root salad f24 Onipa
Ghana meets UK, K.O.G. & The Zongo Brigade meet Nubiyan Twist. Jamie Renton explains.
bit odd on paper, but makes perfect sense when you hear them. “Bringing traditional African ideas with lots of contemporary styles,” says Tom. “So, that can branch out to UK garage or wonky hip-hop.”
After an intensive six months working up the material, K.O.G. and Tom made their debut as a duo at an Africa Express event in Australia for the Commonwealth Games and Nelson Mandela’s 100th Birthday. They performed as a full band for the first time with a couple of sets at this year’s Shambala Festival in Northamptonshire and have been playing around the UK ever since. “It’s amazing how good a response we’ve got, seeing as how rough around the edges it is. It’s an energy and a mix of sounds that’s get- ting people excited.”
I
t’s late Friday night at Camden’s Jazz Café. The place is packed out with a mix of serious music heads and week- end party people, the DJ’s pumping
out Afro-house and the bar’s run out of draught beer by the time Onipa hit the stage. This is a most singular ensemble, combining various deep African roots tradi- tions with bang-up-to-date UK dance music influences. Theirs is a rough but sweet sound that seems to go down well with everyone that night: music nerds and cock- tail-swigging dancers alike.
I’ve been enjoying Onipa’s debut EP
Open My Eyes (Wormfood) since its summer release. This is not really surprising, given that the London-based Wormfood label is a reliable purveyor of African-flavoured dancefloor excellence and Onipa are a col- laboration between the Ghanaian singer and percussionist who goes by the name of K.O.G. (Kweku to his mum) and leads a favourite band of mine (K.O.G. And The Zongo Brigade) and guitarist/producer Tom Excel, who leads another favourite ensem- ble, Nubiyan Twist.
An hour or so before showtime, I grab a few minutes backstage with Tom to map out the Onipa story. “It started with the friendship between K.O.G. and me,” Tom explains. “We worked together on a reggae project I was doing six or seven years ago called Chief Rockers. He was singing a lot of reggae back then with sound systems and
he did a track with us.” When Tom found out K.O.G. was from Ghana, he started play- ing him some African music. Tom grew up hearing African and other global sounds, courtesy of his dad’s record collection. “I studied classical guitar,” he recalls, “but it was the stuff I heard in my dad’s collection that really excited me. I just used to sit at home and play along to things. It was a real soundtrack to my childhood.”
K.O.G. was instantly fired up by Tom’s African selections, having had little oppor- tunity to play African music since moving to the UK from Ghana about a decade ago. They’ve been developing material together ever since, whilst retaining their main pro- jects (The Zongo Brigade up in Sheffield, Nubiyan Twist down south).
Finally, 2018 saw the launch of that col- laboration in the form of Onipa (the name means ‘human’). “We’ve both got big bands as our main project,” Tom tells me, “and the time just seemed right to do something on the side that’s small and really raw and powerful. Not as big and slick, with just a different energy. Combining all the styles of music which we love.”
They drafted in Nubiyan Twist’s drum- mer Finn Booth and pianist/sample mer- chant Dwane Kilvington AKA Wonky Logic (“It’s a real tight little family”) and set out with a plan to explore what they describe as ‘Afro-Futurism’. A term which might look a
bang!” The title track Open My Eyes has got a strong Congolese flavour, a kind of disco- soukous. Baala moves things over to South Africa, with township jive-style guitar and the influence of contemporary shangaan electro music, as well as that of the late Sier- ra Leonian king of bubu, Janka Nabay. Woza, meanwhile, takes its cue from the amped-up thumb piano of Kinshasa’s Konono Number One (“It’s such an infectious noise and I’ve just always been obsessed with it”). I Know has got deep African roots and an insistent dubstep-type beat.
T
“This EP has largely been me and Kweku meeting up in my home studio,” says Tom of their working methods. “I’ll have written some loose ideas or he’ll sing some things. And I’ll just sketch it, quite quickly electronically. Then we’ve learnt them as a band. Only because it’s such a new project, we’ve had to have some way of structuring it to get gigs. But there’s a lot of spontaneity too. Some tunes, we’ll just jam and then put them into the set the next day. And there’s improvised parts in the set, where we have a rough groove and Kweku’s an amazingly dynamic performer, incredibly versatile with all the different sounds he can make with his voice and styles he can sing and his dancing. So, we kind of follow each other really. That feeds into the compositions. The more we play live as a band, the more that becomes a dynamic of writing.”
Onipa play Rich Mix on 2nd February 2019, as part of the London Remixed Festi- val.
londonremixedfestival.com
onipa.bandcamp.com F
he EP’s certainly been hitting the spot. “We just thought we’d put all the heaviest, happiest, danciest tunes on it and start with a real
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