Being (Vinyl)

Baaba Maal's Being, is an album about being from Africa, being a songwriter, being a romantic, being a realist, being wary, being online, being at the mercy of the elements, being on your way somewhere, and ultimately about being from Podor while being connected through song and dance to an always changing, always challenging world.

Ideas about sound, movement, and sensation materialised at home based on recent experiences touring the world and lengthy, freestyle musical workouts with friends and favourite Senegalese musicians. The jams, loops and beats passed back and forth between Maal and Johan Karlberg, generating their own character and atmosphere. This ‘whatever happens, happens’ combination of fast and slow time, of speeding up and cooling down, of nature and technology became part of the music’s essence, along with the combining of indefinable ancient ritualistic mood with futurist exuberance, a futurism of heart and mind..

On Being, there are seven songs shimmering between dirty thorny desert blues and intangible electro-spirituals, between uplifting chants and trance-like freak outs. They are about generational debts and conflicts, rivers, watching people, seeing new generations of Africans make themselves felt, the impact of technology, remembering dreams, the magic of place, the strangeness of time, the feeling of home, the stars above, and the rhythms inside and out. Mixing up signs of a new Africa, there is a welcome reunion with The Very Best’s singer Esau Mwamwaya on ‘Freak Out’ and appearances from exciting new singer Rougi on ‘Boboyillo’ and Mauritanian rapper General Paco Lenol on ‘Nbedo Wella.’