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Sotho Sounds: Junk Funk

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Riverboat Records
Released: 2012.10.01
Time:
 38:48
Category: Folk, World, & Country
Producer(s): Risenga Makondo
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.facebook.com/SothoSounds
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Intro: Be Ea Bojoa, Pt. 1 (Josepha Kojoane Chaka) - 1:27
[2] Ha Kele Monateng (Remeleke Rantho) - 3:28
[3] Jerusalem (Josepha Kojoane Chaka) - 4:25
[4] Koloi Eutate Mandela (Josepha Kojoane Chaka) - 1:55
[5] Mobopong (Sotho Sounds) - 3:42
[6] Lesholu (Josepha Kojoane Chaka) - 3:49
87] Jo! Kelishapa (Josepha Kojoane Chaka) - 2:35
[8] Lefaatse La Bajo (Josepha Kojoane Chaka) - 3:59
[9] Ntheke Ntheke (Josepha Kojoane Chaka) - 2:49
[10] Tseanku (Josepha Kojoane Chaka) - 4:10
[11] Something To Think About (Remeleke Rantho) - 5:06
[12] Outro: Be Ea Bojoa, Pt. 2 (Josepha Kojoane Chaka) - 1:23

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Tumelo Mpokoane - Drums
Josepha Kajoane Chaka - One-String Fiddles, Arranger, Instrumentation
Thseliso Hoko - One-String Fiddles
Monaheng Mporoane - Guitars
Tankiso Pita - Guitars
Rameleke Rantho - Bass, Arranger, Instrumentation
Paseka Mohale - Dancer
Richard Mohale - Dancer

Risenga Makondo - Engineer, Mixing, Photography, Producer
Ben Turner - Mastering
Brad Haynes - Coordination, Design
Rachel Jackson - Coordination, Sleeve Notes
Jacob Crawford - Photography
Ed Morgan - Cover Photo

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2012 CD Riverboat/World Music Network TUG1066

Sotho Sounds are funky shepherds from the Kingdom of Lesotho who have quite literally invented their own music, crafted their own instruments and now continue to follow their own mission turning junk into funk.



Junk Funk is Sotho Sounds debut album and perfectly captures the excitement and humorous bounce of their live performances. The eccentric band met whilst shepherding in the lofty hills of Lesotho, a landlocked enclave surrounded by the Republic of South Africa. Junk Funk is one of the first international recordings to come from Lesotho and is set to spread the unmistakeable Sotho Sounds worldwide.

The band plays instruments crafted out of recycled materials. Their guitars are made from tin-cans and bicycle wire, and rattle melodiously alongside the fuzzed ring of one-string fiddles and the thud and boom of their drums. Atop the mix, swinging unison vocals bring to mind the hugely popular choral tradition of Lesotho. Sotho Sounds also weave the sounds of their everyday life into the music - listen closely and you can hear everything from the jangle of their home-made guitars, to the hum and shatter of the percussion, to the bark of a dog, an accordion, whistles and more. Stumbling across the band, don’t be surprised to find them in traditional Basotho blankets, or instead decked out in gumboots, rainbow-framed shades and, if you are lucky, a neon-pink wig.

The subject matter of their lively songs draws on the social issues and experiences of their everyday lives at home in Lesotho and while travelling abroad. ‘Something To Think About’ was inspired by their travels in England. Amused by everyone constantly asking them, ‘How are you?’ and ‘What are you thinking?’, they decided to write a song in order to give them ‘something to think about’. ‘Ha Kele Monateng’ translates as ‘When I’m Happy’ and is a bright, positive number with catchy call-and-response vocals. ‘Ntheke Ntheke’ (or ‘The Sun Is About To Set’) is a stunning a cappella track that is reminiscent of South African isicathamiya.

Sotho Sounds cite the influence of Basotho traditional music and South African pop, especially the bubblegum pop stylings of Brenda Fassie. Yet ultimately the band is remarkable because of their fierce innovative streak – they have literally built their music from the ground up. Their home-made sound bestows their music with a deeply personal edge – every fibre of the sound was crafted by them, from the slap of the strings, to the crash of drums, to the call of the voice. This is raw Sotho Sounds. Let the Junk Funk revolution begin.

© 2015 World Music Network



Atmosphere is everything, and yet we hear so little of it in contemporary digital recordings. But that's not the case here with this band from the kingdom of Lesotho in South Africa. Approximately tuned tin guitars and one-string fiddles accompany raw, powerful vocals while oil drums thunder along in the background. Staff Benda Bilili and Konono No 1 have set the homemade instrumentalist's bar high, but this lot leap it with easy grace.

Sunday 30 September 2012
© independent.co.uk



'a sound that is both innovative and traditional, an extraordinary mix ... a joyous cacophony'

4****stars / Top Of The World Songlines



'Staff Benda Bilili and Konono No 1 have set the homemade instrumentalist's bar high, but this lot leap it with easy grace'

The Independent



Just because you can't afford an instrument doesn't mean you can't make music. The remarkable sounds produced by Staff Benda Bilili's Roger Landu on his one-stringed, home-made satongé are a reminder of the invention of many African musicians. Now here's a band who made all their instruments from recycled material: the fiddles and guitars from tin cans and bicycle wire, the drums from oil tins and tree trunks. Sotho Sounds are from Lesotho, the mountainous kingdom surrounded by South Africa, and they started to play while working as shepherds. Their approach may be rough and ready but their energy and enthusiasm are contagious. The first track sounds like a field recording – wailing voices, barking dogs – and then they are off, mixing chugging guitars with furious call-and-response singing and impressive a cappella harmony, their songs influenced by Bosotho traditional music and township jive and pop. I'd like to see them live.

Robin Denselow, 27 September 2012
© 2015 Guardian News




You know it’s an odd world when a group of musicians can be promoted with this piece of information sitting prime at the front of the list of facts that anyone might want to know about them: they made their instruments themselves. Built them from scratch, sometimes using sticks. The four men were shepherds in Lesotho, in a place called the Maluti Mountains, minding their sheep, when the idea of musical instruments occurred to them, a group, a band, so they hunted down materials and began to build – “wood, tin, metal, and wire,” says the booklet – an activity that will not seem strange to anyone who, bored at work, has decided to set up a balancing act with rubber bands, pen lids, and tape or start a soccer match with an empty water bottle for a ball and table legs for the goal posts.

It would have been good to see their activity put into context, and for someone to have pointed out that manufacturing your own instruments is not totally a novelty in southern Africa – Lesotho is a self-governed blob of nationhood at a precipitously high altitude with South Africa all around – these men are not the first in their area to have opened a metal tin along the side, added a neck and strings, and called it a fiddle or guitar. The tall gumboots they’re wearing in one of their promotional pictures are instruments as well, and evidence of local musical ingenuity, the gumboot dance being a piece of culture, decades old, around the South African mines where many Lesotho men have worked in the past and are still working now. The rubber boots are drums, you stamp them, you slap them, they’re percussive.

So if the label is going to use this as a selling point, then it would be nice to hear, seriously, how these musicians diverged from that, and how they are unique, how they are unusually innovative even in a landscape where innovation is a known thing, how their homemade drums are not like the homemade drums of other people, or how their tin can fiddles are exceptional, or how they are not. The songs themselves can be put in the same taxonomic basket as the music that has been introduced elsewhere under names like, “the Soweto sound” or “township music”, a musical sensibility sustained by a profoundly deep rolling heave that rises without losing mass and then runs into the next heave with a weight that suggests something physical, whales coming up for air, or some other bulky organism following its regular cycles. Then there are the contrasting noises, there are teasing larrikin whistles, fluttering wet warbling whistles, the men singing together, a group of women joining in with a more piercing sound, a single male voice intensely rough in one song, another song sung at rap speed, the metal fiddles with their good hollow echo, and so on, each noise discretely textured, which justifies the interest in Sotho Sounds as an acoustic band, these well-composed clots of texture they make, timing a whistle so that it distracts you from the deep heave, complicates it, and creates a push and pull against the regularity.

The costumes they wear in the photographs, those unnatural strawberry wigs, traditional skirts, oversized striped glasses, dozens of sleek beads wrapped around one wrist and practically none around the other – suggest that they’ve taken on this idea of scavenging as a deliberate aesthetic, and that, like Lady Gaga, they’ve decided that anyone who wants to work them out deserves to be kept on their toes with signs that say, we play. On the album they’re most radically like that in the tracks named “Intro” and “Outro”, or “Be Ea Bojoa” parts one and two, two flying-apart collections of whistles, cries, and dog barks, which, like the costumes and the publicity blurb, seem to be trying to defend them against anyone who might think they were normal.

Rating: 6/10

Deanne Sole, 24 September 2012
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