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2: Release (1999), Volume 3: Further in Time (2001), Seed (2003), Pod (remix album, 2004), Volume 5: Anatomic (2005), Capture – Afro Celt Sound System (Compilation: 1995-2010), were not considered equal members, at least in contractual terms, and they are now. And fair to say that having met Griogair, everyone agreed he should be on equal footing too.
you can hear it in the sound. Not that musical collaboration wasn’t at the heart of it before, it’s just that now, all things being equal, everyone is pitching in with their total creative inspiration. As Kalsi points out, it’s hard to give something your all when you’re not being recognised for it, so “Any creativity we had we’d put into our own projects. Now,” he says “we can put it into Afro Celts.” Emmerson concurs: “Because we opened up the collaboration, the floodgates have been opened. It was very long overdue. Johnny has now written one of the great tracks on the album…” referring to Magnificent 7, Kalsi’s exhila- rating Morricone-inspired collaboration with Emer Mayock on flute.
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This new order has resulted in new working methods, Emmerson says. “It’s all about the open heart, open spirit and ditching the technology, not being dictated to by machines. The sound system is still there, a fundamental element of the sound, but you don’t think it’s an electroni- ca record, you think it’s a band. We’d got into a rhythm where N’Faly, for example, would come into a room and play some kora over pre-prepared tracks and what I wanted to do was write together as a col- laborative process.” And so he broke from the method that sustained the Afro Celts since he and Russell began recording for their debut in 1995. Then, African and Celtic influences were woven into a bedrock of electronica and samples ruled the day – unsurprising, given Emmerson’s regular job at the time as an acid house DJ on the underground London club scene.
fro Celt Sound System will cele- brate their 21st birthday in 2016 as a truly madly deeply collaborative outfit, both con- tractually and creatively, and
Kalsi recalls that “It was a case of going into the studio, play the instrument and wait for the track to be produced. Then you’d have it played back to you in a differ- ent form because they’d cut it up and re- programmed it into the track. Then you’d get your parts. The reason they did this was to make holes for the music to come through, otherwise we’d all be splattering all over every track. All we had to do then was learn our parts and the arrangements. Both mine and N’Faly’s input was probably three or four months apart.”
Emmerson agrees. “We’d spend four months on one track before. For this album I wanted things to be much more sponta- neous. It was very important that we got into a room and played music together as a group and I think that comes across. I did- n’t want it to be one guy in a studio with lots of samples and beats and people send- ing in a bit of guitar. I wanted it to be a genuine collaboration, when we’re all sit- ting round. It was important, for example that when we went to record Davy [Spillane] we were all there.” Spillane, whom they recorded in his studio on the Cliffs of Moher, the wild, most westerly point of Ireland, referred to their pitching up as “a chance to pick up on a twenty- year interrupted conversation.”
It’s a conversation that underpins the organic sound, the lilting cohesiveness that binds it, however unique the expression of any of the diverse and culturally specific ele- ments within it. As live drum tracks tend to speed up (as on track two, the gorgeously spare Beware Soul Brother, featuring Riogh- nach Conolly’s entrancing vocals) you get the sense of everyone playing in the mom - ent together. It gives a fresh sense of spon- taneity, however subliminal that might be. This way of working speaks to now – to our eco-aware, back-to-nature, vinyl -collecting new nostalgia. It conveys the music’s rele- vance, with its subtle modernity and ancient roots as surely as the upfront cool-electronic approach spoke to the ’90s and noughties, successfully bringing marginalised folk and African/world influences into, if not the full flood of the mainstream, then at least its fast-flowing tributaries.
comer Robbie Harris to play bodhran, Har- ris nailed every track in his first take. “He did the whole album in four hours! He’s grown up on Afro Celt music. He knows African rhythms – he plays the calabash and the djembe and you give him a calabash groove and he just gets it. That wouldn’t have happened twenty years ago. You wouldn’t have got an Irish bodhran player who knew what a calabash was. Equally Griogair will go to a session in a pub in Scotland and there’s a kora player there, a Balkan pipe player…”
“W
Kalsi nods. “When I first started to go sessions with a tabla, people would look at me as if to say ‘really?’ But now they’re like, ‘it’s cool, you can stay!’”
When Sound Magic came out in Nov - ember 1996, Afro Celt Sound System hadn’t just released an album, they’d launched a genre, as the very notion of ‘Celtic Connec- tions’ testifies. Though for Emmerson, who says “I thought we were destined to play the alternative stages at 2 am in the hippy tent,” the realisation that he might have a success on his hands that included a subse- quent Grammy nomination and a Billboard No 1, didn’t hit him until on the main stage at WOMADelaide that year, in front of a roaring crowd.
It’s easy to forget when now, as Emmer- son puts it, “All you need is an Apple Mac, some music software, some Afrobeats and percussion samples to make your own world fusion,” just how innovative they were when they started out. “When we were doing it, everything had to be organic, fresh.” He stops, laughing. “It sounds like Lush” (the organic cosmetics company whose founder and fellow birdwatcher Mark Constantine is his partner in their record company Emmerson, Corncrake and Constantine). “We had to make our own loops – there weren’t any sample CDs. The most radical thing to do at the time was to create our own samples. N’Faly would come in and play a bit of kora and we’d sample it up. But now, he comes in and plays the whole track.” Which conversely is currently the far more radical approach. It’s as if Emmerson can’t help himself. He lived in Hackney for years before it had anything to do with hipsters, moving to Dorset when E8 became the only place to be seen.
It was a move a long time coming, root- ed in an epiphany that struck him in Sene- gal 25 years ago. Then Emmerson, describ- ing himself as “a cynical and disillusioned acid jazz DJ, without two beans to rub together” (though by now one with an impressive musical CV), was contacted by Jumbo at Mango Records who put him in touch with a French producer working with Baaba Maal. “He was having a hard time and said he couldn’t do it, what with the power cuts and the rubbish studio and nobody turning up on time. By the end of the phone call he was saying we shouldn’t do it either!” Emmerson headed on out to Dakar with fellow DJ Mark Wolford.
“We were out there for three days, nothing happens. Then a beat-up car turns up and we drive for six hours. We arrive in this village, we must have been nearly in
e did do that,” Emmerson says, finding that 21 years on, when bringing in new-
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