Photo: Dylan Valley
We’re a little bit more than excited to hear about the upcoming double album from visionary and virtuosic South African drummer, composer, writer and activist Asher Gamedze. Entitled Turbulence and Pulse, it follows his extraordinarily staggering and powerful debut Dialectic Soul, which was one of our Album Picks of 2020. Slated for a May 5th release through International Anthem and Mushroom Hour Half Hour, Turbulence and Pulse already looks set to be one of the most compelling albums to bless our ears in 2023.
Gamedze’s forthcoming album saw him working with the same stellar quartet from Dialectic Soul, comprising Thembinkosi Mavimbela on bass, Buddy Wells on tenor saxophone, and Robbin Fassie on trumpet. “I chose these musicians specifically because I know that they’re open to understanding and interpreting the music from my perspective and my way of working.”
On Turbulence and Pulse, and as the press release explains, Gamedze “explores relationships of time between music and history”. He elaborates:
“Time in music is a metaphor for thinking about time in history and how time moves. The way we’re taught history is generally in a way that robs people of agency in imagining themselves as part of history and how it unfolds. It is something that happens to us. I think there’s a productive metaphor in that because the sense of time in music is created by musicians playing together. If we can use that to think about history and time in history, you can see that, actually, history is created by people in a whole range of ways. At the heart of it, historical motion is created by people organized and acting together, whether for progressive or reactionary ends.”
Gamedze also shared his thoughts on the album’s theme, stating that the underlying message is “to claim a form of historical agency and realize that the future is not a foregone conclusion. As people we can organize, to transform our world in small and big ways.” He continues:
“One of the ideas that I’ve had for a long time is to unsettle the way that people think about culture as something static or as something fixed. There’s this tension in Africa, because of the way that the colonists have constructed visions of African culture, where people speak about this need to conserve culture and document it. I think that’s important, but you also have to understand that these things are moving. And we are the people who have to participate in that movement.”
To bring the album to life, Gamedze has also enlisted guest vocalist Julian Otis on one of the tracks and the LP, CD, and digital versions feature three additional tracks, alternate versions of ‘Melancholia’, ‘If It Rains. To Pursue Truth’, and ‘Out Stepped Zim’, which Gamedze recorded on a rooftop in Cairo with his Another Time Ensemble featuring Maurice Louca (synthesizers), Adham Zidan (bass), Alan Bishop (alto saxophone, voice), and Chérif El-Masri (guitar).
It may seem like a long way away for the album to be out but we can already hear the stunning and celestial ‘Wynter Time’, which only heightens our anticipation for what is to come. ‘Wynter Time’ is dedicated to Black Caribbean radical intellectual, writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, in particular her book Black Metamorphosis. The single if offered with an accompanying video directed by Adrian Van Wyk and you can watch it below.
