Billy Bao, Lagos Sessions (Munster, 2015)
First things first: police is a tool of oppression. The very existence of nations is the first cause of death. Where there is power, there is abuse of power. I hope 2020 is another step in the process to get rid of these murderous sycophants and the evil system they answer to.
As a white European, the racism I know is different from what happens in America. The history is different. The oppression, the exploitation, the silencing are different. Black culture is different as well, with European Blackness being more closely tethered to the African continent. But the most striking difference between Europe and America when it comes to Black-White relations is that, well, white Europeans know nothing about their Black brothers and sisters. There is no representation, no conversation.
This is where an album like Billy Bao’s Lagos Sessions comes in handy. The project of Basque experimental musician Mattin has always been capable to perfectly translate a concept into blown-out musical mindfuck. This time, similarly to what they had done with their 2012 masterpiece Buildings from Bilbao, the concept is a city—the city of Lagos. The band traveled to the Nigerian megalopolis and recorded the album with local musicians and local instruments, creating a patchwork of free noise, field recordings, Afro-jazz, reggaeton, spoken word.
The album serves like a diary of the time the band spent in Lagos, divided in four chapters, one for every side. It’s chaotic but intensely stimulating, with its bursts of noise juxtaposed to groovy, sweet, spontaneous and warm West-African rhythms and melodies—and its spoken word moments are fascinating and instructive. While the music world scrambles to offer their hypocritical faux-support to the BLM movement after exploiting Black artists and culture for decades (or centuries), this experiment creates exactly what European underground culture needs: a space for African voices.
Click here to listen to Lagos Sessions on Bandcamp.
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