Review: Throughout their decade-long career, Alma Negra has combined their love of disco and deep house with percussion, instrumentation and ideas excavated from African, Caribbean and tropical musical cultures. On this EP, they largely ditch the latter inspirations, instead delivering full-throttle revivalist disco sounds where the Basel-based band's organic instrumentation and vocals combine with colourful synth sounds and heady horns. The headline attraction is undoubtedly 'Madrugada', a warming and thickset, subtly deep house-influenced take on the turn-of-the-80s NYC downtown disco-not-disco sound. It comes backed with two revisions - an extra-percussive, dubbed-out Yuksek tweak and the band's own dub disco-goes-deep house 'Dub Mix' - and the riotous, party-starting brilliance of 'Funky Fever'.
Review: After many years spent performing gigs with their live ensemble, Alma Negra has finally decided to record and ready a release that showcases the band's dynamic brand of cross-cultural musical fusion. The Swiss combo first adds a tropical twist to the Afrobeat template on brilliant opener 'Mombassa to Lagos', before delivering something genuinely far-sighted and hard-to-pigeonhole: the mutant electronic bass, Tony Allen rhythms, deep house electronics and wayward Hammond solos of 'San Jon'. After a dash of Afro-Cuban dub-fusion - the inspired 'Taxi Radio' - we're treated to two club-friendly takes of 'San Jon'. First Mehmet Aslan goes all dark, cosmic and percussive on a wild (and brilliant) 'soca dub' take, before Alma Negra delivers a weightier, hazier and deeper 'Night Version' of their own. In a word: brilliant!
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