Welcome to the pond

The following is a modified version of my August 5 post on my Livejournal site.

As most of my regular readers know, the Afro Celts (who may or may not still be known as the Afro Celt Sound System) are my favorite music group of all time. Who are they, you ask? These are the facts as I know them (mostly gained from the "about" page of their microsite):

They started in 1995 as a Real World Records project. Producer Simon Emmerson had previously worked on a Baaba Maal album and had brought in an Irish bagpipe player to guest on it. He was intrigued by the amazingly easy combination of African and Celtic music styles and expressed this to the Real World Records head honchos. Additionally, he contacted artist Jamie Reid about a piece of art he made for a studio Simon was working in. He told Reid about his interest in the combination of African and Celtic music, and Reid painted him "the sleeve for the album you are going to make," as Reid himself wrote to Emmerson.

During the Real World Recording Week, Emmerson and fellow producer Martin Russell assembeled an all-star group of both Celtic and African musicians. The resulting album, "Volume 1: Sound Magic" contained Irish reels and evocative African melodies played by such instruments as bagpipes, fiddles, whistles, harp, and kora with rhythmic help from djembe, talking drum and Irish bodhran. This meeting of the instruments was set to modern club beats and ambient keyboard soundscapes. To top it all off, Irish Sean-Nos vocalist Iarla O'Lionard added his gorgeous voice to several of the tracks and a few African vocalists joined in as well. The album was a hit and is generally seen as the first example of world-beat/electronic fusion music. At this stage, the band was still a project, but after demand for live performances grew strong the project began to merge into a semi-stable band.

Sadly, founding keyboardist Jo Bruce died in 1997 of an asthma attack just before recording was to commence on Volume 2 of the project. His loss hit the rest of the group hard, but they found the courage to "go on through" (as a later song title would suggest) and made a significant jump in songwriting, band cohesion and pure sound power on their second effort.

Since then, the band has truly become a band and recorded two (and now three) more studio albums as well as a remix album and companion DVD. They are going strong and have now put out three projects in three years and will hopefully keep the pace going.

This year is their tenth year of existence and next year marks ten years since the release of Volume 1. Next month, September (or perhaps it's October; an official release date has yet to be confirmed), they are scheduled to release their fifth proper studio album, "Anatomic." It promises to be just as atmospheric and powerful as all their previous work, and all Afro Celts fans including myself are extremely anxious to hear it.

All of the Afro Celts/Afro Celt Sound System albums are available for purchase online from Amazon.com and other places, or perhaps in your local record store. Here are a few links for the curious:

Afrocelts.com. This is their "official" site, but unfortunately it has been offline since 2003. Fans have constantly been promised a relaunched site, but it has yet to appear. However, the band is not at fault for this because they are all extremely busy making new music and occasionally performing. They do not have time nor expertise to create and manage a full website, and the company and/or person responsible for the site seems to have put the project on the backburner. In the meantime, fans wait for a new site and can go to . . .

Afrocelts.org, which is the offical fan website for the band. It's not updated as much as in the beginning, but it's still THE place to get the latest news and information. It has an extensive discography and other goodies to look at.

Afro Celts Forum is the BEST place to get the latest news on the group. There are many archived topics to see and talk about, and the most knowledgeable fans post there quite frequently. I check this site every single day.

Afro Celt Microsite is the site maintained by Real World Records. I suppose this could be seen as the "official" site for now. It is actually quite good, with fairly-well updated news, information about each album, and even good downloads and other goodies. The only flaw in the site is with the lack of live gig updates, but those dates can be found at the fan site as soon as announced anyhow.