Clandestino Festival 4–7 July 2024 & Beyond

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suM i c a dventuresbeyond borders

Music adventures beyond borders

Clandestino Festival is a haven for adventurous music beyond borders.

Everyone who knows, who has experience and memories of previous festival editions, understands that we move beyond boundaries that divide music into genres. And we move beyond boundaries of what territory can be interesting to focus on when searching for new artists. As well as we move beyond borders that divide creative forces in artistic disciplines.

The music at our events is not shaped into indivisible building blocks. The music does not necessarily belong to one genre or another. It is adventurous, in the sense it takes us to places we have never visited before.

We believe there is something glittering beyond borders and that music can show us new ways of seeing things.

We do not try to cross borders, bridge or erase differences. Rather, we look for the hidden gaps between dimensions, which create freedom, not only for all invited artists, but for humanity as such.

We don’t believe in binary instincts, in the kind of rhetoric that amounts to a politics of fear and ends up in persecution, violence and war.

Clandestino Festival is a place where it is possible to think in new ways when the misery of our world looms like an apocalyptic voice of doom.

That explains why we have the bravest visitors. The least easily frightened. Those who believe in change. In the idea that another world is possible.

The 22nd edition of Clandestino Festival takes place in Gothenburg Film Studios with the exception of the inauguration at Kulturhuset Bergsjön and Sunday’s trip to Tossene church in Sotenäs.

In addition to the four-day festival program 4–7 July, we arrange a series of concerts in collaboration with, among others, Nefertiti, Pustervik, SkeppetGBG, Slaktkyrkan (Stockholm) and Malmö Sommarscen.

This tabloid contains info on spring and summer programs. For lates updates check www.clandestinofestival.org.

clandestino festival 4–7 july 2024

Amadou & Mariam

Legends of Bamako

Thursday 4 July Filmstudion

Clandestino welcomes one of the most successful African groups of all time! Of all the artists coming out of Mali, precious few have exceeded this duo in the way they fuse rock, pop, blues and electronics with their native music traditions. It all began in Bamako Institute for the Young Blind in the mid 70s. Mariam Doumbia had lost her sight as a five-year-old, and was now a dance tutor at the institute. There she met Amadou Bagayoko, a young guitarist who had just begun playing with Salif Keita. In Amadou’s case, his sight had gradually deteriorated until becoming completely blind as a teenager. Upon hearing the singing voice of Mariam, he immediately suggested they form a partnership.

Five years down the line, the pair had both gotten married and started playing local concerts. But the music industry in Mali was rudimentary, and it wasn’t until the mid-90s that Amadou & Mariam scored an international record deal. After a few successful albums they teamed up with Manu Chao, who produced Dimanche à Bamako – the record that would propel them into global superstardom. Suddenly they were on a neverending world tour, while collaborating with names such as Damon Albarn, Flea and David Gilmour. They also toured with Coldplay, and performed when Barack Obama received his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

After more than four decades together Amadou & Mariam are still enthusiastically seeking out new influences. On their latest EP Mon Amour Mon Cheri they offer up a buffet of desert blues, string-laden love songs, acoustic afro-country, dreamy synth arpeggios and melodies dripping with melancholia.

Khorshid Dadbeh

Virtuoso of the long-necked lutes

Thursday 4 July Kulturhuset Bergsjön

As a seven-year-old in her native Iran, Khorshid Dadbeh started playing the string instrument setar together with her father. This eventually led to her embarking on a career as a professional musician at the age of sixteen, joining international tours to Europe and North Africa.

In parallel she studied at the Tehran Conservatory of Music, specialising in two other longnecked lutes besides the setar: tar – a relatively young instrument – and tanbour, which is associated with ancient sufi music and has a history stretching back thousands of years. The tanbour is sometimes said to be the origin of both the Indian sitar, the Greek bouzouki and the Spanish guitar.

Later Khorshid Dadbeh continued her studies in the Netherlands, where she added the Turkish string instrument bağlama to her tool box. Together with her brother Sepand Dadbeh she leads the music collective Jansouz, incorporating several different constellations that let her pursue her many musical visions. But as the opening act of Clandestino Festival 2024 she will perform solo.

La Sonora Mazurén

New tropicalia eldorado

Thursday 4 July Filmstudion

Tropicalia: an umbrella term for a number of experimental artistic approaches that popped up in Brazil in the 1960s, mashing up endemic culture with avant-gardism and rock’n’roll. In recent years, this playful mixing of expressions has inspired artists in many parts of the world. Not least in Colombia, where groups like Ondatropica, Los Pirañas and Meridian Brothers are cross pollinating their own traditional cumbia with psychedelic rock, metal and electronica. Or, for that sake, with latin jazz, as in the case of La Sonora Mazurén.

This seven-piece clatter along in a mad tempo, propulsed by congas and timbales. Guitars and bass provide a steady backing while Rhodes piano, organ and accordion take turns contributing centre-stage performances. Occasionally some vocals are added by the members, among them Diana Sanmiguel, known from the band La Perla. But mostly this is instrumental, sunny dance music.

La Sonora Mazurén’s debut album Bailando con Extraños serves up a retro-futurist sound that might sound familiar to a connoisseur of 21st century Colombian music. The key is the producer Eblis Álvarez, central figure of Bogotá’s neotropicalia scene and several constellations, including the already mentioned Meridian Brothers.

Damsel Elysium

Tales of a tree whisperer

Thursday 4 July Filmstudion

Having been named “London’s most stylish experimental sound artist” by Vogue, and being a frequent collaborator of FKA Twigs’s, Damsel Elysium finds themself at the cutting edge of fashion and experimental music. But behind the glamour and the playfulness, a persistent struggle for emancipation and decolonisation can be discerned.

As a young student, Damsel Elsyium was disappointed to encounter a music business built on stagnant hierarchies of power and aesthetics. From this experience sprang the podcast What Does Decolonisation in Music Look Like, where

musicians and artists discuss education, money and power in the business.

In their phenomenal composition Shoreline, Damsel Elysium uses so-called extended playing techniques, attacking the double bass from every flank: making it moan, scream, clang and roar like a Formula One car.

Elsewhere Damsel Elysium explores fragility, with viola melodies as fleeting as the song of a skylark. With field recordings expanding the soundscapes, this avant-gardist is continuously searching for new ways to communicate and connect with their surroundings and with nature. The album Whispers from Ancient Vessels is a collection of compositions that have grown out of dialogues with beings such as trees, the sea and the inner self.

Sahra Halgan

The voice of freedom

Thursday 4 July Filmstudion

When the Somali civil war broke out, Sahra Halgan was a teenager with dreams of being a singer. She soon found herself working as a singing nurse for the rebels fighting for Somaliland’s liberation. She also started Hiddo Dhawr, Somaliland’s first music venue, which would become a meeting place and cultural centre after the fall of the dictatorship.

In 1992, she arrived in Lyon, France as a political refugee, working in a café and performing with the Sahra Halgan Trio, a group she started together with other refugees.

Today, she is back in Somaliland. For many in the region, her unique voice with its powerful vibrato is synonymous with the freedom struggle. But instead of resting on her laurels, Sahra Halgan wants to use her music to spread the word about Somaliland—a self-proclaimed state not recognized internationally.

On her new album, named Hiddo Dhawr after the legendary venue, her group creates a global Somaliland music with seriously funky drums and hypnotic guitar. With both traditional songs and original compositions, Sahra Halgan aims to set both dance floor and inner worlds in motion.

Gemma Hansson Carbone

Die like a country

Thursday 4 July Filmstudion

A trans-disciplinary project curated by internationally awarded artist Gemma Hansson Carbone. The work, which mixes different practices and sciences (walking, historiography, architecture, archeology, performance, anthropology, video art and poetry), is based on the homonymous text written by the Greek author Dimitris Dimitriadis, and the figure of the Angelus Novus described by Walter Benjamin in his 1940 essay. Since its premiere in 2023, this unique and site-specific performance was restaged in nine countries.

Die Like a Country is a punk-liturgical experiment designed to evoke the advent of the Angel of History. History is immobile, it can’t go forward nor backward, and it tells us what we have been through and where we will go. What we are.

But what is the Angel of History? Why is it here? And what prophecy does it bring?

A sci-fi metaphor, with archaic elements, of a society that has lost itself, and died inside. The narrator is a young woman with an unidentifiable accent, who describes the last ruthless events of her country. She details them with the meticulous scientificity of someone observing the unfolding of history from the outside, like a disembodied voice of a lost collective memory, or an outcast oracle from the future.

Thursday 4 July

La Sonora Mazurén

In collaboration with Clandestino Festival, Hansson Carbone will present a site specific edition of the performance, a homage to unmoving time, inspired by Jannis Kounellis and featuring the Italian video-artist Francesco Tedde.

Slauson Malone 1

Radioactive love affair

Friday 5 July Filmstudion

Atom bombs and nuclear power are recurring motifs in the music of Slauson Malone 1. In his song Half-Life he describes a radioactive love affair that slowly disintegrates, but keeps giving off radiation for years. Submission as a position of power is another theme. Like giving oneself up completely to a piece of music, or letting go of control as a composer and allowing a logarithm to decide the notes played, like in Fission For Drums, Piano and Voice

Jasper Marsalis – the man behind the moniker – is a multi-instrumentalist and singer who moves back and forth between performance art and pop music. His third album Excelsior was five years in the making, and brims with inspiration. It is a wild interplanetary ride with no safety belt.

We traverse a soundscape of millions of shimmering fragments. A collage of distorted voices, acoustic guitars and wobbly synthesizers. It is a fool’s errand to try and pigeonhole Slauson Malone 1. At times there are echoes of psychedelic funk in the style of Ariel Pink or the more adventurous tracks on Frank Ocean’s Blonde. But turn another corner and there’s a harpsichord plopped into a techno rave; beyond that some poetry whispered over a cello duet; followed by romantic chamber music on piano and guitar, morphed abruptly into a thumping rock song.

Selvhenter

FlammerDanceBand

, Fr i day 5 July

Mesmerizing crossroads of jazz

Friday 5 July Filmstudion

A smattering of intricate polyrhythms from two insanely locked-in percussionists. A saxophone that leaps from a whisper to a roar. An amplified trombone throbbing like a subsonic synthesizer. The Danish band Selvhenter construct their own musical universe at the crossroads of free jazz, noise music and minimalist krautrock.

The quartet consists of Anja Jacobsen and Jaleh Negari on drums, Maria Bertel on trombone and Sonja LaBianca on saxophone. It’s been nine years since their last full length Motion of Large Bodies, but anyone who’s kept an eye on Copenhagen’s underground scene will know that these four have kept busy within projects such as Ymers Pizza, Gud Er Kvinde and Valby Vokalgruppe. They also have their own record company and artist collective Eget Vaerelse (A room of one’s own).

Now though, they are back with the new album Mesmerizer. Still prowling the periphery of jazz, the new Selvhenter offers up an even wider range of dynamics. As listeners we are pulled by an inexorable, accelerating force towards a reverberating abyss. Even as it dawns on us that we are about to be swallowed whole, we can’t but be swept along by the chugging groove that swirls towards this aural Charybdis.

Flammer Dance Band

Dedication to partyfication

Friday 5 July Filmstudion

A Norwegian dance blowout in the jungle? Brødrene Dal meet Fela Kuti? Flammer Dance Band are difficult to categorise – what we do know is

that they are a seven-headed psychedelic party machine with vibes of 70s funk and afrobeat, and that they recently toured across Europe as the backing band for Ghanaian legend Rob.

On their own they offer up an unrelenting party on the album Dedikasjon Til Inspirasjon Tracks like Dansesko and Uansett Underlag build upon simple riffs repeated ad infinitum over which vocalist Torb Roach emits single words or utterances in a rhythmic scat/rap while producing sci-fi sound effects on his synth. On a dubby electric piano Mikkel Berggrav engages in dialogue with the percussive guitar pickings of Jelly Jel, while the pulse of this afrobeating heart is laid down by Sifu Pablos on congas and timbales, Olve Gravklev on drums and Mikkel Bjørneboe on bass. On top of all this Bror Havnes squeaks and bellows out melodic fragments through a smoky saxophone, marshalling us into a transcendental groove beyond time and space. Simultaneously heavy and light, cosmic and earthy.

Titi Bakorta

A bioluminescent dream

Friday 5 July Filmstudion

Titi Bakorta was on his way to Uganda when life suddenly took a turn. Halfway across the Congo river, he fell off the boat! For a musician who had never learnt to swim, the strong currents could have easily meant the end of his story, but luckily a good samaritan saved his life and brought him along to the nearest town. He got to know a local singer, Dancer Papalas, with whom he teamed up and toured with in Tanzania, South Sudan and Dubai.

Titi finally arrived in Kampala, Uganda, where he began work on his debut album for the record label Nyege Nyege Tapes. Molende developed as a search for Titi Bakorta’s own dream image of Congolese folk and pop music. Familiar sounds of soukous and highlife are encountered hovering in a bioluminescent jungle of electronics, synths and hooting owls – or was that a Brazilian cuíca drum just then?

The music takes us further up the river, towards a goal that isn’t quite there yet: the sound of the future. Maybe it can be found in this eccentric patchwork of styles, transgressing all barriers, even languages – Titi Bakorta switches between French, English and Lingala without hesitation. In the title track his voice transforms from a soul croon to growling breathy noises, while an autotuned choir repeats: “Hustling, every day hustling”.

Daniel Gilbert

Rekviem for a dreamer

Friday 5 July Filmstudion

Daniel Gilbert is something of a Zelig in the music history of Gothenburg. He was one of the founding members of legendary indie rock band Broder Daniel. After that he spent years as the right hand of local superstar Håkan Hellström, featured also in his homage Hurricane Gilbert. He has played with Ebbot Lundberg, and for Swedish TV viewers he is familiar as one of the front men of Augustifamiljen – house band of a popular quiz show. So even though he might not always seek out the spotlight, Sonic Magazine is correct in calling this guitarist and songwriter an “institution in Sweden’s music scene”.

Currently Gilbert is receiving wide acclaim for his solo album Rekviem – an unusual experiment born out of a correspondence project during the pandemic. Sound files were dispatched to a variety of his musician friends, with little central direction, resulting in a sprawling, untamed collection of songs. A few musical notes recur and tie this

bouquet together: dulcet saxophone licks, jazzand high life-scented guitar lines, and mood setting steel guitar.

But the overarching theme of the twelve songs on Rekviem is Gilbert’s autobiographical sketches, starting in childhood and leading right up to his current life. In between there are scenes of youthful folly and romance in Den unge Baader, as well as a traumatic near death experience in Lungkollaps på Östra. Like the music, these lyrics have grown out of unfiltered real-time improvisations – inspired snapshots, spoken or sung in raspy English or Swedish.

C.FRIM

Curated by Gimme Signal

Friday 5 July Filmstudion

Resistance is futile when the DJ-sets of this young star roll over the audience. The beat never slows down or drops out, as she seamlessly merges streams of afrobeat, dancehall, grime, gqom and amapiano into a drum-driven roar, interspersed with voices of political agitators and African chants. While distinctly global and diasporic in character, occasionally a well known dance floor anthem rears its head in the whirlpools, only to be immediately sucked down into the cultural hybrid mix that is C.FRIM’s signature.

Charlotte Frimpong was born in Australia with Ghanaian-Filipina heritage. As soon as she was old enough to hit the clubs she found herself standing as close to the DJ decks as possible, carefully observing while raving. Through this and online tutorials she taught herself the craft of disc spinning. After a breakout Boiler Room gig in late 2022 her career has skyrocketed, and for the past year and a bit she has been playing all over Australia and Europe.

Still entrenched in the queer POC scene in Melbourne her work is just as much about building communities for the future as it is about exploring her own roots through music. And making people dance until they are drenched in sweat, of course.

The Zawose Queens

Sonic alchemists of the Gogo Saturday 6 July Filmstudion

Fiery rhythms, passed on generation after generation, played on rattling Illimba thumb pianos. Dry tones from the bowed string instrument chizeze. And then there’s the fat beats of ngoma drums, roaring under synth sounds and woody bass tones.

Combining traditional instruments with electronic beats has become a fertile recipe for many an East African artist, but rarely is it done with the panache and natural melding that The Zawose Queens bring to the table.

Across all this lay the vocals of family duo Pendo and Leah Zawose. In perfect harmony they traduce the traditional singing style of the Gogo people, stemming from their home in the Dodoma region, Tanzania. In doing so they carry on the legacy of their father/grandfather Dr Hukwe Zawose, the most prominent figure of this genre.

Maisha – the debut album of the Zawose Queens is out now on Peter Gabriel’s label Real World, and it was produced by Oli Barton-Wood and Tom Excell, the former who has previously worked with Nilüfer Yanya and the latter whom is also known for his work with Nubiyan Twist and Onipa. Both of these sonic alchemists are also on stage as the group makes its first ever visit to Sweden for the Clandestino Festival.

Kabeaushé

, Saturday 6 July

Sami Galbi

Rainbow-coloured raï

Saturday 6 July Filmstudion

Serpentine synth riffs and hard-hitting beats; Sami Galbi draws his inspiration from the music of parties and weddings he experienced as a child in Morocco, transcribing it into sultry bangers for global dance floors. In his studio he is a jack of all trades: handling production, beat programming, singing and playing all by himself. The same goes for the stage, where he appears as a one-man band, dexterously switching between guitars and keyboards.

Sami Galbi resides in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he is currently completing his eagerly awaited debut album. His reputation as a performer has raised high expectations. So far he has only released one track officially: the single Dakchi Hani comes accompanied by a dance video in gymnastic environments, where viewers meet a singer unafraid of poking fun at himself.

Musically this young artist remains true to his roots while creatively liberated, as he is upgrading North African dance music into shimmering neon electro chaâbi and rainbow-coloured raï.

WaqWaq Kingdom

Neon-coloured euphoria

Saturday 6 July Filmstudion

The opening salvo of WaqWaq Kingdom’s latest album is a sped-up, high-pitched cartoon voice over a basic four-to-the-floor beat. But no, this is not some gimmicky 90s children’s record. This is something far stranger, and far more enjoyable! Everything here happens at high speed: colour ful explosions of alien sounds, all while the beat gallops on. At times, echoes of the creators’ Japanese origins fly by, in the form of a Noh-like vocal exclamation or a synthetic Koto melody. But just as often African polyrhythms are set to some Nintendo-like blips with a volley of Jamaican dancehall spattered across.

This kind of pyrotechnics is what you get when two hyper-creative mavericks fuse. Shigeru Ishihara has been active for decades as gameboy-breakcore and gabba innovator DJ Scotch Egg, while Kiki Hitomi has previously played with King Midas Sound and dubstep outfit Dokkebi Q.

Song titles like Religion Surfer and Hashtag Smile make it obvious that this is irreverent music full of humour. But there is method to the madness and the end goal of euphoria is reached via Shinto mythology. The live version of WaqWaq Kingdom has been described as “an intense time warp experience that re-connect their animistic roots with the future of urban neon colours”.

Kabeaushé

Hectic eclectic eccentric

Saturday 6 July Filmstudion

Kabochi Gitau grew up in Nairobi with a blend of Michael Jackson and his mum’s gospel music soundtracking his early years. Curiosity drew him to exploring hip hop bootlegs, and when a friend played him Kanye West and Childish Gambino he had something of a eureka moment.

Fast forward a couple of years and we find Kabochi as an artist in residence at the underground label Nyege Nyege in neighbouring Uganda. Label boss Derek Debru became a mentor figure for the young Kenyan, and not only helped him develop a whole new sound, but also to create his stage persona Kabeaushé –complete with a blonde wig and stage costumes combining bling with vintage clothing.

SamiGalbi , Saturday6July

WaqWaq Kingdom, Saturday6July

His debut album The Coming of Gaze is a hectic, eclectic record, equal parts funky soul and heavy electronic hip hop. But the cheekily titled follow-up Hold On to Deer Life There’s a Blcak Boy Behind You presents an artist completely unleashed and immersed in experimental mashups of beats and genres. This is music full of confidence, comfortable in its own eccentricity. Rap folds into Prince-like falsetto yelps while chopped up vocal samples dance over latin rhythms. The soundscape is further extrapolated with screaming electric guitars, inappropriate groans, and the sound of laser guns.

Scratchclart

Curated by Gimme Signal

Saturday 6 July Filmstudion

Something about the intensity of the music by electronic producer Leon Smart seems to defy containment. Like the beats he conjures up: his record releases smatter, skip and change tack, numbering in the dozens in recent years. As further evidence of his creative restlessness stands the plethora of monikers he has used: DJ Scratcha, DVA [Hi; Emotions], Scratcha, Scratcha DVA, Scratchclart…

It was as a radio DJ that Scratcha first reached a wider audience. Since 1997 he has been a mainstay on London’s underground stations, championing UK dance music trends such as jungle, garage, grime and house.

From producing artists like Wiley, as well as his own influential grime singles, he went on to release his debut album Pretty Ugly on Hyperdub in 2012, taking UK funky as a starting point but heading out into knottier, more abstract territory.

When the gqom scene exploded in Durban, South Africa, it immediately caught Scratcha’s attention, reminding him of the rise of grime in London. So in recent years, he has pursued the fusing of British and South African club music. With cavernous productions and drumbeats that land like hammer blows in your ribcage, this is music for tripping over your feet on a heaving dance floor.

Bitoi

Bass Is The Original Instrument

Friday 5 July Vägs Ände

Saturday 6 July Filmstudion

Sunday 7 july Tossene church

Cassius Lambert is a Swedish-Ethiopian bassist with two visionary solo albums on his CV. In his hands, the bass guitar turns into a magic box full of strange and other-worldly creatures. The tunes are rooted in funk and fusion jazz as well as contemporary classical minimalism, but transcend into a wild and unique breed of music – a style which Lambert has dubbed “miximalism”.

BITOI stands for Bass Is The Original Instrument

In this project we find Lambert collaborating with three singers, Lise Kroner, Anja Tietze Lahrmann and Alexandra Shabo. Their voices dance around percussive bass notes, sometimes like a threepart renaissance canon, and sometimes with timbres that seem to stem from choral traditions of the Balkans. Metallic noise crescendos build up and push the pieces from harmony towards the edge of dissonance.

At the time of writing, this Malmö-based quartet has only released four tracks, but they have already garnered international attention and received standing ovations at a packed Le Guess Who festival in the Netherlands.

Brìghde Chaimbeul

Dreams of drones

Sunday 7 July Tossene church

With dreamy double-note drones and a tonal language all of her own, Brìghde Chaimbeul challenges everything you thought you knew about Scottish bagpipe music.

Growing up on the Isle of Skye, in a home where Gaelic was both spoken and sung, Brìghde became fascinated by the Scottish smallpipe around the age of seven. Her big inspiration was Rona Lightfoot – one of the first female bagpipe players to break through in Scotland. Later she studied the instrument in Edinburgh and Bulgaria, and over time traditions from both southeastern Europe and Scandinavia have become part of Brìghde Chaimbeul’s own compositions.

Her debut album The Reeling was recorded in a church in the Scottish Highlands, with guest appearances by Irish folk group Lankum and childhood idol Rona Lightfoot, among others. Soon she found herself performing in venues where bagpipes had rarely been heard. At just twenty years of age Brìghde Chaimbeul received prizes and awards from the BBC, and was invited to perform for world leaders at the opening of the COP 26 conference in Glasgow.

On her new release on Glitterbeat, Carry Them With Us, Brìghde Chaimbeul injects yet another dose of experimentalism into the bloodstream of Scottish folk music, including collaborations with the saxophonist Colin Stetson. Notes swirl around dancelike, as in the track Banish the Giant of Doubt and Despair, while immense landscapes are evoked by the heavy chords of album opener Pililiù (The Call of the Redshank)

José González

An endless curiousity Sunday 7 July Tossene church

“Where do we come from?” José González asks in the opening track of his latest album Local Valley, and goes on to question the religious answer that man is created by God. It is a theme that has become prominent in the work of this Gothenburg-based star: the tension between religion and secular humanism. Touching on unity and community, or the tug of war between development and tradition, these are themes he also visits in the 2023 documentary A Tiger in Paradise

José Gonzàlez’s journey is a remarkable success story. One day he was a graduate student recording acoustic guitar tracks in his Landala flat – the next, music industry bigwigs at SXSW in Austin were queuing around the block to get a glimpse of the unknown Swede’s showcase. Since then, his soft voice and intricate plucking on the nylon strings have won the hearts of listeners around the world. He has performed to packed houses at the Sydney Opera House, the Beacon Theater in New York, the Royal Albert Hall in London, and many other top venues.

At the same time, the 2024 edition of José Gonzàlez is not radically different from that PhD student in Landala, at least not musically. The songs are detailed and elaborate. On Local Valley, we hear him singing in both Swedish and Spanish for the first time, as well as English. But otherwise it is an organic continuation, or shall we say deepening, of the José that many of us have come to know. Low-key and introspective, yet endlessly curious about the universe and the origins of this world.

BrìghdeChaimbeul,sunday7july

Scratchclart,

& beyond spring 2024

Jembaa Groove

Afrobeat soulution

Saturday 13 April Nefertiti

They may be based in Berlin, but Jemba Groove remain deeply rooted in West African musical soil. The name of the group is from the Akan language and can be translated as “gathering place”, reflected in their music as a meeting ground for cultures and styles.

The front man Issiaka “Issa” Sanogo, on sax and vocals, leads the seven-piece through a unique landscape made up of afrobeat and highlife, adorned with infusions of jazz, funk and soul. Their brand new album Ye Ankasa | We Ourselves is bursting with aural pleasures coupled with a message of unity, explored through themes of identity and community.

In recent years, Jembaa Groove have established themselves as an international touring act, playing concerts on many a renowned stage. Members of the group have also played with legends such as Tony Allen, Ebo Taylor, Pat Thomas and Orlando Julius. But even though this combined apprenticeship certainly shows, Jemba Groove move well beyond imitation of their teachers.

Lonnie Holley

Cosmic gospel

Thursday 2 May Pustervik

Describing Lonnie Holley’s path to recognition as crooked and full of hardship is to make an understatement. He was born the seventh of 27 siblings in Alabama during an era of segregation laws and systemic racism. Soon, he was adopted by a woman who eventually traded him for a pint of whisky. He worked with everything from digging tombs to picking cotton, and was once hit by a car and declared dead. He had a child at the age of 15, and he served time in a juvenile detention centre.

In the 70’s, he took his first steps in what would prove to be an extensive visual art career, including exhibitions at the Met and the Smithsonian. Drawings, paintings and sculptures made of plastic flowers, a xerox machine and old shoes –discarded items telling stories from the backyard of the American Dream.

The same theme recurs in his career as a musician, which started when Lonnie Holley was 62. His improvised singing and spoken word practice has kinship with Gil Scott Heron and Tom Waits, while his music evolves in layers from continuous experimentation: industrial trombone blues meet dream pianos à la Harold Budd. His latest album Oh Me Oh My expands into new worlds, accompanied by guests such as Moor Mother, Michael Stipe and Justin Vernon from Bon Iver. Like a broken angel, his unmistakable voice soars in a cosmic gospel for the future.

Etran de L’Aïr

Nigerien desert punk

Tuesday 21 May Slaktkyrkan

Saturday 25 May Nefertiti

With repetitive rhythms and serpentine guitars, desert blues has become a beloved phenomenon across the world. But compared to superstars like Tinariwen and Ali Farka Touré, Etran de L’Aïr come across as a rowdy party gang. According to themselves, this family collective is a “wedding band for people with no money”. In their take on the genre, two, sometimes three, guitarists seem to want to prove their soloing chops simultaneously. The drums clatter along like some mad machine while the vocals threaten to blow both fuses and speakers.

These riotous vibes are well captured on their latest album Agadez; recorded live and named after their hometown. There, in the heart of the Aïr region of Niger, the band was formed in 1995. Equipped with a sole acoustic guitar and a calabash upon which they kept rhythm with a sandal, the group would play weddings and other events in their early days. They soon acquired electric guitars and drums, and by today there is hardly a block in that town that hasn’t rocked and reverberated with the desert punk of Etran de L’Aïr. The same applies to a selection of venues in other cosmopolitan cities around the world that have experienced the band’s unique brand of desert punk.

Lonnie Holley

Jembaa Groove,Saturd

Florence Adooni & Vumbi Dekula

Frafra euphoria meets Congo guitar

FLORENCE ADOONI

You may have seen her on stage with Alogte Oho’s Sounds of Joy? Or in collaborations with Guy One or with Jimi Tenor? Before performing under her own name, Florence Adooni inspired awe as a vital part of Ghana’s frafra gospel scene. And once her debut single was out, it had West African dance floors in a frenzy. The fever soon spread to discerning European rump shakers, and before long she was signed to the German label Philophon.

Frafra gospel is 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 settle within the confines of just one style. In songs like Mam Pe’ela Su’ure, she expands the genre’s melodic vocabulary, while bringing the rhythm to a boil.

Backed by a mega-soulful seven-piece band, she creates a rich sound, flavoured by highlife and afrobeat. Blazing guitar melodies compete with brass attacks over tightly woven percussion.

VUMBI DEKULA

Kahanga “Vumbi” Dekula grew up in eastern Congo Kinshasa. Inspired by Docteur Nico and other soukous pioneers, he learned to fingerpick intricate figures on the guitar, and eventually moved to Tanzania where his career took off with Orchestra Maquis. More than thirty years ago, Vumbi arrived in Stockholm, where he started performing with Ahmadu Jah & the Highlife Orchestra, and eventually founded his own group, the Dekula Band. Since many years, Stockholm audiences have been able to enjoy the group’s relaxed virtuoso guitar arpeggios and rolling rhythms at Lilla Wien, a venue housed inside the Södra station.

Some of Vumbi’s solo recordings are collec ted on the album Congo Guitar, published by Sing a Song Fighter, the label run by Karl Jonas Winqvist (Wau Wau Collectif). In songs like Zanzibar, Kinshasa & Vällingby, the listener is treated to a brilliant instrumental dream soukous, where layers of guitars sing as if in a kind of polyphonic call-and-response choir.

Friday 31 May SkeppetGbg VumbiDekula, Friday 31 M ay

Bab L’Bluz

Gnawa-blues explosion

Saturday 8 June Nefertiti

Gnawa is the name of an ancient Sufi trance music. As a teenager, Yousra Mansour, the frontwoman of Bab L’Bluz, was fascinated by these hour-long rhythmic improvisations. She travelled around Morocco to discover how a new generation of musicians was opening up this style to new expressions.

Some years later she met Brice Battin, a French musician who had long been experimenting with a polyrhythmic concoction of jazz and gnawa music. Together they learnt to play the guembri and the awicha – two traditional types of lute –and explored how these instruments could be used in the manner of a bass and lead guitar in a rock band. This became the backbone of their debut album Nayda

The title means “awakening” and points to an artistic and social emancipation movement among young Moroccans. The lyrics, variously in Darija, Sudanese and English, deal with everything from transcendental love to frustration over injustices. The album won a Songlines Award 2021. Since its inception, Bab L’Bluz has grown to a quartet which, in addition to traditional lutes and qraqeb castanets, mixes in flutes and Indian tabla drums to create funky, psychedelic gnawa blues for the 21st century. Album number two will be released in 2024, and a teaser is already available in the form of the single AmmA, a rager track and battle cry against sexism and patriarchal structures.

SATURDAY 13 APRIL

THURSDAY 2 MAY

TUESDAY 21 MAY

SATURDAY 25 MAY

FRIDAY 31 MAY

SATURDAY 8 JUNE

NEFERTITI

PUSTERVIK

SLAKTKYRKAN (STOCKHOLM)

NEFERTITI

SKEPPETGBG

NEFERTITI

Jembaa Groove [Berlin]

Lonnie Holley [Birmingham, Alabama]

Etran de L’Aïr [Agadez]

Etran de L’Aïr [Agadez]

Florence Adooni [Kumasi]

Vumbi Dekula [Stockholm]

Bab L’Bluz [Marrakech]

CLANDESTINO FESTIVAL 4–7 JULY 2024

THURSDAY 4 JULY

KULTURHUSET BERGSJÖN

FILMSTUDION

FRIDAY 5 JULY

VÄGS ÄNDE (LARV)

FILMSTUDION

SATURDAY 6 JULY

FILMSTUDION

SUNDAY 7 JULY

TOSSENE CHURCH

Khorshid Dadbeh [Rotterdam]

Amadou & Mariam [Bamako]

Die Like a Country [Int ’l]

Damsel Elysium [London]

La Sonora Mazurén [Bogotá]

Sahra Halgan [Hargeisa]

Awive Apleni [Capetown]

Bitoi [Malmö]

Daniel Gilbert [Göteborg]

Titi Bakorta [Kinshasa]

Selvhenter [Copenhagen]

Slauson Malone 1 [Los Angeles]

Flammer Dance Band [Oslo]

Gimme Signal: C.Frim [Melbourne]

Bitoi [Malmö]

The Zawose Queens [Dodoma]

Sami Galbi [Lausanne/Casablanca]

Kabeaushé [Nairobi]

WaqWaq Kingdom [London]

Gimme Signal: Scratchclart [London]

Brìghde Chaimbeul [Isle of Skye]

Bitoi [Malmö]

José González [Göteborg]

FESTIVAL TICKETS

There are several ticket options on top of the four day festival pass (from 1095 SEK) that grants full access to all concerts during the festival 4–7 July + discounts to all events beyond the very festival. One day pass (from 395 SEK) grants full access to either 4, 5, 6 and/or 7th of July) and with weekend passes (from 695 SEK) you can enjoy all concerts during Friday and Saturday night. And there is also a club ticket (150 SEK) that gives you access to club events after midnight on Friday and/or Saturday. Further ticket information can be found online at www.clandestinofestival.org

VENUES

The 22nd edition of the Clandestino Festival takes place at the Filmstudion in Gothenburg with the exception of the opening at Kulturhuset Bergsjön and Sunday’s excursion to Tossene church in Sotenäs. In addition to the four-day festival program 4–7 July, we arrange a series of concerts in collaboration with, among others, Nefertiti, Pustervik, SkeppetGBG, Slaktkyrkan (Stockholm) and Malmö Sommarscen. With a festival pass, student prices apply to all these concerts in &Beyond unless otherwise stated.

BACKSTAGE

Clandestino Festival has been organized by the non-profit organization Clandestino Institut since 2003. The annual event is made possible with support from Västra Götalandsregionens Kulturnämnd, Statens Kulturråd, Göteborgs Stad Kulturnämnd and Sotenäs kommun. Artistic director: Aleksander Motturi. Operation manager: Sandra Saied. Graphic design: Milena Karlsson. Text editor and translation: Markus Görsch and Petter Yxell. Box office: Emilie Blomgren. Tech coordinator: Mikael Werliin. Logistics and backstage: Linda Ekberg & Raquel Abreu. Financial administration: Amanda Hägg & Johanna Berglund, Nätverkstans ekonomitjänst, Anna Hedin, Baker Tilly, EMK. Web: Jesper Lind, Nodestar. Catering: Sarah Coulibaly. Board of trustees, Clandestino Institut: Catharina Bergil, Erling Björgvinsson, Jesper Eng, Mariam Wallentin, Nathalie BödtkerLund, Stefan Jonsson, Vanessa Ansah-Pewudie.

CLANDESTINO PODCAST

Our interview series is available through major streaming services including iTunes, Spotify and Soundcloud.

PHOTO CREDITS

Amadou & Mariam: Nicolas Réméne. Khorshid Dadbeh: Carmen Reynolds. La Sonora Mazurén: N.C. Damsel Elysium: Vasilisa Skasca. Gemma Hansson Carbone: Amanda Arnborg. Sahra Halgan: Brulex (Artwork). Slauson Malone 1: Gillian Garcia. Selvhenter: Mads Fisker. Flammer Dance Band: Yakob Dahl Changezi. Titi Bakorta: Ian Nnyyanzi. Daniel Gilbert: Anton Lernstål. C.Firm: Dulce Amor. The Zawose Queens: Michael Mbwambo. Sami Galbi: Chana Batch. WaqWaq Kingdom: Marco Tinari. Kabeaushé: Edwin Maina. Scratchclart: Leon Smart. Bitoi: Tova Nyberg. Brìghde Chaimbeul: Camille Lemoine. José González: Peter Toggeth & Mikel Cee Karlsson. Jembaa Groove: Jannis Keil. Lonnie Holley: Tamir Kalifa. Etran de L’Aïr: Larry Hirshowitz. Florence Adooni: Roland Quester. Vumbi Dekula: Karl Jonas Winqvist. Bab L’Bluz: Karim Chater.