In support of his critically acclaimed album Mádibá (May ’23), Blick Bassy is returning this April/May to North America for an extensive spring tour of the United States and Canada.
In his own words, Blick says: “I love playing in the US, a country where artistic appreciation is deeply rooted. I enjoy strolling along the vast roads that connect cities and provide a unique opportunity to admire the magnificent landscape of this country.”
The new performance artistically reinterprets the various tracks from Madiba, which saw Blick experiment with electronic production to support his iconic voice and composition style for the first time.
Musically, Madíbá took Blick in a new direction, spurred by a love of James Blake and Bon Iver to relocate his voice in electronic textures with more spare instrumentation. The album (recorded between Paris, Biarritz, and Quimper and produced/composed with Romain Jovion), let Bassy’s voice dominate, carried by delicate guitar, synthesizer, bassoon, and brass. The cuts are diaphanous and nevertheless modernist and testify to a contemporary and poetic Africanity at the crossroads of soul, folk, and electro. The album released in May 2023 has been supported by a wide list of media including Louder Than War, Bandcamp, Les Inrocks, Le Monde, Mojo, Afropop Worldwide, and aired on BBC6, KCRW, KEXP, Radio Eins, and FIP.
The Cameroonian singer-songwriter has also brought us three new versions of “LoBa“, the dynamic single from Mádibá, including a remix by badfocus. “Loba” is a contemplative, melancholy track, in which the narrator takes the form of a bird vainly flying over dwellings in search of a well, only to find that the village has disappeared. The omnipresent synthesiser layers accompany the movements of the bird in the sky, jostled at times by slight dissonances linked to the clenching of thirst, while closing on a full, ethereal horizon line.
The Prague producer badfocus, a rising star on the Eastern European bass and intelligent dance music scene, deconstructed the original track into 3 acts. Celestial in its introduction, not to mention nods to Warpian electronica, it then unleashes syncopated, industrial rhythms, developing a fascinating, dystopian sonic canvas, before concluding with the chant of another planet.
Will you be catching Blick Bassy on his North American tour?
