SHABAKA - Of The Earth

In his previous work, Shabaka had used a simple flute as a detonator. With its velvety, suspended textures, he had built an open, choral record, sustained by a constellation of guests and by the symbolic weight of a historic major label (Impulse!), able to project the British artist into a dimension of near-unanimous critical acclaim.

“Of The Earth”, on the other hand, seems to reverse the vector: the return to saxophone, which in other hands (and with equal talent) would signal a frontal statement, here bends to a more introverted logic. Not a reduction of energy, which remains nervy, at times openly conflicted, but a contraction of the field. The self-production, the less mediated weave, the rougher and closer sound all suggest a gesture of subtraction, almost a reflux back to the source. As if, after pushing the sound outward, Hutchings had chosen to test its resilience by bringing it back to contract around its own axis.

At the opening, “A Future Untold” scatters bells and celestial reverbs that brush against an almost new-age imaginary, while “Those Of The Sky” spreads out a still water surface, a soundscape that proceeds by suspension. But it's a balance that doesn't last long. With “Go Astray” the weave ripples: the entrance of a rap against colonialism/slavery, performed by Shabaka himself, introduces a clear friction. The voice seems to search for a space that the deliberately iterative music doesn't fully grant it. The result is an unresolved friction, almost programmatic.

It's from there that the record takes on a more restless posture, unfolding through successive shifts. “Step Lightly” marks a threshold: the long intro, built on overlapping groups of flutes bouncing in a hypnotic circularity, is suddenly overturned by the irruption of the drum machine, which transforms the track into an urban stage. Elsewhere, on “Dance In Praise”, the pulse accelerates to the point of brushing against a para-tribal dimension: a tight dance in which the flute abdicates contemplation to take on a percussive, almost muscular role. No longer a melodic line, but impulse, a kinetic line that runs through the track and determines its inner drive.

“Marwa The Mountain” is the album's peak. The saxophone grafts itself onto a weave of tribal pulsations, while a hypnotic siren runs through the track like an intermittent signal. The result is a form in continuous tension, where the search for timbre doesn't dissipate but coalesces into a rare balance between instinct and construction. It's an episode that seems to find its own self-sufficiency, immediately contradicted by the following track, “Light The Way”, which could be described as an oblique electronic pastiche, made of grainy textures and analogue drifts, with an entirely different vocabulary. It's in this controlled discontinuity that the record reveals its deepest nature: a multiform substance, crossed by recurrences of spiraling sonic textures but always constantly called back into question.

The saxophone itself, from being a load-bearing axis, sometimes becomes a line of flight, as in the cinematic “Stand Firm”, where it dissolves into a horizon more suggested than defined. Trajectories already traced in previous works surface clearly, here put back into circulation and subjected to a kind of internal verification. More than a point of arrival, “Of The Earth” feels like a laboratory in progress: an object still warm, in which flashes of insight coexist with a certain indeterminacy of form.

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30/03/2026