#lëk ndau mbay

[spilladabalia]

Ndox Electrique - Lëk Ndau Mbay

[dustedmagazine]

Ndox Electrique —  Tëdd ak Mame Coumba Lamba ak Mame Coumba Mbang (Bongo Joe)

The guitar rips right through these chants and rhythms, blaring out a mighty roar that both upends and undergirds Ndox Electrique’s West African trance music. This outfit, a partnership between Europeans François R. Cambuzat and Gianna Greco and the n'doëp community at the far western tip of Senegal, near Dakar on a peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean.

The n'doëp use their music for religious rituals, achieving an ecstatic communion with the divine through polyrhythmic drumming and singing. To this Cambuzat and Greco add guitar, bass and electronics, kicking up an amp fried ruckus behind age-old traditional forms. A purist might quibble—and certainly this is a syncretic, hybridized endeavor—but there is no denying the obliterating force of this music, nor the way it transports you from whatever you’re doing into an awe-shocked mystic space.

Cambuzat and Greco have worked this trick before with Ifriqiyya Electrique, a similarly configured north-south collaboration, in this case drawing on Tunisian traditions. You can see that partnership in action here. The Ndox Electrique project feels denser and more bracing to me, its guitar parts blowing back your hair as the drums thump on in intricate patterns. A concert recorded at KEXP shows the band standing in a line, two Sengalese women singers flanked by Cambuzat and Greco, a three man hand-drum line keeping time to the side. Their rendition of “Lëk Ndau Mbay” grows out of a spare, harrowing call and response, thickening and complexifying as it rolls downhill like an avalanche. Similarly, “Yaré Rirewé Bakora Ndoye” may remain as a distant, dusty, acoustic dialogue between soloist and chorus, it leads directly into the sirening, drum hammering, euphoric transport of “Ngor Diouf Né Du Wallé.” This stuff rocks in a large-scale, body-shifting, arena-filling kind of way, but its bones are elemental.

It’s hard to say why the electric roar works so well, without feeling disruptive or ill-fitting or too full of itself. The guitar and the bass only intensify the whirl and ecstatic conveyance of the traditional n'doëp music, turning an already fierce aesthetic right up to 11.

Jennifer Kelly