akazehe done three ways

Dirty Projectors’ new song “When The World Comes To An End” is great, and deploys a brilliant technique where the female singers each take a syllable of a wordless melody and sing them in such a tight sequence that it sounds like one person singing:

Dirty Projectors – When The World Comes To An End (live on Jimmy Fallon)

It’s perfectly and affectingly executed, but I’m thinking that chief Projector Dave Longstreth, being a former music student and all, has copied the technique from this little bit of genius:

Akazehe

It’s a field recording of some singers in Africa. That’s all I know. My friend Alan gave it to me, apparently from a big compilation of stuff that influenced jazz. I couldn’t stop listening to it, and since then I’ve seen it popping up everywhere, Zelig-like. Dirty Projectors adopted it for their chamber-math-R’n'B thing, and it’s been sampled by Tortoise on this, taken from obscurities collection A Lazarus Taxon. They’re in full cosmic lounge mode, but the sample gives it that little bit of unease:

Tortoise – Restless Waters

And it’s on “Mao Mao” by Starlights, which is some weird Afro-funk obscurity exhumed by French cratedigger Jean Pierre Massiera:

Starlights – Mao Mao

If you ask me it’s crying out for some relentless looping deep under some Radio Slave monster. Let me know if it’s been used anywhere else.