Francis Bebey: Trésor Magnétique album review — rediscovered tapes from a Cameroonian polymath
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Although he made more than 20 albums, the Cameroonian polymath Francis Bebey is better known today as an ethnomusicologist (he worked for Unesco and wrote the then-comprehensive 1975 study African Music: A People’s Art) or a novelist than as a musician. Partly this is because he ran his own label, Ozileka, rather than signing to a Parisian major. Or it may be because his music was defiantly ahead of its time.
His 1984 album Akwaaba: Music For Sanza was built around hypnotic thumb piano patterns overdriven into distortion — a recipe that made Congalese group Konono No 1 famous in the 2000s. When Bebey returned from the Congo obsessed by Pygmy melodies and the n’dehou, their bamboo flute, he mixed those influences with electronic rhythms, prefiguring by more than a decade the entire discography of French electronic duo Deep Forest. His fondness for synthesised textures also recalls Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono.
Bebey died in 2001. Trésor Magnétique is a compilation taken from tapes found by his son, Patrick. There are alternative versions of well-known songs from 1970s and 1980s albums, plus fragments and sketches never heard before. “Forest Nativity”, the dreamy, polyphonic opener, stretches out significantly longer than any previously released version. The lounge beats of “Dash, Baksheesh & Matabish” belie a fury at corruption that Fela Kuti would have applauded. “You want a passport or a driving licence; you want to sell your crops, your cocoa, bananas or coffee . . . Somebody is always there to ask for DBM.”
There is an English-language version of 1981’s “La Condition Masculine”: as often with Cameroonian music, it is hard to tell whether sexism is being satirised or embodied. Other songs can be heard emerging from studio experiments, drum machines gesturing to the parts that would eventually be taken over by live drummers. The compilation is fascinating in its own right; the more people it sends back to the original records, the better.
★★★★★
‘Trésor Magnétique’ is released by Africa Seven
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