Weekly Music Roundup: Orbital, Msaki & Tubatsi, and Bio Ritmo
Week of Dec. 12: This week, plague-based dance music from Orbital; Msaki & Tubatsi’s celebration of life in South Africa; and “The Bionic Man” gets the salsa treatment from Bio Ritmo. Also, new music from Hania Rani, and Florence + the Machine.
Orbital Dances Its Way Through Plagues, Past and Present
Thirty years on, the British acid house duo Orbital is still making club-ready dance music with a message. Earlier records occasionally referenced environmental and sociopolitical issues; now their forthcoming tenth LP, Optical Delusion, aims to soundtrack our halting recovery from the pandemic. Halting, but grooving. The new single “Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song)” is a collaboration with the Mediaeval Baebes, the goth female chorus that Katharine Blake has led since late 90s. The combination of Orbital’s pulsating dance sound and the Baebes’ ethereal singing is vaguely unsettling – a feeling amplified by the pagan-themed video – and it takes a moment before it becomes apparent what the Baebes are actually singing: “Ring Around The Rosie” – the children’s song commonly believed to have originated with the Black Death. (Where we Americans sing “ashes, ashes,” the Brits usually sing “a-tishoo, a-tishoo,” to imitate sneezing.)
Optical Delusion comes out on February 17 and also includes collaborations with the band Sleaford Mods and others.
A South African Collaboration Celebrates Life In The Townships
“Come with me,” sings the duo of Msaki x Tubatsi on their welcoming debut single, “Subaleka.” The South African collaborators have made an album that’s due next year, and this song and its accompanying video suggest that the record will follow the ubuntu philosophy espoused by the late Bishop Desmond Tutu (and many others) – “having an equal responsibility to look after each other,” as Tubatsi Mpho Moloi puts it. Moloi is part of the pan-African band Keleketla!, as well as the Soweto group Urban Village. Msaki is a two-time winner at this year’s South African Music Awards; she has collaborated with producer Diplo, among others. Together, they draw rhythmic and vocal elements from regional styles both new (like amapiano) and old (like mbaqanga), as well as mixing in Western instruments: “Subaleka” is largely driven by plucked cello, for example. The video, shot on an iPhone, takes us into a day in the life of the Townships in and around Johannesburg.
The album by Msaki x Tubatsi will be called Synthetic Hearts and is due in March.
Florence + The Machine Share Live Performance With Ethel Cain
Florence and the Machine have been playing to arenas in support of their latest album, Dance Fever, and the American singer Ethel Cain has been their opening act. At their Denver concert in October, singer Florence Welch invited Ethel Cain to join her for the song “Morning Elvis,” a gothic yet gospel-tinged ballad about the power of live performance to heal and transcend. That live performance was pretty powerful, and the band has now released the recording to prove it.
Hania Rani Offers A Hint Of Spring
The Polish pianist Hania Rani has attracted an international following for her lovely, lyrical pieces for keyboard. This style, which some are calling neo-Classical (a confusing name, since there was already a style with that name a century ago), has made stars out of German composer Max Richter, Iceland’s Olafur Arnalds, and several others. In February, Rani will release the album On Giacometti, based on her soundtrack to a documentary film, The Giacomettis, about the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti and his family. For now, she’s shared the track called “Spring,” a gentle, rippling piece for piano with subtle washes of synthesizer.
Bio Ritmo Marks 30th Anniversary with New EP
Salsa System is the new EP by the Richmond, VA band Bio Ritmo. When they played for us in the studio, we called them a “post salsa” band; Bio Ritmo describes its music as “indie-salsa dura, original, funky, experimental, 70's inspired,” all of which seems about right. Especially with this EP, released to celebrate the band’s 30 years of offering an unpredictable take on salsa. These songs have all been released before, but never on vinyl, until Friday. Three are covers of earlier salsa tunes that they originally recorded in 2006; but this one, “Bionic Boogaloo,” is 2008 recording in which the band takes the theme music from the old TV series The Six Million Dollar Man and transforms it into a fun, slinky Latin dance track.
