vibrate higher

The only magazine I subscribe to (I'm not quite sure why I like it, as I often find it superficial, they never sent me the two gift CDs they promised and my ideal music magazine is the almost diametrically-opposed Sextant), Vibrations, has a new look and a new web site. It's essentially a well-furnished blog with news, downloads, videos, concert reviews, brief articles and more.

The CD sampler has been dematerialised into an MP3 download that you have to buy the magazine to get. My two favourite tracks are somewhat similar, building culture-hopping patchworks on top of insistent polyrhythmic bases.

Tumi and the Volume "Afrique": a short burst of tense, rapid-fire hip hop-era Afrobeat from South Africa. <

Roberto Fonseca "Ishmael": maybe I'm still in a Cuban mood, but I love the sleek, slightly sinister Afro-Cuban beat, and the arrangement which includes Eastern-ish melodies, blooms of warm Cuban piano splattered with disrupting crashes and a mosquito buzz double-reed (a ney?).

Most of the rest of tracks on the sampler, even when pretty good, sounds a lot more forced and insincere than these two, with Balkan Beat Box (whose 2005 concert I really liked) being the worst offenders.