Wonderful work by SWP's Michael. A duo of gourd-resonated xylophone and kalimba, with murmured vocals drifting further away atop the subtle slippage of the plain, unadorned rhythms. The album production keeps a steady tempo rather than cramming in a variety of tunes, which makes it a very easy listen. The primal landscape of Afro-minimalism? I've been listening to it like I'm possessed. Incantatory chill. (Shhhhh)


This album documents the playing of two elderly master musicians of the Leya people, who live on the Zambian side of the Zambezi River as it flows into Victoria Falls. It was assembled by SWP's Michael Baird—familiar from the reissues of Hugh Tracey's African field recordings—from material he recorded over many years. Since today's Leya youth make their living from tourism, Baird felt that once these two passed away their music would head toward extinction, so he recorded them and also produced a documentary with Engel Mulder, completed as the film "Mutanuka and Syasiya." This album reportedly contains all of the performances heard in that film, along with recordings from 1996, 2010, and 2014.
The two musicians at the center are Crispin Mutanuka (b. 1931), who plays the silimba xylophone with gourd resonators, and Edwin Syasiya (b. 1939), who plays the kanimba mellophone, a single-key thumb piano mounted on an empty tin can. The record includes two duets in this combination of xylophone and thumb piano—rare even in Africa—plus solo pieces from each. Every track has a buzzing quality to its tone, and with improvisation woven throughout, they deliver the aesthetics of repeating African polyrhythms in a way that would startle even modern minimal music. Yet their unrestrained playing is colored by their own particular aesthetic, leaving the listener with the illusion of having wandered into a maze.
Crispin Mutanuka reportedly passed away in June 2019.