Album Notes

One-time Faithless guitarist and occasional Dido collaborator, 29-year-old Dave Randall, has produced a border-breaking debut album, Nommo, that is a spellbinding work of great heart and subtlety. Drawing on a wealth of musical, political and cultural references, Randall fuses spoken word, poetry, ethereal vocals and dance rhythms from around the globe. With collaborators as disparate as the angelic Icelandic singer Emiliana Torrini, Kurdistani poet Ismail Taha and New York rapper Anthony DeMore, Nommo is a liberating musical melting pot. Mixing the street sounds of Gaza City with traditional West African instrumentation and complex polyphonal soundscapes, Nommo takes the listener on a blissfully eclectic aural excursion. Charming, relatively simple acoustic tracks such as the emotive gem "Killing Me" and sublime "Weebles Fall" are no less evocative than their more complex neighbours. One of which, "Di Wengi Sane", somehow blends rap, female harmonising from Togo and Cameroon, a speech by Charlie Chaplin and a sitar, all wrapped in raw infectious percussion. Wise, original and inspiring, Slovo's debut is as challenging as it is uplifting. --Christopher Barrett

Faithless guitarist Dave Randall has created "An adventurous and spellbinding work that fuses traditional and contemporary, political and poetic".**** Q Magazine

"In the Dogon, Yoruba, and other West African cultural traditions, the process of nommo - naming things, forces, and modes - is a means of establishing control over the object of the naming process. Menacing problems are ferreted out from the isolated individual experience and reconstructed as problems shared by the community. As shared problems, threats can be met and addressed within a public and collective context."
Angela Davis

"The struggle between people and corporations will be the defining battle of the twenty-first century. If the corporations win, liberal democracy will come to an end. The great social democratic institutions which have defended the weak against the strong - equality before the law, representative government, democratic accountability and the sovereignty of parliament - will be toppled. If, on the other hand, the corporate attempt on public life is beaten back, then democracy may re-emerge the stronger for its conquest. But this victory cannot be brokered by our representatives. Democracy will survive only if the people in whose name they govern rescue the state from its captivity." George Monbiot