Adventures in Afropea

Sic transit gloria mundi – but how welcome to be reminded of past triumphs by this reissue of Zap Mama's astonishing 1991 debut. Mapping out an imaginative new cultural geography in which African roots were repurposed in a post-colonial black European context, on Adventures in Afropea, bandleader Marie Daulne and her all-female ensemble fashioned a diaspora sound that combined Congolese rhythms with Arabic and Mediterranean flourishes. Singing entirely a capella and mixing polyphonic singing, beatboxing and evoking bird song and other sounds from nature, the freshness of their harmonies took their debut to the top of Billboard's world music chart and earned a Grammy nomination.

What happened subsequently as Zap Mama's razor-sharp focus became blurred and the group squandered its unique glory is another story. But the freshness of Adventures in Afropea, now released on vinyl for the first time, still has the capacity to thrill and intoxicate – alternately unsettling and euphoric, chaotic and complex and yet, as Johny Pitts, author of Afropean: Notes From Black Europe rightly says, always transcendent.