Casey Driessen - Otherlands:ONE

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 168, June 2021.

Casey Driessen
Otherlands:ONE
Red Shoe Records (84 mins)

American fiddler Casey Driessen spent nine months travelling the world, meeting, listening and playing with local musicians until COVID-19 eventually ground everything to a halt. Otherlands:ONE is the result: an album of all-acoustic collaborations with folk musicians from Galicia, Ireland, Scotland, India, Japan and Finland, each recorded on the guests’ home turf.

Although Driessen’s background is in bluegrass, his collaborations here aren’t exactly ‘fusions’ with all the heavy-handedness that term may suggest. It’s a much more sympathetic meeting. Driessen bends his style to that of his hosts, his bluegrass more of a polite suggestion than an imposition.

A lot is explored in the album’s 13 tracks, from the pan-Celtic folk styles of Western Europe to the songs of Baul musicians in Bengal, and even bluegrass itself with mandolinist Taro Inoue in Japan. The sound that binds it all, however, is of musicians really enjoying themselves. You can hear it in the music and the atmosphere, and in the little glimpses of chat we get at the end of each performance – as well as in the perfectly-captured hubbub of a pub session in County Clare.

This is a really lovely album with good vibes aplenty. Hopefully Driessen can get back to globetrotting and collaborating again soon!

Transglobal Underground and Our European Friends - A Gathering of Strangers 2021

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 168, June 2021.

Transglobal Underground and Our European Friends
A Gathering of Strangers 2021
Mule Satellite (47 mins)

A Gathering of Strangers first saw light in 2010 when it was released by a pan-EU collective headed by dubtronic pioneers Transglobal Underground, under the moniker Urban Native Integrated Traditions of Europe – or UNITE. Now it’s been remastered, remixed and re-released as part of TGU’s ambitious one-album-a-month challenge for 2021.

The project features guests from Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Ireland and the UK, with stars of folk, hip-hop and electronica all getting involved. This united European front, together with a theme of longing that threads through the whole album, makes this a compelling collection of protest anthems from the resistance, created while Brexit was still the dream of a fringe lunacy.

The strange thing is that a side-by-side comparison with the original isn’t particularly kind on the 2021 edition, soundwise. The 2010 release just feels meatier, its basses more full and its tops more resonant. Add in the fact that the new version has five fewer tracks, it all makes for a rather odd remaster.

Like its source material, A Gathering of Strangers 2021 is still a very good album and a great listen on its own… but it might be best to track down a copy of the original before settling for this update.

Khalab & M’berra Ensemble - M’berra

First published on The Quietus.

Khalab & M’berra Ensemble
M’berra
Real World Records (37 mins)

Real World Records’ latest release harks back to the label’s grand tradition of intercultural collaborative fusion as Italian DJ and producer Raffaele Costantino – better known as Khalab – meets and mingles with the musician residents of the M’berra refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania.

M’berra has existed since the early 1990s, when people fled violence in neighbouring northern Mali. Its population has fluctuated with relative periods of peace and war in the region, but recently there have been as many as 60,000 people living in the desert settlement. Khalab visited M’berra in 2017 to meet its people, record its sounds and, it turns out, to create a 14-strong ensemble of Tuareg and Hassaniyya musicians, playing their own music in their own styles together. Among the musicians are members of groups such as Tartit, Tafalawist and Imarhan Timbuktu – from the population of a refugee camp, a supergroup.

Read the full review over at The Quietus.