Analog Africa No. 5 – Legends of Benin

We live in an amazingly, almost infinitely rich musical world. However open-minded we are, however broad our tastes, we all know that there's - quite literally - a whole world of other music out there, over and above the diversity of our own collections. It's not neccesarily not wanting to explore all this music that holds us back from hearing it; often, it's the sheer daunting nature of the task that holds us back from attempting to sample the delights available. Where do we begin? Looking at almost any country in the world, the variety of local musical styles and techniques is staggering. Faced with this bazaar of alluring possibilities, it's dangerously easy to get lost, and to miss out on the best produce. What we need, of course, is a guide. Someone who knows the territory, and can help us sample a country's music without overwhelming us too quickly. Analog Africa is one such guide - a various record labels putting out compilations that focus on extremely rare tracks from Africa. Number five in this series, Legends of Benin, focuses on the titular legends: Antoine Dougbé, Honoré Avolonto, Gnonnas Pedro, and the mysteriously-named El Rego. These 14 songs, each recorded either by one of these four men solo or with their respective bands, were all recorded between 1969 and 1981 and comprise a snapshot of Benin's Afro-funk, cavacha, agbadja, and Afro-beat during and immediately around the 70s. It's a fascinating time capsule that offers us just under an hour and a quarter of music that's likely to be a world away from anything else most people have ever heard. The Analog Africa blog goes into some fascinating detail about what the Beninese musical scene was like in the 70s - one of the most interesting things, besides the gruelling process undertaken in the country to put these compilations and their associated photos and interviews together, is the small but verdant local distribution process at that time. Various tiny labels operated in the small West African country's cities, rarely producing more than 500 copies of any given record.As you'd expect, rhythm is one of the main constituent parts of these diverse sounds - built on core Beninese rhythms, these songs often have a tremendous sense of groove, and several go past the six, seven or even eight minute marks. It's far from monotonous though - most of the songs have expressive lead and backing vocals in French, local languages, and in one case, the heavily soul-influenced "Feeling You Got", in English. On top of all that there are some fascinating funk guitar textures and lovely sax work - everything here oozes the atmosphere of the environment in which it was recorded, you can really imagine that you are genuinely hearing something of Benin here. A significant part of the appeal of this compilation is likely to be the 40-page booklet with rare pictures from the 70s scene, not made available to us lowly reviewers but something I can well imagine would be a fascinting read. All in all, this is a diverse, challenging and rewarding compilation which does a fine job of guiding us through a small fraction of what Beninese - and in a wider sense, African - music was and is capable of. 80%Analog Africa on MySpace