Album Notes

IzibBongo performs songs in the rich and diverse traditional styles of people groups all over the world. Playing African drums, Indonesian angklungs, Bolivian flutes, Middle Eastern stringed instruments, and more, they perform indigenous praise and worship music researched by Bible translation projects around the globe.

It's anything but what you might think of as traditional church music, but is truly the music of the Church universal. Rather than incorporating diverse musical expressions into Western contemporary music styles, they seek to present these cultural treasures as authentically as possible, using as many as 80 indigenous instruments and 20 languages in a single performance. Some of the music may sound strange to the Western ear; but then, who gets to decide what "strange" is?

What type of music can make grown men cry for joy in the jungles of Brazil?
How do they celebrate the harvest in Indonesia?
What does a woman of Cameroon do with a clay pot with a hole in its side?
What does the popular and traditional music of minority language groups really sound like (before the music industry makes it more "accessible" to mass markets in the West)?

If your vision of Christian music is constrained by Western hymnology or CCM, let these ethnic worship specialists broaden your worldview. Your church never sounded like this!