The wildly creative partnership between Haitian six-piece Chouk Bwa and Belgian production duo The Ångströmers started when they met in 2016 and went on to perform together, merging Afro-Caribbean voodoo polyrhythms with bass-weight dub electronics. Following their 2020 debut album Vodou Alé, Chouk Bwa & The Ångströmers are back with a new record. Entitled Somanti, the album came about after they reunited in May 2022 for an extensive European tour, punctuated by “near-constant rehearsals, discussions, experiments, intercultural dialogue and meticulous musical negotiations”, as the press release describes. Frederic Alstadt of The Ångströmers comments:
“Being reunited again meant that we played with those tracks, we arranged them in many ways, and they became something totally different. We had toured for about two months and we set up three days of recording sessions at a studio in Brussels, and basically we recorded everything in one day. There was one day of set-up, one day of recording and one day of fine tuning. We were playing live in the studio, and then we spent about two weeks producing it. It was done pretty fast, actually. It really came from the live energy.”
Described as an album of ritual, on Somanti most of the tracks are based on ceremonial music, with the lyrics drawn from proverbs. Chouk Bwa’s manager Michael Wolteche elaborates:
“In Vodou, all of the rites have different rhythms. We could choose the ones that would most please Western ears, but we will not do that, we keep all of the different aspects. This is our way to respect a very complex, subtle culture. It is not just entertainment music. It is meant to bring the people to trance, but for people in Europe or the US, to bring a spiritual connection to the party.”
Somanti is set for release on October 6th through Bongo Joe Records and ahead of it they have let loose the entrancing and intoxicating title track.
