Huambo Música Sessions

From spicy semba to the hip club beats of kuduro, it is the urban music styles of Angola that are best known beyond the country's borders. The organisation known as Tsikaya, however, is trying to bring the music of Angola's rural areas to wider attention, aiming to create an audio archive of the sounds and music of the Angolan countryside. This is their second release with the PangeiArt label, and focuses on the central Angolan province of Huambo. The seven artists featured cover a range of styles, from the lively female percussion and vocal choir of Grupo Katiavala, to the Congolese-inspired dance band Banda Crescente and the joyous guitar picking of Alimba Okimbo. A striking feature of these rural styles is how far they are from the typical Lusophone sound – there's little room for the melancholy, bittersweet saudade mood here. Instead, their sound is much more similar to other southern central African styles; some of the album's more brooding tracks even conjure up shadows of the music of Angola's far-distant Caribbean relatives the Garifuna. Huambo Música Sessions is an amazing album from a fantastic, worthwhile project.