The return of Afro Celt Sound System

Johnny Kalsi is at home in outer west London, seated at a computer under a curtain railing heaving with artist lanyards, sporting gold earrings in both ears and a backwards-facing baseball cap emblazoned with the words ‘Johnny Kalsi’. Not that there’s any mistaking him. The master dhol drummer, 57, has been in demand for decades as a percussionist, his charismatic presence enhancing such trad-modern outfits as Transglobal Underground, The Dhol Foundation and The Imagined Village, and his appearance synonymous with a double-sided drum slung over his body and beaten hard with sticks.

But the collective with which he’s most associated is a global music household name, a twice Grammy-nominated band with an instantly recognisable sound – think contemporary dance music vibing with West African rhythms, Gaelic Ireland and the subcontinent – and, after touring the world several times over, the greatest number of lanyards. Afro Celt Sound System.

Formed in 1997 under the aegis of producer/musician Simon Emmerson (1956-2023), ACSS have explored and celebrated musical trade routes in ways innovative, accessible and eminently danceable: “We make people dance like they’re possessed,” says Kalsi of the group, whose seven studio albums have featured the likes of Sinead O’Connor, Robert Plant and Peter Gabriel. “Even at venues like the London Barbican, where you’re not supposed to dance in the aisles, everyone did. It was like a fever. It always made Simon laugh.”

Emmerson had been in Senegal, producing 1994’s Firin’ in Fouta for Baaba Maal, when he was struck by the similarities between a West African melody and an Irish air. He wasn’t the only Western musician to find such parallels; Dublin uillean pipe player and ACSS guest Davy Spillane told Emmerson about a belief that nomadic Celts had lived in Africa and India before migrating to Western Europe. “Davy had a map on his wall that traced a red line from the west coast of Ireland right down to the coast of West Africa,” Emmerson – also the co-founder of The Imagined Village – told me in an interview for Songlines #119.

Emmerson’s passing from cancer in March of last year hit the music world hard. “Simon devoted himself body and soul to Afro Celt Sound System,” says Guinean kora player, vocalist and composer N’Faly Kouyaté, who, along with Kalsi, is an original band member. “When his illness had declared itself, but while he still had the strength to do everything, he told us that he wanted to entrust us with his baby, Afro Celts.”

“It was following this that I was inspired by a Mandinka [also known as Mande] metaphor,” continues the Brussels-based griot, “about the hunter who entrusts their child to the world, knowing that death – the Mandinka call death ‘one small day’ – can arrive at any time.”

So comes OVA, Emmerson’s swansong, and the eighth studio album by Afro Celt Sound System. Recorded both remotely, and at a sprawling farmhouse turned B&B in Dorset, the 11-track work features Emmerson, Kalsi and Kouyaté alongside Irish singer and flautist Ríoghnach Connolly and musicians including Robbie Harris (bodhrán), Ewan Henderson (violin) and programmer/electronica wizard Simon ‘Mass’ Massey – who co-produced the album with Emmerson.

“All the tracks were made with Simon Emmerson’s involvement. They were essential to his personal journey and outlook on life, reflecting his love of nature in particular,” says Kalsi, referencing ‘Hawk Owl’s Lament’, the album’s gorgeous birdsong-and-choral-flecked opener, by way of example.

“That tune feels like a day beginning, with the sun coming through the trees to light the beauty of the wilderness. Simon was so in touch with his beliefs in druidism” – after studying under the writer Phillip Carr-Gomm, Emmerson was made an honorary druid bard – “and [he] had this ceremonial robe that made him look like a Jedi,” smiles Kalsi. “We were in constant contact,” he adds. “I miss him every day.”

OVA is titled for the band’s symbolic logo, which has graced each ACSS album cover from their 1996 debut Volume One: Sound Magic onwards. Designed by the late graphic designer Jamie Reid, another honorary bard in the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, the acronym is positioned so it overlaps to form the shape of an egg, evoking creation and regeneration. Track names such as ‘The Mantra’ (which features bassist Richard Evans and drummer Ged Lynch, erstwhile members of Peter Gabriel’s touring band) and ‘Magical Love’ (a tune with a head-spinning twist, as exultant and incantatory as its title implies) underscore the positivity, the triumph over adversity, inherent in the ACSS aesthetic.

Featuring choral arrangements by John Metcalfe, and atmospheric Gaelic language vocals delivered by the band’s original singer Iarla Ó’Lionáird, album single ‘AM’ is an impressionistic, painterly affair, all poetic hauntings and long silvery shadows. Devised by fiddler Pete Tickell for Scotland’s Knockengorroch Festival and crafted remotely – everywhere from Emmerson’s home in Dorset to Kouyaté in his village of Siguiri in Guinea, playing his grandfather’s ancestral balafon – ‘Lockdown Reel’ is a joyous maelstrom peppered with Kouyaté’s rich-voiced cries of ‘Kharifa!’ (Entrust!).

“There’s some big, beautiful reels on this album,” says Kalsi, whose Swahili-speaking Sikh parents came to the UK from Kenya. “But we’re very much focused on the African sound that we’re known for, and there is more crossover from organic to electronic.”

“The blend that Mass has put together is amazing. He would send us different versions of the same tune, changing the frequency balance [and] setting the soundscapes to come in a particular ear if you are listening on headphones until we all agreed on a preference. He was very much a driving force.”

As was Kouyaté, with whom Kalsi worked intensively to drive tracks including the rollicking, Mory Kanté-esque ‘Nfaly Foli’ (an ode to the value, and life-giving properties, of fresh water) and the heart-tugging ‘Bâdji Kan Waly’ (Travel on the Sea): “I was in the studio when I was told that my niece Koumaty Kouyaté and her two-year-old daughter had drowned off the coast of Tunisia,” says Kouyaté. “They were trying to cross to the West when their boat capsized. I immediately sang this song, speaking in French, to try and discourage others from doing the same.”

Issues of urgency – climate change, immigration, xenophobia – remain at the heart of ACSS. This is music to make you think as well as dance. Music that, arguably, we need. Music we know and welcome. Whether augmented by recordings – female voices, djembés – made by Kouyaté in Guinea, treated to electro jumpstarts à la the abandoned, anything-goes ‘Glitchy Fiddles’ (featuring violinist Ewen Henderson), or bringing in some fat-bottomed dub on ‘Radio Ronza’, each track on OVA is imprinted with the signature of the Afro Celt Sound System.

“OVA is more than a collection of tracks,” Kouyaté says. “It is a living work, a sonic tapestry, an embodiment of our dream to merge cultures through music and create a bridge between worlds. When we first began people had never seen a bodhrán, dhol drum or bagpipes, these extraordinarily loud instruments, working alongside a kora, which has a soft, pleasant sound that doesn’t tire the listener. There were those who said it could never work, but through ingenuity and vision, especially Simon’s vision, we did it.”

Did they ever? “OVA is a celebration of Simon’s life,” says Kalsi. “Afro Celt Sound System is a remarkable legacy.”

Afro Celt Sound System are touring the UK in October, beginning with London’s Islington Assembly Hall on October 9

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today