Anatomic adds another storey to that edifice. It also continues the longstanding Afro Celt tradition of cultural collaboration, bringing in two stunning vocalists - Uzbeki star Sevara Nazarkhan and Rwanda’s Dorothee Munyaneza - who add their own special qualities to the disc. “We always try to do something where the track is a dialogue between two languages of different kinds,” observes Russell, and Nazarkhan’s duet with Ó Lionáird is a prime example of that - rhythmic, evocative and gorgeously shaded, with a raw, sensual edge.
Martin Russell was also responsible for bringing Munyaneza to Anatomic. He’d worked with her on the soundtrack to Hotel Rwanda, and “she stuck in my mind”. When the Afro Celts had the backing tracks for the new disc, “we played her some of the ideas in progress and she came back three days later with very strong ideas”, which became ‘When I Still Needed You’ (“one of our strongest statements as a band,” says Emmerson) and ‘Mother’.
“When I listened to the kora on ‘Mother’, immediately I saw the scenery of the song,” says Munyenza, a survivor of the horrific 1994 genocide in her homeland. “When the genocide started my mother was already working in England, and I was in Kigali with my father and my siblings. On 25th July, my birthday, my mother came. It’s something I never thought would happen. Just seeing her, hearing people scream with joy, knowing she was back, all was suddenly well and everything made sense. So that song is about how happy and how sad and how moving the whole event was. I wanted to convey that feeling of sheer happiness and ecstasy.”
“ ‘Mother’,” McNally points out “hits you in a place where you belong. I was almost in tears when we finally mixed it; I feel it’s a truly beautiful piece of work.”
The album also includes two previously unrecorded concert staples, ‘Drake’ – originally written for Release – and the atmospheric, spectacular ‘Mojave’, a tune that still affects the band “in a simplified way that a lot of other things do in a complicated way. Iarla opens up with a call, it sounds Native American, and it brought us to that wide-open vast space of Mojave. The rhythm’s hard and pounding, but the tune is soft and invites you in. That one comes purely from the heart.”
With Anatomic, Afro Celt Sound System continue to open up the new horizons they started exploring ten years ago. As James McNally concludes, “there’s a lot of soul in this body of work.”
Protection - we do a lot of it these days. Sun cream for our skin, sunglasses for our eyes, condoms for you know where - but do you remember to protect your hearing?
Click to find all the information you need to look after your hearing now so you can enjoy music for years to come
The Raft has discovered The CarbonNeutral Company
They help business, government and individuals to tackle their contribution to climate change. In addition to forestry projects, their work includes carbon emissions reduction, renewable energy and biomass schemes, as well as carbon management and risk consulting
