Zoona Malawi

As Gasper Nali hoists his ten-foot, homemade babatoni, we clearly have a candidate for unusual instrument of the month: it is a simple yet powerful one-stringed beast. This entire mini-album showcases the impressive one-man band skills of Nali, as he strikes this immense axe with a hand-held bottle and stick-plectrum; it resonates deeply, from its stretched-cowskin base up to the distant end of its neck. Nali also keeps furious time with his similarly skin-stretched kick drum. The first track is the most accessible, ‘Abale Ndikuwuzeni’ prompting the listener to imagine a full band powering behind Nali. These songs were recorded on the shore of Lake Malawi, and at the end of this opener, it sounds like Nali's dropped part of his instrument in the water. In fact, it's the sound of a breaking string, a regular hazard of this long-necked monster.

Nali's vocals have a melodic roughness to match his instrument's punky momentum, and he imbues all aspects of the performance with a remarkable energy. There's a strong metallic ring to ‘Musamanyoze Osauka’, an after-shimmer of dragged and scraped string vibration, stopping and starting to lend an increased dynamism of tension then release. Throughout this brief six-tracker, Nali pulls the listener along via his sheer commitment to momentum. Strangely, four songs that featured on his first album reappear here, so it's clearly high time to write some new works.