Uganda's favorite sonic salvagers Fulu Miziki already had a recognized and well-received album under their upcycled, polyurethane waist straps (2021's
Ngbaka) by the time 2024 EP
Mokano sprang from the soil like a disco-ball-patterned sunflower, but in many ways this later release is their earnest debut to the world.
Ngbaka, while being sonically and texturally interesting and imaginative in its own right, denied a prospective audience a proper exposition of the group's unique interchange of Cuban-inspired and East African sounds- a regrettable development for a band whose raison d'être is raising to the plane of consciousness the natural and genuine in a sea of manufactured superfluity.
Mokano gives a stronger sense of this purpose, while being a more straightforward reclamation of aural authenticity, thriving amidst the mountainous cast-offs of decadence and decay- in other words, it's landfill music meant to root you back in the dirt and struggle of this planet. A call to motion and unity of action rings out from the first strike of a PVC pipe on opener "Mbanga Pasi," with its banded, jived-out rhythms, inundating percolation of improvised percussion, accompanied by a multi-tiered torrent of vibrant group vocals, a potent display of energy that heightens the senses suitable in preparation for the bopping scoot and scrapping skip of "Bopeto" with its pepper-bark puff and gum-boned slap, which then winds down just in time for the high-traction bustle of "Tamatu" to take center stage, followed by the monsoon-summoning charm "Vie Eza," the ascendant acapella of "Soki Ozwyi Yako Lia," and finally, the jerky rhythmic convoke "Mosala," which seems to pull flesh and blood from the clay of the altar on which it pivots to give body to a prancing homunculus, whose gesticular form is as dynamic as lightning and who lithe figure extends as a bridge between the plane of the sky and the terrene flats below. Not everywhere in the world has the infrastructure to dispose of the refuse generated by modern industrial output to satisfy consumer needs, and as a result, many around the world end up living with and amongst the consequences of light production and petty consumption as the terrain around them fills up with refuse and non-biodegradable elements, from both their communities and abroad, as their home becomes a dumping ground for places rich enough to have the luxury of forgetting about the debris created by their lifestyles. But in heaping and accumulating, these disregarded residues of modernity reshape the land where they come to rest, and for those who still maintain a connection to this land, even as undesirable as it is, the detritus integrates into their cosmos, augmenting the spiritual balance and flows of energy but not disrupting the fundamental obligations which the living have to the cumulative well-being of creation; instead, demanding an infusion of imagination to reintegrate what is cast off back into an integrated whole and renew humankind's commitments to the Earth in the process. Fulu Miziki play "junk music," because junk is the indigestible kernel and stubborn gallstone lodged in the belly and at the heart of the contemporary schism with the forces that sustain life on this planet- by reclaiming waste, they are reclaiming the world itself.
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