- artist:Chouk Bwa & The Ångströmers
- featured artist:The Ångstromers
- release year:2017
- style(s):Dub, Vodou
- country:Haiti
- formats:Audio File / Digital, LP / Vinyl
- record posted by:Enthusiast Music
- label:Ångstrom Records
- publisher:Ångstrom Records
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RELEASE NOVEMBER 1, 2017
The first release of Chouk Bwa & the Ångstromers combines a dub sensitivity with a Haitian rhythm science. It is a new collaboration between the traditional Haitian vodou band, Chouk Bwa, and the abstract sound engineering of the Ångstromers. The result is a very distinctive blend: a kind of future-leaning Vodou dub.
The Chouk Bwa rhythm scientists are steeped in the deep traditions and long cultural memory found in Gonaïves, Haïti. Branching out of Africa into an ever-expanding Diaspora, this incarnation seeks a newsoundscape for each evocation. Never a retromania obsessed with return, Chouk Bwa & the Ångstromers unearth untimely dances where rituals of the future can be heard leaking into the precisions of the past. These technicians of the sacred invoke the spirits of freedom through songs rooted in their ancestral ceremony.
The two tracks were selected from the rst meeting with the Ångstromers at Café Central, Brussels, recorded live in September 2016. Modular synths and other vintage electronic instruments bring another dimension to Chouk Bwa’s music, although obviously it is always the band’s groove and uent tempo that leads the energy of the ensemble: no laptops, no drum machines. There are certain freedoms that cannot be coerced. Even more, the electronic instruments are wired directly to the drums that feed them with impacts and caresses. All the Vodou families are there with their many rhythms and songs. Radical Vodou roots for urban audiences.