African Head Charge: A Trip to Bolgatanga album review — sounds of rural Ghana

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If Rex Asanga, municipal chief executive of Bolgatanga Municipal Assembly in northern Ghana, is reading this, he should consider giving a bonus, or at least thanks, to his culture and PR chiefs. The area is currently garnering a lot of attention in music: earlier this year, favourite son King Ayisoba released another well-received album, Work Hard; a couple of weeks ago Frafra gospel legend Alogte Oho and His Sounds of Joy celebrated its capital with the cascading rush of “This is Bolga!”. Now African Head Charge return for their first album in 12 years and, again, Bolgatanga is in the title and throughout the music.

African Head Charge started in the early 1980s as a dub reggae outfit with a mission to “make a psychedelic, but serious, African dub record.” From My Life in a Hole in the Ground (a nod to Brian Eno and David Byrne’s nod to Amos Tutuola) to Vision of a Psychedelic Africa (a nod just to Eno), its albums married deep dub, drumming, global instrumentation and found sound. Like The Velvet Underground, the group were more influential than popular — everyone from The Orb to Transglobal Underground owes them a debt.

The Jamaican-born percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah — one of the group’s two mainstays alongside producer Adrian Sherwood — has relocated to Bolgatanga. In A Trip to Bolgatanga the group swap the expansiveness of previous records for a focus on the soundworld of northern Ghana.

It opens with kologo, the characteristic two-stringed lute that sounds like an ngoni, played here and elsewhere by King Ayisoba himself. On “Never Regret a Day” piercing hunter’s flutes provide a chorus. “Accra Electronica” has fat metropolitan beats, but for the most part the atmosphere is rural as in “Push Me Pull You”, which combines chirruping insects and birdsong with eerie wind instruments. The title track opens with interlocking kologo patterns that evolve into a piano melody with blasts of horns.

★★★★☆

‘A Trip to Bolgatanga’ is released by On-U Sound