“The core of the Fofoulah album is built around a suite of often convoluted and multi-directional beats, integrating a selection of instruments and samples, that either sit upon a core rhythm, stopping, starting and phasing in and out to build a canvas of melodies and abrupt rhythmic injections. Secka provides the narrative to this intricate and elaborate work. It’s he that turns the symphony into an opera, adding an emotional response to the music, and giving the music a sense of purpose and direction. Without his vocal, and there are instumental pieces here too, the music has an almost meditative complexity that almost reflect the human mind in its darting, flitting, randomised notation.”
The Audiophile Man
“Daega Rek pushes things a lot further [than Fofoulah’s first LP for Glitterbeat] … It’s dense music, humid with electronics and keys, and gives the surprising yet exciting impression of a band who were seeking after one thing but stumbled on something else entirely.”
The Wire
“Fofoulah's follow-up album hasn’t just moved on but supersonically zoomed into the experimental void; even an esoteric, spiritual one at times … A ricocheting lunar-tropical bounding dub cosmology … On the ensemble’s most out-there of experimental dance albums, vague echoes and passing reverberations of R&B connect with roots, hip-hop with drum’n’bass, and the tribal with post-punk synthesized music as rhythms both rapid and chattering flutter with slower slurred ones and synthetic melodic atmospheres.”
Monolith Cocktail
"Fofoulah's foundations are dub and jazz, but these are beefed up with electronics … and, most persuasively, the sabar and tama drums of West Africa.”
Mojo
"Avoiding pastiche or casual borrowing … Fofoulah have set sail toward an original sound."
The Wire
“One of the most progressive and innovative albums of this year … Electronica glitches through frightening and beautiful shamanic chants, quickfire sabar beats punch holes in your daily lives and fill them with futuristic melodies and Wolof tales. Everything shifts with such fluidity and shockingly raw power that any other music that you might care to listen to afterwards will seem limp and bland … Hip-hop dances with wild West African trance, jazz trips with electro lightning strikes and they come together in a sweeping embrace of different cultures. They are creating Worlds within Worlds.”
Louder Than War
"Complex rhythms, pulling in elements of dub, drum n bass and footwork."
CMU Approved
“Bravely adventurous"
The Guardian
"Highly dramatic, the rhythms of the Gambian sabar drummer Kaw Secka, together with the production of keyboards player Tom Challenger, hold nothing back in delivery, with some hard driving beats and Sci-Fi sound effects to keep things in order. Delivered in Wolof, the tracks, such as Seye (Marriage), Ndanane (Star) and the almost tortured performance of Kaddy, written in memory of the Grenfell disaster, quiver with pounding futurist beats, whilst the title cut settles into an appealing groove.”
Northern Sky
“It is not an album to describe, it needs to be experienced, to allow the cross patterns and varying speeds to take you body and mind in different directions simultaneously. It is, however, an album that bears listening to time and again, learning as you go and grasping more of the deep heart and soul of the collective along the way. Open your mind and your heart and let this album in(vade).”
**** Music-News
