buffering juju

Self-described as ‘nomadic future folk,’ the sound conjured up by dumama + kechou on their debut manages the delicate feat of being a concept album free of gimmicks. In the telling of one woman's journey from leaving jail (the sounds of fences rattling and the intoning of the women heroes of the liberation struggle) to her own quiet liberation, South African Gugulethu Duma and Kerim Melik Becker have created one of the most musically and lyrically eloquent records of the past 25 years.

At times dreamlike and hypnotic, at others insistent, the duo and a host of creative collaborators (including Shane Cooper on upright bass on ‘Wessi Walking Mama’ and clarinettist Angel Bat Dawid on ‘Uveni’) masterfully deploy an array of instruments and overlay this with atmospherics drawn from their varied recording spaces. The latter includes Nirox Sculpture Park, whose location in the Cradle of Humankind outside Johannesburg attests to buffering juju's call for collective human healing through one woman's reclamation of her multifaceted power (in this telling, as a mother, a child, an owl, a honeyguide bird, the sky, the mountains). Cows soundtrack the album's shape-shifting protagonist leaving prison, and birds pass over (abundantly on the standout, ‘For Madala’ and lightly twittering on the uplifting ‘Mother Time’) as she journeys on dry roads, through forests, into holes, over mountains. All that's missing from this deeply affecting, magical realism experiment are the visuals that dumama + kechou's debut is crying out for.