Drum Dynasty
Posted by: admin in CD Reviews, tags: Dark Continent, Drum Dynasty, Mystic Sunrise, percussion, world rhythmsDrum Dynasty
Mystic Sunrise / Dark Continent
reviewed by Gary Levinson
It’s been a cold and rainy early evening at the beginning of Advent here in Berlin, and I was feeling kind of bluesy. Time to listen to some music! I tried putting on a few things; some new age, techno, folk, and none of them was really what I wanted to listen to. Then I put on Drum Dynasty.
This, their debut album, is a 2 CD album. I took a liking to it immediately, when instead of be entitled, each disk just has a color: Red is the Mystic Sunrise disk, and green is the Dark Continent disk.
The press release that came with the disk said that each disk was a separate musical journey. And indeed, as soon as I put on Dark Continent, I was transported directly to the Dark Continent, Africa, feeling the wind on the Savannah and the as-of-yet unknown smell of the air. I was bluesy no more.
Mystic Sunrise sounds, appropriately enough, like a trip to a jagarti in India - reminding me of Jan Garbarek and his album Legend of The Seven Dreams - with Sitar sounds and incense burning; while listening to Dark Continent takes one to this continent, but without the turbulence.
These two disks are filled with 28 songs (over 90 minutes) of rhythmic music, most importantly percussion (with some strings and throat). The songs are world rhythms - an intense form of communication that everyone can understand.
Drum Dynasty with their two musical adventures create a musical ambiance that fosters the calming of the mind, and in a meditative way encourages focusing on the internal, the essential, the primal nature of rhythm.
Reviewed by Gary Levinson
Entries (RSS)