Out This Week! Drummer Asher Gamezde's revolutionary Southern African soul epic Turbulence & Pulse
IARC0057 / M3H013
Asher Gamedze Turbulence & Pulse
“Potent and gripping”
– Cast The Dice
“Gamedze and his group project astrally into the outer realms of the known sonic universe.”
– FADER
“Dark like Mingus, charged like Fela Kuti and boundless like Kamasi Washington.”
– WBUR
“The deeply philosophical musings are as important to the recordings as the music.”
– V13
“A triumph in understanding as an organizer, perspective as a student of history, and in song as a musician.”
– Off Shelf
“An engaging quest for satori”
– MOJO
2xLP, CD, Digital album out Friday May 5th, 202
Just in time for Bandcamp Friday, this Friday...
Asher is illustrated and interviewed by Andrew Jervis for the latest edition of Bandcamp's flagship radio programme, Bandcamp Weekly.
Listen to the show here – which is a nice place to start RE: making a shopping list for Bandcamp Friday, this Friday, where the platform yet again passes through 100% of all sales to the thirsty mouths of independent labels & artists.
Greetings from IARC Studios
Final mixing touches on Asher Gamedze's Turbulence and Pulse were made in early 2022 at IARCHQ aka International Anthem Studios in Chicago, where engineer Dave Vettraino roasted the stems via our MCI console.
Vettraino gives a run down of the ethos, equipment, and albums from our catalog that have been made (in whole and in part) at our Chicago studio in a piece originally published in the first edition of our zine, Tracing The Lines, which is now available digitally on our website for the first time.
Read Dave V's "Greetings From International Anthem Studios" here.
Order a hard copy of Tracing The Lines via our Bandcamp page here.
((( photo by Dylan Valley )))
About Asher Gamedze
Asher Gamedze is a cultural worker based in Cape Town, South Africa, involved in music, education, and history. As an independent musician he works a drummer, composer, and bandleader.
A versatile drummer with an open sound and sensibility, Gamedze plays across and between multiple traditions of music including free improvisation, soul music, rock ‘n roll, and many locally situated traditions from Southern Africa. Asher has performed extensively in South Africa and other parts of the African continent including Egypt, Lesotho, and Malawi. He has been on multiple European tours and has also played some gigs in the USA, particularly in Chicago where he has a big community. Gamedze’s debut record as a bandleader, Dialectic Soul, was released to critical acclaim in 2020. The record received high ranks on Pitchfork and The New York Times‘s top ten jazz albums of the year, as well as winning ‘Best Traditional Jazz Album’ at the Mzantsi Jazz Awards. Gamedze’s second release, Out Side Work, consisting of two improvised duets with saxophone players Alan Bishop and Xristian Espinoza, came out in April 2022. He toured that record with the reedman Espinoza in Europe in September 2022 and, in November 2022, toured Dialectic Soul, playing venues and festivals such as Jazzfest Berlin, Le Guess Who? and Flagey.
He has recently played on the following recordings: Luh’ra’s Nice (2022), Xhanti Nokwali’s Umthombo (2022), the Mushroom Hour (Johannesburg) / Total Refreshment Centre (London) collaboration On Our Own Clock (2021), Manny Walters’ Dark Halo (2019) and Live at Milestone (2021), as well as both the full-length Angel Bat Dawid albums released on International Anthem, LIVE (2020) and The Oracle (2019). He has performed live with Ben LaMar Gay, Nduduzo Makhathini, Salim Washington, Sharif Shenaoui, Donna Khalife, and many others.
For Gamedze, the underlying message of his new album Turbulence and Pulse is “to claim a form of historical agency and realize that the future is not a foregone conclusion. As people we can organize, to transform our world in small and big ways.” This concept comes out of Gamedze’s involvement in radical cultural work and political organizing.
He adds: “One of the ideas that I've had for a long time is to unsettle the way that people think about culture as something static or as something fixed. There’s this tension in Africa, because of the way that the colonists have constructed visions of African culture, where people speak about this need to conserve culture and document it. I think that's important, but you also have to understand that these things are moving. And we are the people who have to participate in that movement.”
Joining Gamedze on Turbulence and Pulse is Thembinkosi Mavimbela on bass, Buddy Wells on tenor saxophone, and Robbin Fassie on trumpet. Vocalist Julian Otis guests on a track - a good friend whom he met through Angel Bat Dawid’s band. “I chose these musicians specifically because I know that they’re open to understanding and interpreting the music from my perspective and my way of working.”
!!! ANOTHER SIDE !!! with Another Time Ensemble
The LP & CD versions of Turbulence and Pulse feature an extra side – i.e. three additional tracks – with alternate versions of “Melancholia,” “If It Rains. To Pursue Truth,” and “Out Stepped Zim” all recorded in December 2020 on a rooftop in Cairo, Egypt, by Gamedze with his Another Time Ensemble featuring Cairo-based musicians Maurice Louca (synthesizers), Adham Zidan (bass), Alan Bishop (alto saxophone, voice), and Chérif El-Masri (guitar).
*Deluxe Vinyl Package*
One Drop color vinyl
For the album artwork, Gamedze extends the visual aesthetic of his previous release with a hand-drawn illustration. “I feel like my drawings represent the inside of my mind. It’s very free and improvisational,” he says. Friend and designer Naadira Patel worked with Gamedze to design the final cover layout, which includes liner notes penned by his sister, writer and artist Thuli Gamedze.
Turbulence & Pulse comes on two limited edition "One Drop" color vinyl LPs inside a heavyweight gatefold jacket with obi strip and custom IARC/MH3 printer inner-sleeves. Lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST and pressed at Pallas in Germany. And as always, we will have a limited edition color vinyl option for the first pressing only, available via our Bandcamp page only.
Distribution via RedEye for
US, Canada, North & South America
Retailers in the United States or Canada or anywhere else inside of North, South, and Central America... Please reach out to your sales rep at RedEye Worldwide if you are interested in making wholesale purchases of this album, or any other album in our catalog. Don't yet have a RedEye rep? Please just reach out to us and we'll get you hooked up!
Distribution via !K7 for
Europe, UK, Australia, and ROW
We are distributed by our good friends at !K7 Music and their various territory partners in Europe, UK, Australia, and everywhere else in the world outside of North & South America.
If you are a retailer or store with questions about wholesale or are just looking to get some of our records... we'd like to make things as easy for you as possible, please do not hesitate to contact us!
Turbulence and Pulse is the first collaborative release (of hopefully many) with the Johannesburg-based label Mushroom Hour Half Hour. This crew is a major inspiration for all of us here at IARC – definitely recommend keeping an eye out for any and all of their LPs !!!
((( Photo by Dylan Valley )))
