“Music is a universal language, but spoken language can help you think about what makes you emotional, what makes you feel certain feelings, what you want to see in the world,” says Eno Williams, frontwoman of Ibibio Sound Machine. When Williams uses both English and the Nigerian language from which her band’s name is derived for their dazzling new album Doko Mien, the group somehow produces a world of both entrancing specificity and comforting universality. A language entirely of their own.
Long lauded for their jubilant, explosive live shows, Ibibio Sound Machine fully capture that energy and communication on Doko Mien, the follow-up to their Merge debut Uyai. In a glowing piece in the New York Times, those songs were praised for following “in the tradition of much African music, [making] themselves the conscience of a community.” By pulsing the mystic shapes of Williams’ lines through further inventive, glittering collages of genre, Ibibio Sound Machine crack apart the horizon separating cultures, between nature and technology, between joy and pain, between tradition and future.
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