Ibeyi's debut album was made for your spiritual 6th sense

jonathan

March 16, 2015 10:45 AM

Ibeyi’s debut album, was made specifically for the enjoyment and nourishment of your sixth sense. It is made to take your on a sailing trip to a place where music becomes your soul and your soul becomes a mirror of all things sensual, artful, and spiritual.

How can one make music so enthralling, so captivating, so other worldly…so spiritual!

The 'Ibeyi' album is not for you, neither is it designed to hit you without pain. It skips all that we hold dear in music, and seeks to redefine it all with an ancestral spiritual angle of things.

I fell deep for the 20-year twin sisters of Ibeyi last month when I fell upon the entrancing, unsettling video for their single ‘River.’

The way that Lisa-Kainde and Naomi Diaz mixed deep soul with Afro-Cuban tradition and electronic textures resulted in one of the best new cuts of this age. The Diaz twins create a world of intoxicating beauty, in songs that are smart, sweet and emotionally cracked wide open.

Not surprisingly, the Parisian sisters possess beautifully matched voices, though Lisa-Kainde takes the lead on vocals and plays piano, while Naomi brings in the sound of two Afro-Cuban percussive instruments, the cajón and batá. Producer Richard Russell (who's also the chief of their label, XL) adds the crackling energy of synths and samples.

The Diazes' Afro-Cuban heritage is hugely important to them; it's the guiding force of their debut on many levels, particularly in their evocations of the Afro-Caribbean religion Santería.

They begin the album with ‘Ellegua,’ a song to the Yoruban orisha spirit of the same name — he represents the beginning and end of life, and is always the first orisha greeted in any ceremony. (Without his blessing, nothing else can proceed.)

Religious references and Yoruba-language chants swirl around the entire album, with songs steeped in references to various orishas, including Oya, Aggayu, Osun, Sango and Yemaya.

In ‘River’, the Díaz sisters sing "River" mostly in English, before raising their voices up in the Yoruba language in a paean to Osun, the Yoruba river orisha spirit and the patron deity of Cuba in the Afro-Caribbean Yoruba tradition.

Afro-Cuban religion isn't the only cultural frame of reference at play here. Born in Paris, the Diaz women have lived there for most of their lives, and it's easy to hear the echoes of French hot jazz in the metallic ring of Lisa-Kainde's voice.

Plus, the Diaz twins are the daughters of the incredible Cuban percussionist Anga Diaz, who died of a heart attack at 45 when the girls were just 11; his spirit clearly nourishes their own work. In "Think of You," the Diazes summon their father's memory and, more directly, his sound: "We walk on rhythm," they sing, heartbreakingly, "and we think of you." There's also a second elegy on the album, "Yanira," in honor of their deceased older sister, a song underpinned with a gorgeous, haunting Afro-Cuban rhythm drummed out on the batá.

If this is the kind of sonically stunning, wildly inventive work that Lisa-Kainde and Naomi Diaz are producing on their first album, when they're just 20, just imagine what can we expect in the years ahead.

Simply put, the Ibeyi sisters didn’t make music that can be boxed and labelled as a way of inspiring relativity. Listening to the album, you find yourself using more than your ears, heart and body to digest this. You go deeper than that. Your soul and spirit join the party, and you get lost in the beauty of a new dimension.

jonathan