New release: Rituals
Here’s our latest release, Rituals, released on Christmas Day 2020. Five tracks with a science fiction, futurist vision. One unusual aspect of this release is that we haven’t used a drum kit (sampled or otherwise)…we’ve used hand drums and frame drums only. We wanted an organic texture, future-tech but also rootsy.
Rituals – arriving 25 December
Excellent Sufi hip hop
There’s a lot of Sufi inspired music in the world but probably not a lot of Sufi hip hop. Jhalaak (meaning spark) is a most excellent collection of Indian and Pakistani-flavoured tunes that connects 13th century Sufi poetry with 21st century global bass grooves.
Chugge Khan, Salim Khan and Khete Khan are 19th generation Rajasthani musicians from the Manganiyar tradition who have teamed up with Canadian born Desi hip hop artist, multi-instrumentalist and composer, Ruby Singh (male despite the ambiguous first name). Here they have worked with well known producer DJ Adham Shaikh to create a dancefloor friendly nine track album that seamlessly merges Qawwali and hip hop beats with confident, accomplished vocals and rap.
Totally recommended. Available from Bandcamp.
Beats From The East! Long awaited new podcast episode…
Here’s a new podcast episode. It’s been a while! We have some particularly amazing tunes this time, including a new unreleased tune of our own.
Tracks
1 Secret Archives of the Vatican – Ritual For Star Drive Engage
2 Blvck Waves – Pharoah
3 Blvck Waves – Ramses
4 VFM Style – Bakara
5 Jhalaak – Challa/The Beloved Wanderer
6 Aya Metwalli – Matkhafsh Menni
7 Kaya Project – Beware The Drunken Master (Suduaya Remix)
8 Ges-E and Shandy – Kufiq
9 Celt Islam – Vendetta
https://secretarchivesofthevatican.bandcamp.com/
https://1001nightrecord.bandcamp.com/album/arabic-erreur
https://jhalaak.bandcamp.com/album/jhalaak
https://ma3azef.bandcamp.com/track/matkhafsh-menni
https://sebtaylor.bandcamp.com/album/remixed-body-mind-soul-pt-1
https://nasharecords.bandcamp.com/track/kufiq
https://earthcityrecordz1.bandcamp.com/track/vendetta
Little Flower – new video for very old tune
Little Flower was on our first CD album release, Reformation, in 1998. It’s always been a popular tune (if you can call anything we do popular…). As I recall, we found the drum groove sample on one of those CDs that came with a music magazine, added a synth pad sound and the rest is improvised lines played on an E-bow guitar. No real structure, just a jam that happened to work.
Recently, we’ve been exploring making videos, trying to raise our game and achieve a higher standard whilst still being restricted by our almost-zero budget. Here, we found some free-to-download-and-use clips from Pexels, did some initial editing ourselves using Filmora X, uploaded it to Rotor Videos for some more processing (transitions, effects) and then did some more post processing ourselves.
We found the video clips before thinking about our back catalogue to decide which track they’d work best with. We think this video suits Little Flower very well!
Eastern Legends Mix – on YouTube
We’ve seen quite a few artists adding long mixes of their own tracks to YouTube. We thought we’d experiment a little and see what response we get. Here’s a 25 minute mix from Thousand Yard Prayer.
Tracks:
00:00 The Glory of Ardashir
04:15 Sharaz-De
08:12 The Blind Scribes of Shushtar
12:40 Shedu
16:08 Afshin
19:13 A City Named Abunhiswar
All of these tracks and the albums they’re from can be found here: https://thousandyardprayer.bandcamp.com/
Before Beauty
Here’s a video for a track we released in 2009. Before Beauty was on Remembering Machine, an important album in our musical development. We think it still holds up today.
Lelonek & Talvin Singh Live @ Anokha 1997
The Asian Underground is where Secret Archives of the Vatican got a lot of our initial inspiration (and, indeed, support), despite us not being Asian! Here was a part of dance/electronica that we got. We only made it to Anokha once (a night at The End) but we went regularly to some other events in that scene.
Here is a small glimpse of the vitality of the culture. Most of the musicians, DJs and producers in the Asian Underground scene are still musically active.
New track from The Spy from Cairo
The Spy from Cairo always makes great tunes.
This is available from Bandcamp on a name-your-price basis which means you can download it free if you don’t want to pay or can’t. Please pay something if you can, though, because music has value.
He has a lot more music on there too – check it out!
