Some Reviews With Jimmy For Reals: Clap! Clap!

Some Reviews With Jimmy For Reals: Clap! Clap! – Tambacounda EP

Posted by: Jimmy For Reals on March 18, 2014

Some deft Afro-Futurism from Clap! Clap! this week, coming through like a lost-tribal savant being given sudden access the last decade of club music via a Matrix-esque data dump. Black Acre have a habit of unearthing supreme talent on a regular basis, so much so that it’s probably worth entirely worth skimming through their catalogue from time to time just to see if you’ve missed any gems, however in this case I thought I’d save you the trouble, because Clap!Clap!’s Tambacounda EP is out now and it’s excellent.

Clap!Clap! isn’t exactly a newcomer mind you; a cursory googling reveals him to be one Cristiano Crisci, a prolific Florentine musician and producer also known as Digi G’Alessio. If you’ve never heard of him before, don’t worry I hadn’t either, but he seems to have been making banging club tunes for a while now – seriously go check out his bandcamp page, you’ll be busy for days. Mind you that’s neither here nor there, Clap! Clap! sounds unlike anything Crisci has done before, blithely grafting field recordings samples to upfront production and neatly sidestepping back and forth over genre boundaries – all whilst standing out as one of the most infectious releases I’ve heard this year.

Comparisons to label mate Romare are inevitable given that both of them occupy a similar space musically, but whilst the aesthetics are similar Clap! Clap!’s music is less focussed on suave sophistication and more on dancefloor impact. This isn’t a criticism of either producer, I’d probably sooner listen to Romare at home, but if you were tooling up to make people dance like flaming marionettes then Clap! Clap! is your man. Elon Mentana segues from shamanic chants into Zig-Zagging slowfast Synths, Tambacounda’s White Magic flips ersatz tribal percussion and a primitive flute hook into breakneck footwork machinations, counterpart Tambacounda’s Black Magic rolls out like FWD holding a one off rainforest party somewhere deep in the Congo, before Kaluma rounds out proceedings in Carnivaaal style, sounding a bit like a Baile-Funk soundclash between Rashad and Jneiro Jarel.

Clap! Clap! – Tambacounda EP out now through Black Acre Records.

Some Reviews with Jimmy For Reals runs weekly – stay up to date with his latest selects exclusively on The Operatives.