Back from the global jungle
After musical expeditions through India and North Africa
DISSIDENTEN have again discovered a New World: the exotic world of Pop
By Hollow Skai - (translation Ken Hunt)
And there was a time - back when Persia was still under the Shah's thumb and Afghanistan was still unoccupied by the Russians - when the German jazz-rock group Embryo undertook a journey to India. The Caravan of Vagabonds was on the road for a year. On their way to Hippy Heaven they made music with many a musician met along the way. And so it came to pass that in a Maharajah's palace - Bhalkrishna Bharti's palace - rather than in a stable, a girl child was born to the guitarist Uve Müllrich on December 25, 1978. Bajka by name, a name meaning "fairy tale" in Polish.
Even whilst she was still in her mother's womb she was a wanderer, even later stopping only where the music was playing. When her father left Embryo after the Indian trip in order to found Dissidenten with Friedo Josch and Marlon Klein, young Bajka got to know what other children usually only get to read about: other parts of the world, countries and customs. Her parents shlepped her all over Asia, from one concert to another. Constantly changing wardrobes served as her nursery. At the age of two she was singing ascending and descending parts with the Indian vocalist Ramamani in Bangalore and drumming as fas as her little hands could manage. And because "it wasn't fair she had to go to bed when the concerts began" - and her father got to stay in bed all hours - she decided to follow in his footsteps. Gnaoua Moroccan trance music influenced far more than the American charts. And when Bajka's parents separated and she went off to live with her mother in Durban in South Africa, where they lived in the sugar factory ghetto "outside of society's acceptance", she sang gospel in the church choir. She used to stop on the way home by the burning oil drums - where people hung out - in order to make up poetry and sing. "In places like that, " Bajka says, "where people have nothing but the air that they breathe, people make music in order to know they are living."
I sing: therefore I am. And how in her case! On Dissidenten's latest album she raps as explosively as her sisters from the ghetto - and sings as lasciviously as if she had spent her whole life in a London night club.
Without question, Instinctive Traveler's high point, besides the title track, is the "Lobster Song", the stuff of summer hittery, on which she duets with the Tamil vocalist Manickam Yogeswaran. But there are other ways in which the "true Godfathers of Ethno-Beat" (NY Times) have amazed. Although in Germany they are counted because of their time served in the German underground, in other countries they are placed on the same level as David Byrne, Brian Eno or Khaled. This time they have mixed an album drawing on souvenirs brought back from their "expeditions through the global jungle of danceable sounds and noises."
On the way they meet Dorian Wright, the son of Gary Wright of Spooky Tooth (who collaborated on the song "Shine On Me") and the Karnataka College of Percussion who were also to be heard on the Jungle Book. The string section comes courtesy of the Royal Orchestra of Morocco, the Native American voices from Canada's Ojibwa Singers and the Maori melody in "Broken Moon" comes from the Hawaiian songstress Kumuhula Nona Kaluhiokalani. Also in attendance are Paul Simon's saxophonist Richard Landry, the jazz trumpeter legend Manfred Schoof, and the North African singer Noujoum Ouazza who also contributes mandolin-cello. The three core Dissidenten melted down an album from this, trip-hop and drum 'n' bass, of a sort to show Enigma where the boundries lie.
Ever since the mid-Eighties and Sahara Elektik when they popularised rai and World Music in Germany, Dissidenten have continually caught people intent on branding them as "Third World Grandfatherss" on the hop. Along the way Instinctive Traveler got to be a pop album. and although their practice has been to dedicate each album to a particular country or continent, this time English is in the forefront. Instead of sinking beneath the ethno-wave, this time they wanted to dive for pearls.
At the beginning of their career their motto was, "Home is where the head is." Now the head has come back home. One might say that back home through Bajka they found a pearl in their local swimming pool. Marlon Klein, the album's producer, enthuses that "from the very first moment she was absolutely spot-on tonally" and that even at 18 she lacks nothing when it comes to feeling.
But also she lacks nothing when it comes to being self-aware. That is why her debut solo album ought to be called, with all due respect to Michael Jackson, HerStory.
Rolling Stone, May 1997
