Kondi Band

Two unique and very different musicians stemming from Sierra Leone team up for a Afro-futuristic collaboration.

Kondi Band’s hypnotizing voice belongs to Sorie Kondi, a forgotten and then found blind singer from Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown. He’s also considered a master of electrified kondi, a Sierra Leonean version of thumb piano you might recognized as one of the most characteristic sounds of African music.

Chief Boima, meanwhile, is an acclaimed US-based producer and DJ with Sierra Leonean roots (and once an early beehype contributor, too). He simply discovered Sorie on YouTube, and December last year, he offered us a (re)mix of Sorie’s works called “The Freetown Tapes 2006​-​2016“, which turned out to be an introduction for their proper collaboration.

Its result – after a series of concerts – is Kondi Band’s debut album “Salone“, which just came out today on Strut Records. As Boima explains, “forges a direct link between techno born in the black cities of the American Mid-West, where I grew up, and roots African music.”

And indeed, the album takes you both to the globalized future and the local past of African rhythms, chants and sounds. Just like the sheer meeting of Sorie Kondi nad Chief Boima, this music is something that simply was supposed to happen.

Stream “Salone” on Bandcamp.

Photo: Alexis Maryon

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Kondi Band on Facebook.

Recent music from Sierra Leone