Terra, my new single, is out now.

Terra is taken from my forthcoming sixth album Flash of the spirit. The single includes the B-side Fela’s Car.

The music combines my dearest musical influences from Afrobeat (Fela Kuti), Electro, Krautrock (Kraftwerk), Malian Blues, Minimalism, Soul, even Gospel. The tracks are based on my travels and field recordings in West Africa. The idea has been, as always, to create a new kind of music: timeless and geographically global, less concerned with styles or genres, experimental yet accessible and uplifting. Or as Brian Eno put it: “The idea is to produce things that are as strange and mysterious to you as the first music you ever heard.”.

The release is available on all the major download and streaming services worldwide, including:

Spotify https://spoti.fi/2JLi9fS
Bandcamp https://bit.ly/2uWYB2P
Amazon https://amzn.to/2LpBBDV

The tracks have had a long evolution. Fela’s Car was originally made in the early 2000 when I was studying sound art in London and passionate about combining my ideas and impressions of everything African, a continent where I’d never been to, with my electronic music at the time. But because of my inexperience I didn’t know how to finish the track back then. In the following years it went through several permutations, but never seemed to find the right home…until now, as a B-side (in the future I hope to make a proper song version of it). Terra was born in 2010 when I was collaborating with an African-American painter, Odili Donald Odita, on our track for Another Africa. Inspired by his rhythmic and vivid, abstract geometric paintings, I made several variations of the initial piece, and Terra became one of them. Years later I reworked it for my album Sahara – recharged by my travels and musical experiences in West Africa by then – but it just never fit the final sequence, and I forgot it completely. In the subsequent years the stereomix of the track kept surviving my frequently breaking harddrives, and when I stumbled upon the mix last winter, I was astonished: it wasn’t just another failure of mine, it was a failure that had failed better than most, ending up somewhere truly different.