- Masaaki Yoshida is a Japanese musician whose records are inspired by his live shows, where he crafts tunes from scratch using a sampler and a keyboard. To date he's generally focused his energies on making downtempo beats, but his latest effort, a 10-inch for BBE, finds him playing around with upbeat African rhythms. Mawa's sleeve offers a good visual approximation of the music contained within: Anthony Pappone's photograph gloriously captures a dancer in colourful garb flinging themselves backwards at a festival in Dédougou, Burkino Faso.
Mawa's title track is a busily percussive slab of Afro-house you could imagine Joe Claussell throwing down to raucous cheers. There's no build up—instead we're parachuted into a fiesta of junkyard drums and vocal chants. "Flamingos" is one of the prettiest house tunes I've heard this year. Like Mo Kolours at 120 BPM, it opens with a sweet marimba rhythm that's soon joined by a gently oscillating bass tone. The two B-side cuts are more reliant on driving swells of low-end. Both "Ivory" and "Mantra" are pleasant enough, but they lack the verve of the A-side. ("Ivory"'s vocal sample begins to grate after a couple of minutes.) Still, I get the feeling these two tracks, like all of Anchorsong's music, are best experienced live. Combine Yoshida's dextrous on-stage presence with this dance floor-friendly evolution in his sound, and you've got an artist worth keeping an eye on.
TracklistA1 Mawa
A2 Flamingos
B1 Ivory
B2 Mantra