The African and Celtic diasporas have moved across the world, occasionally overlapping and creating some cultural cross-pollinating. In the Real World studio, producer Simon Emmerson wove the two together for the project called Afro Celt Sound System.
In the 1990s, as traditional music was reexamined and sometimes reinvented as part of the “world music” movement, Emmerson pulled together an ensemble of musicians to create an electronic-steeped hybrid that seemed unlikely but proved popular on dancefloors around the globe.
Afro Celt Sound System’s origins began with the London-born Emmerson’s visit to Senegal to record Firin’ in Fouta, an album by the country’s rising international star Baaba Maal. Emmerson knew little about African music, having made his mark as a guitarist with the jazzy-dreamy Weekend and Working Week.
When Maal began one session with an invocation called “Daande Lenol”, Emmerson was struck by the song’s palpable spirituality and its similarity to an Irish air. Once back in England, he played the recording to others with similar reactions, which sent Emmerson thinking about creating music that would meld the disparate cultures. He pulled together an international band of musicians after attending a week-long jam session at Peter Gabriel‘s Real World Studio near Bath and created the Afro Celts’ first album, Volume One: Sound Magic. Over the years, their albums outsold all other performers on the Real World label except for Gabriel’s.
With OVA, Afro Celt Sound System’s eighth album, the long-running story comes to what seems to be its coda with the death of Emmerson last year from cancer. This latest release continues the loose-knit group’s jam band cum world music vibe and should please long-time fans as well as gain new ones.
Though the Afro Celt Sound System performed live over the years, these long-form songs feel like they were born and raised in the petri dish of the studio. While the conjured soundscape is not as diaphanous as Enya’s, the music sounds processed even with its many acoustic and ethnic instruments. Emmerson was obviously in love with his source materials, whether it was an Irish whistle or an African balafon. However, his goal was to create a modern tapestry sound that went where it needed to go, even if that meant outside the diasporas, it putatively melds. One could also make a case that the unnamed third leg of the Afro Celt Sound System stool is South Asian music since the songs feature tabla and dhol player Johnny Kalsi.
OVA opens with “The Hawk Owl’s Lament”, which starts quietly with wisps of electronic clouds blowing by amid sporadic bird calls and plinks of the African harp-lute called the kora. Guitar vamps emerge, soon bolstered by a mix of thundering drums and powerful bass. Simple, long chants ride atop the big beat, creating a song that simultaneously creates rhythms for dancing and spaciousness for more thoughtful listening.
“The Mantra” begins with Rioghnach Connolly’s ethereal singing, matched with accents from an Indian tabla, a lone West African fiddle, a big burbling bass, and overwashes of electronic sounds and choruses. Amid it all, vocal duties pass to original band member N’Faly Kouyate. Emmerson’s vision of an egalitarian orchestra with elements blending equally despite their heritage comes together beautifully here.
The first single, “AM”, features the soulful singing of the band’s original vocalist, Iarla O Lionaird. It starts with a U2-like building of hypnotic guitar patterns, eventually giving way to an acoustic guitar and an understated matrix of beats. The slow anthem builds inexorably with layer upon layer of instrumentation while Lionaird’s Gaelic vocals move from hushed to soaring.
“Radio Ronza” kicks off with a powerful, singular mix of traditional percussion and electronic beats. Then, a high-pitched penny whistle pierces through the dense thicket of polyrhythms, only to be replaced with a series of vocal male and female choruses. While it’s all enough to make an ethnomusicologist’s head spin, the song makes plain that this is stomping music to move your body. Emmerson creates some compositional magic here, with the song passing through a series of aural landscapes while maintaining a common ecstatic beat.
On “Magical Love”, the group’s politics come to the fore with vocal declarations chanted by Rioghnach Connolly. “I am a fighter / Running for cover / Standing up for what’s right / I will protest; I will dissent / I will never give up / I am willing to die.” The anthemic lyrics are rooted in a sure-footed, inexorable beat, even as Emmerson does his Afro Celt thing and swirls an array of sounds over the basic groove.
While OVA pays no favorites among the cultures it takes from, it leans into Irish music with “The Lockdown Reel”, a traditional-rooted tune led by fiddles and Irish pipes but pumped up with chunky, funky African percussion, chants as well as electronics. Emmerson and company here take an Irish reel and blow it out of its native habitat of the pub session.
Emmerson’s vision—energized by the spirituality he discovered in traditional music—created a sound that brought joy to many who were unfamiliar with the sources he tapped. It was a labor of love that fortunately found appreciative audiences worldwide. Though the Afro Celt Sound System founder is gone, they continue to tour, and their latest album adds to a legacy that moved bodies and shifted mindsets.