Throughout the 1990s, the West African country of Sierra Leone was wracked with a bloody, horrifying war that forced millions to flee their homes. The musicians that would eventually form Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars are all originally from Freetown, and they were forced to leave the capital city at various times after violent rebel attacks. Most of those that left the country made their way into neighboring Guinea, some ending up in refugee camps and others struggling to fend for themselves in the capital city of Conakry.

Ruben Koroma and his wife Grace had left Sierra Leone in 1997 and found themselves in the Kalia refugee camp near the border with Sierra Leone. When it became clear they would not be heading back to their homeland anytime soon, they joined up with guitarist Francis John Langba (aka Franco), and bassist Idrissa Bangura (aka Mallam), other musicians in the camp whom they had known before the war, to entertain their fellow refugees. After a Canadian relief agency donated two beat up electric guitars, a single microphone and a meager sound system, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars were born.

American filmmakers Zach Niles and Banker White encountered the band in the Sembakounya Camp, and were so inspired by their story they ended up following them for three years as they moved from camp to camp, bringing much needed joy to fellow refugees with their heartfelt performances. Eventually, the war in Sierra Leone came to an end, and over time the All Stars returned to Freetown, where they met other returning musicians who joined the band’s rotating membership. It was there in the tin-roofed shacks of Freetown’s ghettos that Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars recorded the tracks that ended up, along with unplugged recordings made in the refugee camps, being the basis for their debut album, Living Like a Refugee, which was released on the label Anti in 2006.

The resulting film that documented this moving saga, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, was a critical success, and introduced the world to the personalities and dramatic stories behind the band, not to mention their instantly appealing music. “As harrowing as these personal tales may be,” wrote The New York Times, “the music buoying them is uplifting.” Newsweek raved, “It’s as easy to fall in love with these guys as it was with the Buena Vista Social Club.”

The movie, album and eventual U.S. tours helped expand their following, and soon the band found itself playing in front of enraptured audiences of tens of thousands at New York’s Central Park SummerStage, Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival and the revered Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. They appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, contributed a song to the Blood Diamond film soundtrack, participated in the U2 tribute album In the Name of Love: Africa Celebrates U2, and earned praise and backing from Sir Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Ice Cube, Angelina Jolie and others inspired by their life-affirming story and captivating music. In one of the most surreal moments of their climb to fame, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars opened for Aerosmith at the 12,000-capacity Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut.

Botnik Studios | 21 July 2012 | Tickets

Toronto-based turntable artist Cheldon Paterson, alias SlowPitch, is a boundless sonic explorer of towering technical proficiency. He’s fascinated by the interplay between sound, movement, and live performance – where the public’s response acts as an integral component that impresses each singular performance. Over the years, he’s been nominated for the K.M. Hunter Artist Award for Music and received grants from the Toronto, Ontario, and Canada Arts Councils. This year he played at the esteemed Mutek Electronic Music Festival in Montreal and has performed at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Music Gallery, Royal Ontario Museum, Gardiner Museum and the Harbour Front Centre to name a few. He is also a founding member of revered experimental turntable band INSIDEaMiND. As SlowPitch he has released two projects RPLCMNT and Biosphere Stargaze, both offering an eclectic array of improvised turntable sound manipulation and science fiction inspired rhythmic production sure to carry you through to another cosmic universe.

FRIDAY 8 JUNE

Club Liming: Daniel Lemma and Michael Azar dig deep into their collection of rocksteady and similar styles of awesome grooves.

DJ Gavanas: a musician and a social anthropologist who has written about dj culture, technology and gender. Her djing crosses the borders of various genres but tends to focus on styles like steppas dub, dubstep and electronica.

SATURDAY 9 JUNE

José González: Known as a member of Junip and as a solo artist. Tells us he will be playing some very “danceable music from various parts of the world. But no indie rock.”

Lisa Nordström: One half of experimental pop duo Midaircondo. Solo performer. A member IAMSOAREYOU. Runs Rex Studio. And, like, a hundred other cool projects. Sounds are electronic, acoustic, jazzy.

Iamtrip: Electronic, hovering landscapes cut up drums och heavy bass. He is a trip.

SUNDAY 10 JUNE

Ebbot Lundberg: Singer of Gothenburg’s legendary rock band The Soundtrack of our Lives and a walking rock encyclopedia. Ebbot was already collecting MC5 vinyls when the rest of us where humming along to Smurf Hits.

Nathalie Barusta & Sebastian Gäbel: Master minds behind the genre defying and ultra cool project Göteborg String Theory.

Dj Mleccha and Wattsriot: Grooves and fat beats from two longtime collaborators and curators of Clandestino.

Why Should the Cultural Minister Resign?

In relation to the controversy surrounding Makode Linde’s cake performance we will devote a few hours on Sunday to a direct and nuanced discussion whether and if so, why Lena Adelsohn Roth should resign from her position as Sweden’s Minister of Culture. Those participating are among others, Dariush Moaven Doust (moderator), Makode Linde, Dror Feiler, Joanna Rytel & Elin Wikström. The panel takes place 10.00-14.00. Lunch is at 12.00.

Dariush M Doust is a psychoanalyst, a Doctor of Philosophy, and previously a lecturer in art theory at Valand Art Academy. He is a member in the art collective ARC and founded the non-profit Kurrents.

Makode Linde is a DJ and artist. He is educated at Konstfack and the Royal College of Art in Stockholm. He has produced a series of artwork called Afromantics. In April 2012 he became known after his performance/installation as a cake at Moderna Museet which the Cultural Minister had to cut through.

Dror Feiler is a musician, composer, artist and political activist. He was born in 1951 in Israel and has lived in Sweden since 1973. In 2004 his art installations “Snow White and the Madness of Truth” created together with Gunilla Sköld Feiler (that was vandalized by the Israeli ambassador to Sweden) rendered him international attention.

Joanna Rytel is a Swedish artist, born in Warsaw 1974. She studied at University College of Art and Design in Stockholm. In 2000, along with Fia –Stina Sandlund, stormed the Miss Sweden pageant under the name Unfucked Pussy. She gained notoriety as did her catch phrase, “man slime.”

Elin Wikström is an artist based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Her work – with roots in performance, conceptual, and context based art – deals with being subjected to a constructed situation, which leads to reflections on social issues and include her own participation, along with collaboration and exchange with those who commissions her work, audiences and specially invited participants.

10.00-14.00 June 10th at House of Win Win, Tredje Långgatan 13b, Göteborg. Free entry with festival pass, otherwise 80kr at the door if there is space.

Question: What goes bleep bloop like an 8 bit video game, wears orange colored whigs and dances faster than 180 BPM? Answer: Shangaan Electro. The name of both a musical style and a group from Johannesburg.

Synthetic marimba licks. Soulful singing on top of a grid of outrageously maxed electronic beats. It sounds as if Super Mario ate one too many mushrooms, went down one of those green pipes and came out in a South African shanty town: A humoruos, mega artificial dance music saturated by plenty of harmful coloring agents and lots of call and respons chanting. And at the same time a hyper local music, made and consumed by the Shangaan people who live around the cities of Johannesburg and Limpopo – one of the most marginalized groups in South Africa.

The epicenter of the movement is in Soweto: Producer Richard ”The Dog” Mthethwa runs the operation from a small room next to his kitchen. It is here that he writes, sings, produces and organizes Shangaan Electro. ”I even copy the cassettes myself and silk screen the covers”, he writes on his website.

The obscure music scene suddenly became viral around 2010 thanks to some videos that Mththwa made. Wills Glasspiegel of Afropop Worldwide found them on the Internet late one evening in his Brooklyn home. He became obsessed with the idea of releasing a compilation and flew to Johannesburg where he met with Mthethwa. Record label Honest Jon’s soon put out the compilation, entitled ”Shangaan Electro”, and is releasing a sequel this year: a collection of remixes called ”Shangaan Shake”. The local underdog music was suddenly on just the right turntables at the right time, as ears from around the world turned curiously towards African electronic pop.

The live band Shangaan Electro consists of The Dog himself – Richard Mthethwa – on vocals and keyboards, the group Tshetsha Boys who perform wearing clowns masks the singers Tiyiselani och Nkata Mawewe and a group of dancers.

Tinariwen’s biography is as unlikely as it is fascinating. Today the world’s most famous representatives of a genre known as Desert Blues, the group has fans in celebrities like Radiohead and U2, and their performance during the 2010 FIFA world cup was seen broadcast to people all around the globe.

But the road to success has been a long and crooked one. Tinariwen was formed in 1979 by a group of Tuareg Berbers in a Libyan refugee camp in the Sahara dessert. They started playing a tranquil and melancholy yet hypnotic and danceable music.

The sound of Tinariwen is centered around the electric guitar which plays melodies and riffs based on pentatonic scales, sometimes sounding quite closely related to Delta blues. However, members of the band claim not to have heard American blues music in at that time early in their career when the Tinariwen style developed. There are theories based on the idea that the two traditions both are distant descendants of a music played in the lands around the river Niger hundreds of years ago.

People started calling them ”Kel Tinariwen” – the boys from the dessert. After some time they started writing their own material with lyrics about their own lives – as opposed to the traditional songs they had played initially, with lyrics mostly telling the stories of a mythological past. One of the experiences that formed band leader Ibrahim Ag Alhabib’s songwriting was when as a child he witnessed his father’s execution during a rebellion in Mali.

In 1980 Tinariwen enrolled a training program to become soldiers in Muammar Gaddafi’s army, as a way to gain legitimate residence in the country. During the training they met other musicians and soon the group grew into a collective and built a rudimentary studio. Their music was starting to spread around the Sahara.

In 1989 Tinariwen moved to Mali and became full time musicians. Since then the group has played more than 700 shows in Europe, the USA, Japan and Australia. Their 2011 album recieved a Grammy for ”Best World Music Album”.

LKJ was born in Jamaica but moved to London with his family in 1963, where he would eventually become a central figure in the carribean subculture. For a while he was a member of the Brittish section of the Black Panther movement, arranging poetry workshops and working with Rasta Love: a group of poets and percussionists.

Reggae and dub music slowly found its way into the mainstream of Brittish popular culture through musicians like The Clash in the early eightees. LKJ released records like Bass Culture and LKJ In Dub at this time. He had signed a deal with major label Island Records, and his audience was growing significantly.

In spite of often being described as the inventor of the term Dub Poetry as a name of the specific hybrid of toasted declamation and reggae music that carribean Djs in London started making in the mid-seventees – an artform which is often thought to have laid the foundation for brittish hip hop – LKJ does not want to put that label on his work: for him words always come first, and music is added once the text is finished.

LKJ was the first black poet to have his selected work published by Penguin Classics. Here, next to writers such as Shakespeare and Chaucer, he continues to question the politics of the written word – who is allowed to use the English language and how? His poems are often in Jamaican English: the language of the black working class.

Most of LKJ’s poetry talks about the black Jamaican experience in the United Kingdom, everyday life as seen in the streets of London’s poorer neighborhoods. As for example in Inglan is a Bitch. ”Writing is a political act and poetry a cultural weapon”, he said in an interview. He recites his lyrics to music created in colaboration with dub master Dennis Bovell. LKJ rarely performs live, so don’t miss the opportunity to see this legendary and amazing wordsmith at Clandestino Festival.

Gonjasufi invaded ears and stirred curiosity after putting vocals on a beat that became ‘Testament’ on producer Flying Lotus’ 2008 album, ‘Los Angeles’. Two years later, his debut album, ‘A Sufi and a Killer’, hit the streets to critical acclaim. What we are talking about is a hip-hop visionary, an artist that delves deep into self and beyond to lay everything on the plate for you to absorb – even if some of the words are barely decipherable, as if they have been momentarily buried by the same beat archaeologist that discovered them. The voice has range, from a razor-edge coarse delivery to that of a whispering soul on a cosmic voyage.

Turkish ‘70’s drum breaks, the blues, sanctuary, samples from Raag’s, bombastic beats, smoke-filled time signatures, psychedelica, analogue, digital, rough, devilry, discipline, justice, meditation, union, hardships, responsibilities, vows to one’s oneself, Hendrix-inspired dreams, all make their mark and deliver articles of substance that are honest and sincere. This is an indication of what hip-hop heads can achieve when they begin to see beyond their own belly button. Contradictions are abound, but that is how life is, isn’t it? Admitting them is a start.

Gonjasufi released the mini album ”MU.ZZ.LE” in January, a recording brief in format but rich with messages, political, social as well as spiritual. The songs were written while traveling and reflect the frustration and anger that he sometimes would experience in the world. The album was recorded in Gonjasufi’s home in the Mojave desert. The music is slower here and morose yet magical. It’s one man’s journey on his own through the darkness.

Recommended listening:
‘MU.ZZ.LE’ CD (Warp 2012
)
‘When I’m In Awe’: Gaslamp Killer feat. Gonjasufi (Brainfeeder 2011)
‘A Sufi and A Killer’ CD (Warp 2010)
‘Testament’: Flying Lotus featuring Gonjasufi (Warp 2008)

”How can less be more? More is more!” said an agitated Yngwie Malmsteen in a recent heavy metal documentary on Swedish public tv. This might be true to guitar virtuoso Malmsteen, but it definitely does not apply to this minimalist and simultaniously expansive duo: Taking into consideration Wildbirds & Peacedrums’ rather sparse toolbox – mostly consisting only of Andreas Werliin’s drums and Mariam Wallentin’s voice – it is impressive what a range of aural worlds they managed to construct.

The project started at the College of Music in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2006 and Mariam’s interest for the possiblities and limitations of the human voice have been there all along: A curious sort of laborating in the grey zone between what is normally known as speech on one hand and musical expression on the other. Andreas drumming experiments with the physical perception of music, his drums play with our sense of balance and proportion: sometimes in the form of refined rolling grooves, and other times beats that move like a Hulk throgh the melodic structures. All in all the music of Wildbirds & Peacedrums uses empty space as much as it utilizes sound.

After releasing their debut album ”Heartcore”, the duo was given the award for best Swedish Jazz by the organization Rikskonserter, which enabled them to release their sophomore record, ”The Snake” on Caprice Records. In 2010 the duon traveled to Iceland to record ”Rivers” with arranger Hildur Guðnadóttir and chamber choir Schola Cantorum Reykjavík. Around the same time the Wildbirds & Peacedrums performed at the Swedish Polar Prize ceremony: backed up by a big orchestra they played a version of Björk’s ”Human Behaviour”.

Another much acclaimed collaboration the group participated in was with members of Deerhoof, Skeletons, Kasai Allstars and Clandestino favorites Konono No 1, in a super tour named Congotronics vs Rockers, featuring around twenty musicians on stage simultaniously.

Wildbirds and Peacedrums are currently working on a new album which will be released next year. The show at Bottna will be their only performance in Sweden in 2012.