From the Heavens

N'Draman Blintch - Essika-Ti

I’ve never been much of a dancer.

Not because I couldn’t, but because it just didn’t feel to me what it seemed to feel like to other people.

Sure, I had my little flirtations, when I was in my early teens, going through the motions at places like Club Soda (the all-ages prep school for future club kids) and Tradewinds, a pretty inconsequential Houston version of Miami’s way more famous teen club, the Pac Jam.

But I just didn’t welcome dancing into my body.

I welcomed it into my ears though. And even though I’ll never be a dancer, when I listen to really great dance music, I can see myself dancing. A tiny version of me, like a flickering hologram, bumping around the screen of my inner mind’s movie theater.

It takes a quick eight seconds for this song to announce its sublime intentions, although in fairness, that strangeness should be easy to expect based on the album’s title: Cosmic Sounds. But the squealing warble of that eighth second is really only the beginning of the sublime direction of this tune. After the intro, the song then sinks into a thick bouncing bassline and pumping hi-hat that bobs around for a minute or so, but, other than the Nigerian voices over top, is pretty straight forward four on the floor.

Then, at the 1:54 mark, the whole thing drops a level.

The bass moves from being in front of the beat to behind it. The guitar needles down from its steady scratchy funk strum into a a thin and simple two note repetition. In all the space left appears a faint organ. The rhythm switches from roll to bounce. From a European style of disco to a very distinctly African update.

It’s amazing, really. The whole feel of the song changes with a drum fill, like you’re crossing over some boundary between worlds, the colonized flipping the script on the colonizers. I recommend headphones, so that you can not only hear how the dominant guitar pans from hard right to hard left, but also so that you can feel how weightless and airy the space becomes. It’s a contradictory heaviness.

When the song returns to it’s earlier groove, it’s then a waiting game. The musicians have shown you the heavens. The listener (or the dancer), settles back in, but with the knowledge that ahead lies a return to that promise of rhythmic bliss.

It makes the album cover all the more interesting to me.

Like what what’s going on here? Bombs away in the comments!

Not into this song? Stick around for the next one, it may be what you didn’t know you needed! Remember, there are only two genres of music here at SERMONS!: good and bad, and I have too much to do to waste time on bad music.