There are so many playing potentials on record or indeed live with Shabaka Hutchings - considered and often moving chamber-jazz and intellectual anti-slavery statement back in the day with Zed-U, playing free with Louis Moholo-Moholo's Five Blokes, in two drum/tuba combination with his own Sons of Kemet, hipster futurist with another of his bands The Comet is Coming, his film score appearance side as a session player on Paul Thomas Anderson's classic scientologist satire The Master - and now with this new solo record when he drops his surname Afrikan Culture a diaspora record that runs in parallel with Shabaka's South African Ancestors explorations: the project of the reedist and flautist's that we like best. This goes even deeper, is more Malian in a certain sense and is probably one of his best works compositionally and overall in a recording career going back to 2009's Night Time on the Middle Passage as part of Zed-U. Afrikan Culture features various types of Shakuhachi flutes and layers flutes with kora and mbira also part of the overtly global soundworld. Hutchings once again delivers a staggering new phase on a recording. Pick of the EP for marlbank is the vivid dreaming of 'The Dimension of Subtle Awareness'. A case of Shabaka walking and talking with the spirits, key to the overarching mythology at play.
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