When Alsarah & the Nubatones released Silt earlier this year the music had traversed several countries. The Sudan-born Alsarah fled civil unrest her home country at age eight with her family to Yemen, only to be met with another civil war, which prompted her family to move to the United States in 1994. Now based in Brooklyn, Alsarah became an ethnomusicologist and practitioner of East African retro-pop. But while her music is an amalgamation of her journey and studies, Silt is not finished traveling the world.
Silt Remixed features worldwide reworkings from Argentina’s Chancha Via Circuito, Central African producer Boddhi Satva, Angola’s DJeff, LA fixture and KCRW DJ Jeremy Sole, and Wonderwheel Recordings founder Nickodemus. On the Captain Planet remix of “Wad Alnuba”, a fellow-Brooklynite transforms the Nubatones’ Nubian orchestration as though it were one of his cherished crate findings that helped breath life into his recently released Esperanto Slang. The original “Wad Alnuba” derives from a distinctly folk background, transporting the listener to an indigenous plane, while Captain Planet amplifies the pace with laser-like synths, active percussion layers, and a hypnotic bass feed that tests the meters. He’s manipulated the source, but with the utmost respect to the ancestral core.
Silt Remixed is out October 21 on Wonderwheel Recordings. Preorder the album here.
