elements – be they vocals, trumpets or traditional Japanese instruments – often seem to mimic rather than accompany the tablas, bongos and other percussive instruments. If such a monomaniacal focus on rhythm and time signatures might in some traditions result in austere minimalism, here it turns into an exuberant playground, with results ranging from onomatopoeic spoken word experiments to irreverent electro-pop. After early single Hana was picked up by none other than John Peel and celebrated in both The Wire and Mojo Magazine, the constellation began touring worldwide, collaborating with contemporary dance troupes and appearing on soundtracks to popular anime shows. Though they’ve taken extended hiatuses and two of the original members have left, tabla guru AsaChang keeps reinventing the band, and now he is back, with a new live constellation, but just as many genre-bending hijinks!
From this age-old, organic material, Sponga then spins yarns with one foot in the physical world and one in the supernatural. Through film and installation she touches on themes such as anthropomorphism, hyper-individualism and suppressed needs. Fashioned out of raw wool from Hraðastaðir, Iceland and Tromsø, Norway – where Sirin Sponga studied art at the Arctic University of Norway – Clandestino is proud to present the Wool God: a character from her latest film project. A carrier of frustration with the world, a representation of unseen forces, a figure of loneliness.
Thursday 29 May, Skeppet He’s the man in the background, making magic in collaborations with
He has played on over 400 albums, with Elvis Costello, Tom Waits and Yoko Ono being some of the most famous artists, but his CV also includes collaborations with Anna von Hausswolff and Merope – with whom he will make a second appearance at the Clandestino Festival. In 2023 he recorded the Grammy-nominated album Love in Exile, together with Arooj Aftab and Vijay Iyer.
In his collaborations, Shahzad Ismaily works intuitively, allowing the chemistry between the musicians to take the work where it wants to go. But while Ismaily has long been known for elevating other artists to new heights, he has yet to release an album of his own, and he is rarely the centre of attention in a live setting. Clandestino Festival is proud to present a unique concert in which we meet Shahzad Ismaily completely solo with guitar and banjo.
Thursday 29 May, Skeppet
Is it a Dionysian ritual? Or a musical dream journey along the River Styx? Either way, Fauna’s debut single Animalisk invites us to a magically trippy sound world. The track opens with the buzzing sound of what could be a swarm of mosquitoes. Darbuka rhythms and mysterious clicks take us on to a wicked surf guitar riffing away in a melodic mantra, along with drums and mindexpanding swoosh effects. In the distance, a pitch-black saxophone howls as the intensity builds, culminating in screams of what seems to be both pleasure and horror. Fauna challenges the listener to let go and let every cell vibrate in time with their very unique version of danceable psych rock. They are more of a collective than a traditional band: some of Fauna’s nine members also manifest their love of psychedelic and experimental music through their own record label, and as organisers of clubs and concert nights. Others appear in parallel in other live projects in both Gothenburg and Malmö, namely as members of bands like BITOI and Rome Is Not A Town.
Since their debut, Fauna have released a handful of high-octane singles and also emerged as a commanding live band, easily turning the dance floor into a transcendental jungle of rhythms.
Thursday 29 May, Skeppet
Since its founding in 1974, Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble has become something of an institution for innovative improvised music in Chicago. The core has always consisted of trumpet and saxophone – played by Corey Wilkes and Alex Harding respectively since many years – with Mr El’Zabar himself on drums and various percussion instruments. The current line-up also includes cellist Ishmael Ali.
Kahil El’Zabar was long a driving force in the Association of Creative Musicians (AACM), an organisation to promote and educate musicians on the cutting edge of experimental jazz. Currently in his seventies, he is as prolific as ever.
On his latest album, Open Me, a Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit, his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble looks to both the past and the future of African-American musical tradition. In this highly personal musical history, his own compositions are interspersed with interpretations of milestones by the likes of McCoy Tyner and Miles Davis.
Compared to What offers a funky rendition of Eugene McDaniel’s classic, as relevant today as when it captured the frustrated zeitgeist of the late 1960s in the United States: How did visions of equality get obscured by the shadow of escalating violence, both at home and in distant countries?
In addition, some of Kahil El’Zabar’s own classics can be found in new guises, such as Barundi and Great Black Music, as well as a tribute to one of jazz’s true innovators, Ornette. What does it all sound like?
Take a myriad of hand drums, thumb pianos and bells. Add cello, trumpet and fierce bass lines from the baritone sax. Complex harmonies and meticulous compositions, then in the next moment free jazz over rolling drums à la Elvin Jones. In between, little moments of cosmic gospel vibes.
Whatever part of the African-American musical labyrinth Kahil El’Zabar and his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble lure us into, they playfully dance on, confident that they know their way around this place, backwards.
Friday 30 May,
technology to not be caught up in hype and the intoxication of the new. Daito Manabe is that someone. As accomplished in visual art, design and programming as he is in music making, he has directed augmented reality sequences for the Rio Olympics, worked with Björk for the world’s first 360° virtual reality concert, created 3D sound generating software, and made music from brain scans, among many other visionary, cross-disciplinary projects. But while others trying to ride the wave of the latest innovations often end up making gimmicky spectacles, Daito Manabe always puts technology at the service of art and human expression, rather than the other way around.
With one degree in Mathematics from Tokyo University of Science and one in Dynamic Sensory Programming from IAMAS, Manabe has merged his scientific achievements with his lifelong passion for music – be it jazz, hip hop or breakbeat –in a long line of collaborations with other artists, dancers and musicians. In 2006, he founded Rhizomatiks, a Japanese creative collective that made his fusion of technology and art stadium-sized and global. But ever restless, Daito has kept several solo projects going in parallel.
Sonically – whether in his own drone compositions or his wide-ranging DJ sets –his world is oceanic and electronic. Tides of foamy static; skittering, shimmering beats; free-floating voice fragments: it is music to be washed over by, always changing, ever in motion. At Clandestino 2025, Daito Manabe performs in the capacity of a DJ. But with such a polymath, it is impossible to predict what exactly that entails.
Friday 30 May, Skeppet
Sheherazaad grew up in the United States, the child of musician parents with roots in South Asia. She studied Western music and sang opera, musical theatre and choral music – but something felt wrong. She would soon reach a point where neither European tonality nor the English language could give voice to all the experiences that were making themselves felt in her life.
Guided by the guru and musician Madhuvanti Bhide, Sheherazaad rebooted her entire expression, to become a part of the music of the global diaspora and its struggle for liberation.
With the 2020 song cycle Khwaabistan, she took the first big steps towards the sounds she creates today: a meeting of South Asian traditions and Western folk pop, coloured by microtonal oud melodies, Spanish guitar and a strong instinct for musical dramaturgy. Like a storyteller portraying different characters, Sheherazaad’s airy alto voice whispers, chirps and moans; this time in the languages of her parents, Hindi and Urdu.
The formula is refined on 2024’s minialbum Qasr, a story in five chapters, each depicting a different woman’s search for her place in the world. The disc was produced by Pakistani-American musician Arooj Aftab. It features several other top international names, including Palestinian kanun player Firas Zreik and violinist Basma Edrees from Egypt.
Echoes of flamenco, Arabic music and dream pop ballads can be found. But it’s not that Sheherazaad borrows or quotes – rather, her creation takes place in a postgenre state, where musical dialects float weightlessly in the wake of global migration. Since such music did not exist, reflecting her patchwork identity, she simply had to create it herself: Folk music for people who belong everywhere.
Friday 30 May, Skeppet
This improviser and jazz poet, whose real name is Angus Fairbairn, was active in various underground groups in Manchester before learning the saxophone and becoming part of the Total Refreshment Centre, a collaborative recording studio and club space that has acted as a hub for the new jazz scene in London. Putting rules and schooling to the side, his music orbits in the same solar system as Beverly Glenn Copeland and Alice Coltrane. In 2022, Alabaster DePlume made an extra ellipse straight into the hearts of global audiences when he took the stage with seemingly naive jazz poems like Be Nice to People and Don’t Forget You’re Precious This is his home ground: the borderland between the painfully naked life and a kind of wholehearted absurd humour. His voice, melodically reciting, and his ethiopiques-esque saxophone vibrato, make up the core of playful group improvisations. Alabaster DePlume offers an unironic resistance to the cruelty and cynicism that sometimes seems to ring like an ostinato in contemporary life. The music is born in the moment and in dialogue with the listeners.
Alabaster DePlume comes to Clandestino Festival with A Blade Because a Blade is Whole, to be released this spring. The album is the sequel to the EP Cremisan: Prologue to A Blade (recorded in Palestine in 2024) and the poetry book Looking for My Value: Prologue to A Blade. As a whole, the trilogy is an exploration of strategies for self-healing and the art of owning one’s time and anything that happens in it.
Friday 30 May, Skeppet
Rooted in Lithuanian folk tunes, Merope invites listeners on a trip across a sparkling, starry sky of sounds, where traditional melodies shine along with cosmic improvisation. The duo consists of multi- instrumentalist Bert Cools on guitars and synths, and Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė on the Lithuanian zither kanklės and vocals. Both are successful musicians and composers in their own right, within jazz and experimental folk.
Since their inception in 2012, Merope has taken on many different guises and their fifth album, Vėjula (2024) sees them moving in a more mystical and spiritual direction.
Acoustic instruments occasionally give way to synths, field recordings and choppedup voice samples. There are tonal colourings that may bring to mind Eno’s ambient music, or perhaps if one can imagine Popol Vuh jamming with Tolkien’s elves in Rivendell! Some pieces are based on folk songs such as the lullaby Lopšinė, while others are original compositions. Vėjula roughly means “spirit of the wind”, and perhaps the title refers to the many voices carried on the air to contribute to the album. These include Bill Frisell, Laraaji and Shahzad Ismaily.
Friday 30 May, Skeppet
It could be a futuristic Armani advert: three men in black suits encircle what appears to be an infernal machine of some kind.
However, on closer inspection it is a jumble of tom-toms, cymbals, cowbells and African hand drums of various sizes.
One minute they conjure up rumbling, explosive beats, and the next they take it down and produce the most detailed complex sounds. Melodic elements, howls and soulful vocal phrases swirl in a polyrhythmic, high-speed mix of techno and East African singeli. To call this trio tight is an understatement: yes, they are three well-dressed gentlemen who grind those aforementioned beats out, but it really does sound more machine-like than human. In fact, the starting point for Arsenal Mikebe’s debut album is to create a human imitation of a Roland TR808, a machine that –indeed – imitates a human drummer. The title? Drum Machine
The members are Ssentongo Moses, Dratele Epiphany and Luyambi Vincent de Paul, all three professional percussionists in other contexts. Like so many of Africa’s experimental dance music revolutionaries, Arsenal Mikebe has found a home with the Nyege Nyege record label in Kampala, where they developed their sound in collaboration with Portuguese musician and artist Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, previously a collaborator with laptop metal duo Duma.
Friday 30 May, Skeppet
Sandwiched between Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Mali, Burkina Faso is a country whose music stems from the traditions of at least sixty different ethnic groups, and which has long lived in the shadow of its neighbours’ now world-famous artists. Right now, however, studios and clubs in the capital Ouagadougou are undergoing an intense transformation, cross-fertilising folk music with contemporary West African styles, as well as hip-hop and electronic sounds.
Twin sisters Haoua and Azera Doga are known in the region for their intense fusion of mooré melodies with danceable beats, over which they perform paradoxically upbeat call-and-response raps about heavy social issues. Back in the early 2000s, they had a hit with Jeune la sin GOMDA, about the ongoing AIDS epidemic. Alongside their music, the sisters worked in theatre and film, and it wasn’t until 2018 that their debut album Sougry saw the light of day, with twelve tracks that call for forgiveness and peace, while making the floor shake with zouk and coupé- decalé rhythms.
For Clandestino Festival, Les Soeurs Doga will be joined by Viktor Marek, an electronic beat master and club organiser from Hamburg, known for projects such as 8 Doogymoto as well as his duo with sitar virtuoso Ashraf Sharif Khan. On the Bayiri EP, we get a taste of Les Soeurs Doga’s power ful vocals chanting in unison over sampled balafon riffs, electronic beats and a mysterious pseudo-reggae organ.
Saturday 31 May, Skeppet
The clatter of antique rhythm boxes and minimalist guitar melodies meet with influences from Mali’s desert blues when fastmusic from Leipzig takes the stage. It doesn’t
seem far-fetched to posit that the Texan trio Khruangbin has also contributed with inspiration to this restrained atmosphere. Thanks to their evocative concerts, fastmusic has gained a reputation on the European continent as a live performance not to be missed.
The project took shape when singer/ guitarist Bela Fast cycled through the south of France and had the opportunity to borrow a small cottage in the middle of somewhere. The beauty of the landscape inspired a new breed of stripped-down songs, which would eventually lead to fastmusic’s first seven-inch: Wow immediately became an underground phenomenon and was soon picked up by various radio stations.
It was followed by a few more singles, and October 2024 saw the release of I Want to Love, and I Love, a debut album characterised by a peculiarly austere dreaminess, if such a feeling can even be imagined. It is probably best visualised in the video for Funk in the Kitchen, filmed surreptitiously in an exhibition kitchen at IKEA. “Good vibes coming” – the words that leave Bela’s lips bounce hard against the lifeless interior design. What remains is low-key anxiety, vibrating somewhere behind grey-painted chipboard and veneer.
Saturday 31 May, Skeppet
Jorge Emilio Pardo Vásquez is a composer, trumpeter and gaitero from Cartagena on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Under the pseudonym El León Pardo, he has been on a musical voyage for more than a de cade, travelling creative crossroads between experimental jazz and various shades of cumbia.
The first single from his new album is called La Perica. The name refers to a type of machete used by peasants along the Caribbean coast in confrontations with Spanish colonisers, as well as British and French pirates. Two traditional rhythms, puya and merengue de gaita, clatter and intertwine in a frenzied tempo on tambor and maracas. Bass, guitar and synths help form the backbone of this high-energy dance-and-battle music. On top of this, El León’s high flute notes soar, drowning in mind-expanding tape delay, before flying over the mountain peaks in a kind of Andean high-altitude dub.
In the unique constellation he brings to Clandestino Festival, he focuses on the gaita, a flute made of cactus and beeswax that has become something of a symbol of Colombia’s pre-colonial history. The instrument has long played a central role for indigenous people, who also call it chuana or kuisi. When the Spanish landed, they renamed the flute because the sound reminded them of the Galician bagpipe: gaita. Together with Los Gaiteros de Punta Icaco, El León Pardo invites the listener to experience traditional gaitero music filtered through this quartet’s highly dancefloor-friendly sensibilities.
Saturday 31 May, Skeppet
You may have seen her performing with Alogte Oho’s Sounds of Joy? Or heard her in collaborations with Guy One or with Jimi Tenor? Indeed, even before performing under her own name, Florence Adooni had already inspired awe as a vital part of Ghana’s frafra gospel scene. And once her debut single was out, it really set West African dance floors in motion – as well as European ones – and soon she was signed to the German label Philophon.
Frafra gospel is the name of a traditional style of church music from northern Ghana, centered around euphoric choral chants and rhythms. Florence Adooni has been called the new queen of the genre, but this young artist is too much of an innovator to feel at home in just one musical style.
In 2024, she met European audiences on a tour of more than fifty shows, including an extatic evening at Clandestino. Come 2025, the time is finally here to release A.O.E.I.U. (An Ordinary Exercise in Unity) Florence Adoonis’ new album. Here, she takes the frafra melodies to the next level while bringing intense dance rhythms to a boil. Backed by a mega-soulful seven-piece band, Florence Adooni creates a dense combination of frafra gospel, highlife and afrobeat. Shimmering guitar melodies compete with thundering brass attacks over a tight rhythm section.
Saturday 31 May, Skeppet
Reggaeton may have originated in Panama and techno in Detroit, but today, they are both fully naturalised in Colombia, where
an entire generation has adopted them as their favourite party music. Unsurprisingly, young artists are taking a liberating and innovative approach to the rules of the genres, lovingly tearing them down to build something new.
Anto <3 (pronounced “Anto Pico Tres”) is currently one of the most buzzworthy newcomers to Bogotá’s club scene. She grew up with a father who produced techno and alternative cumbia, and an aunt who organised an electronic music festival. Rumour has it that Antonia Broderick –her real name – was born on the same day that Daddy Yankee’s classic Gasolina was released.
Be that as it may, in 2022 she released her debut single Regañada, which immediately set a new tone in the Colombian underground. Anto sang coolly, mumbled and rapped in turns. Reggaeton met trap, LatinTek and influences from the golden age of techno on tracks like MC Dinero and Deja Vu. She began performing at clandestine clubs and rave parties in Bogota, and soon gained a loyal fanbase. The following year, the EP Enkryptada was released, and Anto <3 was signed to Miami-based label 5020, home to Latin greats like Nathy Peluso and Christina Aguilera.
Saturday 31 May, Skeppet
A reckless carriage is speeding towards you! All revving bass synths, galloping afrobeats, rollicking highlife guitars and ricocheting bleeps, this is a Mad Max- esque vehicle at all times enveloped in a cloud of verbal sparks and rhyming shrapnel – sharp and lethal, just as their progenitor’s name suggests. While at times it seems the punishing pace falters or pauses, do not be fooled: this is just Aunty Rayzor taking pleasure in the rampage’s finer moments – whether playing a glitchy start-and-stop game in Stuttrap or revelling in the syllables of Nina. Rapped, sung and bulldozed ahead in a mixture of English and Yoruba, this is truly a Viral Wreckage And while this is the name of Aunty Rayzor’s first full-length record, she is a veteran of the scene. Penning her first songs at age nine, Bisola Olugbenga subsequently came up through the ferocious rap battle scene of her native Lagos, where she earned her artist name. In 2020 she dug her long nails into the crisis of the moment and released Kuku Corona (Corona Virus), which became Nigeria’s pandemic anthem and her big breakout single. Since then, she has conquered Nyege Nyege Festival, sold out stadiums in her home country, and toured Europe.
Musically ambitious and hybrid, while she sometimes nods to Western trends such as trap or garage, Aunty Rayzor emphasises that Nigerian rap is fiercely indigenous and preoccupied with originality. With her neon braided hair extensions and agitating stage persona, her own name for what she’s doing is “punk”. On a long list of collaborators we recognise Clandestino favourites such as producer Debmaster, chanteur KABEAUSHÉ and DJ Scotch Rolex. She herself visited us in 2022 but now it’s time to welcome Aunty Rayzor back. Prepare to be run over!
Saturday 31 May, Skeppet
While this group is from the Congo, band leader Jupiter Bokondji’s career began in East Berlin in the 1970s, where he lived as the son of a Congolese diplomat. While on day trips to the other side of the Berlin Wall, he picked up music by American artists such as James Brown and the Jackson Five, and was inspired to start his first band, Die Neger.
At seventeen, he returned to Kinshasa, where he immersed himself in myriads of traditional rhythms and styles until this rich musical undergrowth merged with the music he had come to love in more northern climes.
Determined to get the world moving to this new electronic universal funk, he started Jupiter & Okwess. However, several years and band configurations would pass before their first album Hotel Univers was released in 2013. By then, the group was already in high demand on international stages thanks to their appearance in the film Jupiter’s Dance, which captured their unique blend of soukous, rumba, ndombolo with funk and rock. Damon Albarn was so enamoured that he recruited Jupiter & Okwess both for the Africa Express project and to support his own band Blur. Jupiter’s lyrics – often about standing tall despite his own and his country’s many traumas – are fiercely delivered in Lingala, English, French and German. And on the follow-ups Kin Sonic and Na Kozonga, Jupter & Okwess expanded their sound world with hip hop and Latin rhythms as well as several international guest stars. 2025 will see the release of the album Ekoya, a battle cry for equality and against post-colonial plundering of natural resources in both Brazil and the Congo. And listening to the teaser Les Bons Comptes one discovers how Jupiter & Okwess con -
tinue to deliver their political activism with frenetic drums, funky bass, dubby echoes and a thoroughly euphoric rhythm party.
Sunday 1 June, Skeppet
Almost a decade and a half has passed since Etsegenet Mekonnen packed her bags and left the Addis Ababa of her childhood for Los Angeles. Thanks to a scholarship, she had the opportunity to study music in the Californian metropolis, and the following years would be filled with concerts, recordings and thousands of hours of practice on her main instrument, the guitar. After trying out many expressions and releasing two albums under her own name, her gaze slowly turned back in the direction of Ethiopia and the millennia-old tonal treasures she had long dreamed of immersing herself in.
Sunday 1 June, Skeppet Pressing play on a Shabaka solo record is to enter a magical fairytale forest. Surrounded by lush rounded shapes, his flute tentatively leads the way through hidden paths, where strange insects flutter past and dustings of tinkling harp
just on the other side of where traditions grow wild and unruly. For the last couple of decades, Shabaka Hutchings has been a driving force in the London jazz universe, with his blistering saxophone work forming the spine of celebrated constellations such as Sons of Kemet, the Comet Is Coming and Shabaka & the Ancestors. But then, in 2023, he announced he would take an indefinite break from the horn that has made him famous. The music, however, did not stop flowing. Instead he picked up his first instrument, the clarinet, as well as various flutes, such as the Japanese shakuhachi, and started his eponymous solo output. Whereas his past band work pushed away from jazz in directions of funk, rock, dance music and soca, his new album Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace works in the tradition of Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Yusef Lateef. Though, with his eclecticism and collaborative spirit intact, Shabaka invites you to a wondrous woodland beyond both history and present.
Sunday 1 June, Skeppet Nadah El Shazly is a composer, singer and multiinstrumentalist from Cairo, currently living in Montreal. She began her career alternating between classical piano and punk, but soon moved into electronic music. Finally, she landed in an innovative hybrid of all the styles, plus avant-garde jazz and Arabic music. That peculiar mix
