Carlos Ibanez
Apocalyptic choirs hover on beautiful modal jazz harmonies like dark clouds passing fast without letting water down. Incredible beauty.
Favorite track: Wadada.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
€7EUR or more
M3H010/NS0023 - Classic Black 12 inch LP (First Press)
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
140-gram Classic Black vinyl LP inside a reverse-board gatefold jacket, with custom M3H/NS inner sleeve.
Cover Photograph by Andrew Tshabangu.
Cover Design by Vusi Hlatywayo.
Collage on inner cover by Duduetsang Lamola
Photographs on inner cover by Tseliso Monaheng
Includes unlimited streaming of Group Theory: Black Music
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Sold Out
M3H010/NS0023 - CD
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Compact Disc inside a deluxe tip-on gatefold sleeve.
Cover Photograph by Andrew Tshabangu.
Cover Design by Vusi Hlatywayo.
Collage on inner cover by Duduetsang Lamola
Photographs on inner cover by Tseliso Monaheng
Includes unlimited streaming of Group Theory: Black Music
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Tumi Mogorosi - Where are the Keys? (feat. Andile Yenana & Lesego Rampolokeng)
Python squeeze accordion
Past and future juice in this
Sewer turtles + spittle spewers
Hades hate gate-keep Dominion?
We rattle keys to the magic kingdom
Dread antennae pick up extraterrestrial, Toshman
AMABUTHO it in a Zim jam-anthem
The Omega factor
Land’s spirit
All on beneath within around + us in it
A linkage infinite
Sheet music Hieroglyphic-writ
Rhythm Pulsate
Silence’s violence discord swallow tongue
Percussion tattoo down to bass-marrow
Ivory tinkle fluid spinal tap
No perjury… scalpels out …Gwala surgery
Horns gore deep Essence core
Ancestral voices war-dance out God’s Window
Heart + mind melody makes spines harmonise with entrails/innards
Electric-storm censor castles /
injustice palaces
Parcel gutted out to stark-
dark posterity
We come in… Disembowelment reclamation mission mean
Power addict abject state
Disseminate obscene – control virus value system dictate
Shatter-machine music cut through
minds rhyme
with how hearts vibrate in time
Liberatory beats in tandem
DREAD REVERB… ultrasonic vocab
theory to praxis radical process
MUD BOUND WORDSOUND GENESIS
Life…Revelation
Revolution in Black Movement
Sleepy hollow shadow notes
Creep thru senses crevices
dark embrace…
Genius resides in BLACKNESS
Thaba Bosiu
Nocturnal Mountain raised fist spirit habitat
Blood rivers mystic baffles psychics + psychiatrists
How Kgalagadi muddies Limpopo yet keep the San tomb clean
Blues…Black…Darker than grey
Creation sounds Gold Reef Mine Rockfall
crush-sounds
Guitar-string gun spit tear flesh
Black sonic science
Darkest Acoustics
Black slaughter up from under
back of beyond the lash /swish
Existence level cockroach
Even there the serpentine
between the keys in Fikile’s pianoed spinal-column
Set it of… on Broken bone saxophone moan
Morning horn …the dawning
Black dreams are born… we’re on
Jackboot sense smash
Slit wrists quench thirst
Vulcan tangle mangle flesh
A Mengele experiment
Blood clash brainsplash
Piteous Black Sash
Slash that…vinyl scratch
The pain slide through the gash
Tripping off morning horns
Past the dawning Black futures are born
Drum-Bang out hunger pang
What the cut throat sang
creation music politic It
both mystic +concrete
No one Dimension
Sound first -opp
then com-pressed
through Hell-Gates
Reverberate across space + time
Locked in with the rhyme
They genocide ideology revamp
concentration camped out
Lüderitz to Auschwitz
Death blood-lines
holocaust inheritance
Shark / Death Island choice
Broken wind instruments
Murderous voices
poison-gas class-sick as Wagnerian
Impeach the epoch
from torture to echo-chambers
Unborn murmurs
Carcasses on conscience
corpse consciousness
Fart-bass tremors
Ancient howls posterity whispers
Drum – thunder – roll this present
history – traumatic sonic remedy
Mass therapy frequency music
Heal-force vibratory
Without amnesiac side-effect
Brain on the Col-
Trane tracks Mthuli ka Shezi
Shaka spears ?
Wine curtain torn
Blood on the sugar cane
Slave sweat made Hullets sweet
Dropped in dum-dum
staccato in Cape Flat
Dop rhythm
Kaffir Coolie Hot-Not
Rim-shot
Sky burst
Heaven come rest on Africa breast
Impeach the epoch
Put the age on trial
Single file execute the times
Perennial race war crimes
meanwhile they luxuriate in class climes
From the rubble
bubble-bloodbath-salts
Black sweat makes malts
Armoured noise against silence’s pestilence
facing violence
for Mongezi
Lymphatic fluid polished
Cullinan Diamond
Kimberley Gold……………………………
The Atlantic howls cold in skeleton
commerce spells trap
Hells bells demonic snares
Liberty’s eyes stare blinder than Justice
Dark angelic notes Volcanic
velvet at core
Black image creation Breath
Brotherhood in Blue Notes
Motherless child feeling
birthed hanging from the ceiling
hanging trees
grief hit surface
Magnum force drum-
pierce up to putrid existence core
quest:
Strike the life Motherlode
By Lesego Rampolokeng
about
M3H010/NS0023 - a co-release between M3H and New Soil
Group Theory: Black Music is a stunning new statement from South African drummer and composer Tumi Mogorosi. Standing in the lineage of South African greats such as Louis Moholo-Moholo, Makaya Ntshoko and Ayanda Sikade, Mogorosi is one of the foremost drummers working anywhere in the world, with a flexible, powerful style that brings a distinctive South African inflection to the polyrhythmic tradition of Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Art Blakey. Since his international debut on Jazzman Records in 2014 with Project ELO, Mogorosi has been in the vanguard of the South African creative music scene’s burgeoning outernational dimension, taking the drummer’s chair in both Shabaka Hutchings’ Shabaka and The Ancestors formation and with avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched.
As Mogorosi’s first project as leader since 2014, Group Theory: Black Music marks a return to the drummer’s musical roots. The sound is anchored in the transnational tradition of Great Black Music, with the core of the group comprising a quintet of newcomers Tumi Pheko (trumpet) and Dalisu Ndlazi (bass) alongside the experienced guitarist Reza Khota, with Mogorosi himself and altoist Mthunzi Mvubu, another Ancestors member, representing the current generation of South Africa’s creative music torchbearers. Motivated by Mogorosi’s driving dynamism, the group create deep-hued modal grooves that burn with a contemporary urgency, while established pianist Andile Yenana brings an elder voice to three of the tracks. Featured vocalists Gabi Motuba (Project ELO, The Wretched) and Siyabonga Mthembu (The Brother Moves On) take differing approaches to the spiritual standard ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’, while poet Lesego Rampolokeng pours out lyrical fire on ‘Where Are The Keys?’, creating a bridge back to the Black Consciousness movement and figures such as Lefifi Tladi and Wally Mongane Serote.
But where Group Theory: Black Music moves an established format dramatically forward is in the addition of a ten-person choir. Conducted by Themba Maseko, their massed voices soar powerfully above every track as a collective instrument of human breath and body, and enter the album into the small but significant number of radical recordings to have used the voice in this way, such as Max Roach’s "It’s Time", Andrew Hill’s "Lift Every Voice", Billy Harper’s "Capra Black", and Donald Byrd’s "I’m Trying To Get Home". At the same time, the presence of this wall of voices brings an inextricable connection to the venerable tradition of South African choral music, and to the importance that the Black choir has had for South Africa’s religious, political and social cultures, including the culture of South African creative music itself. From the Manhattan Brothers and the choral compositions of Todd Matshikiza to figures such as Johnny Dyani and Victor Ndlazilwane, the collective power of voice has been one of the cornerstones of improvised creative music in the country.
‘I started out in a choir’, says Tumi, as he reflects on the significance of Black voices in concert. ‘There’s this idea of mass, of a group of people gathering, which has a political implication. And the operatic voice has both a presence, and a capacity to scream, a capacity for affect. The instrumental group can sustain the intensity of that affect, and the chorus can go beyond improvisation, toward communal melodies that everyone can be a part of.’
This potential for communality in the music swings close to Group Theory’s conceptual centres of gravity. The title refers to the mathematical theory of the same name, the essentials of which concern the axioms that make a simple set of items into a true mathematical group – associativity, closure and an identity element. These mathematical ideas offered Mogorosi a metaphorical platform for thinking about the way that individual players in a musical unit are also bound together at the moment of creation, in a unity that begins to challenge the individual and complicates conventional ideas of leadership and hierarchy. In bringing experienced musicians such as Yenana and Khota into the orbit of younger players, Mogorosi also wants to re-orientate the idea of teacher-student relations toward a more open vision of intergenerational knowledge sharing. ‘We are looking for questions, not answers’, he says.
Mogorosi’s overarching vision on Group Theory: Black Music is encapsulated by the touchstone quotation from Amiri Baraka – ‘New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.’ For Mogorosi, these words speak to an essential feature and function of Black creative and improvised art – the search for the point where individual boundaries collapse into the universal ongoing flow of the music, at the moment of group creation. This flow is not local, it is transglobal, and it joins the music of the diaspora with Africa, allowing connections and relations to range across historic and contemporary spaces of struggle, self-determination and transformation. Such effects are also transtemporal, dropping deep down into the wells of history to bring forth sounds from the present and future, and allowing the music to burrow back into the past. As Baraka’s words imply, the individual cannot escape this search unchanged, and the creative musician does not desire to: in the time of its creation, New Black Music intends to flow into and through the performers from sources beyond them. The writer of a song is never the only author; the soloist always speaks for others; the leaders are never one but a host of many. Previous times and places, previous performances and compositions, previous souls and struggles are always made manifest in the music; the search for the inner self is also a quest to dissolve the individual into the living soundways of those who came before and those who will come after. ‘The album is under my name,’ says Tumi, ‘but the ideas aim at a decentring of the individual composer or author, and a a decentring of the idea of the “leader” – it tries to encapsulate the idea of a group effect, to go beyond the point of origin, and it refuses geo-specific narratives.’
South African creative and improvised music, with its nomadic history of journeys between the US, Europe and South African, has always been exemplary of these ongoing processes, and it is fitting that Group Theory: Black Music should itself be the result of an international collaboration. Starting from a shared vision and understanding of the parallels between the music being made in their respective countries, South African label Mushroom Hour Half Hour and London based label New Soil were able to pool their resources to support Tumi’s large-scale creative vision for this project and enable it to find the global audience it seeks and deserves.
Voices
Brenda Thulo
Cecilia Phetoe
Charles Shikwambana
Fortunate Jwara
Noluthando Biyana
Sibongile Mollo
Steve Mthombeni
Tebogo Magwe
Themba Maseko - conductor
Thulisile Ntetha
All songs composed and arranged by Tumi Mogorosi, except tracks 5 & 10 (traditional song arranged by Tumi Mogorosi) and track 11 (musical work composed by Tumi Mogorosi & literary work authored by Lesego Rampolokeng)
Recorded by Peter Auret & Oyama Songo at the Downtown Music Hub, Johannesburg on 6 & 7 December 2021
Edited & Mixed by Dion Monti
Mastered by Norman Nitzsche at Calyx Mastering
Produced by Andile Yenana & Tumi Mogorosi
A&R by Andrew Curnow & Federico Bolza
Executive Produced by Andrew Curnow, Federico Bolza & Nhlanhla Masondo
Since his international debut on Jazzman Records in 2014 with Project ELO, Mogorosi has been in the vanguard of the South
African creative music scene’s burgeoning outernational dimension, taking the drummer’s chair in both Shabaka Hutchings’ Shabaka and The Ancestors formation and with avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched....more
supported by 103 fans who also own “Group Theory: Black Music”
Magic in its purest form. I love Floating Points, I love Pharoah Sanders, I love The London Symphony Orchestra. It's a match made in heaven, and the result is absolutely gorgeous. I have loved this record since its release, and realized I don't own it for some reason. So its time to change that. 9.5/10 honestly could become a 10/10 on an indepth vinyl relisten. angrypizza98
supported by 74 fans who also own “Group Theory: Black Music”
I was brought here after listening to a live performance of Makaya's on you tube. I instantly loved the song Holy Lands so much that I had to see if the album version was the same rendition as the live one. Then I listened to the whole album! Universal Beings is a just a groove... It's a mix of traditional and something new, very nice. pandr1900