This week’s free weekly download comes from Dowdelin’s second album, "Lanmou Lanmou." This project is Creole Afro-futurism at its finest, with strains of reggae, zouk, jazz, and Afrobeat.
From the press release:
Lanmou Lanmou, Dowdelin’s second album, muddies the waters, blurs the lines, bewilders. It does everything to assuage naysayers such as the conservatives and the lazies, the defenders of an official form of reggae, the right kind of zouk, the trademarked version of jazz, or the historically validated biguine. As with the languages, cultures, and nations of the Caribbean which are never quite European nor completely African, it would be daunting to try and define where exactly Dowdelin is located on the official landscape of music in a Creole afro-futurism, at the crossroads of the black Atlantic...
The Dowdelin experiment finds its roots in a blend of encounters and loyalties: David Kiledjian AKA Dawatile, producer and multi-instrumentalist composer met Lyon-born singer from Martinique, Olivya. Together, they would jam and write songs in English. But, nothing felt right, until she started singing in Creole. Then everything made sense: the language of the French Antilles in the West Indies David then got back in touch with Raphaël Philibert, a percussionist, saxophonist and singer who has always been involved in developing the field of gwo ka, the heavily percussion-based traditional music of Guadeloupe, of which his relative, Georges Troupé, is a pioneering defender.
All this gave birth to Dowdelin and the obvious is striking. We’re reminded that when the poet and theoretician Édouard Glissant speaks of Creoleness as a whirlwind of unpredictability, he speaks of an adventure that couldn’t be foretold in the world’s history: From Europeans and Africans forced into a third continent with an insane dream to build a New World, languages, cultures, music in other words mixed heritages, catharsis, dizziness, resilience were born through the mass crimes of slavery and the despoilment of Native American populations.
