Baka Beyond Return After 12 Years With Sing the World Awake

Baka Beyond have released Sing the World Awake, their first album in 12 years, on March Hare Music. The record centres on field recordings made with a new generation of Baka singers from Cameroon and deepens a musical partnership that British folk musicians Su Hart and Martin Cradick have built over three decades.

Their 1993 debut, Spirits of the Forest, came out on Joe Boyd's Hannibal Records and focused on the female singers of the Baka people, who use a polyphonic style of yodelling to evoke dawn spirits. Hart and Cradick have sustained the collaboration ever since. They split royalties equally with the community and support it through their Global Music Exchange charity.

Sing the World Awake sets that tradition against Cradick's expansive instrumental arrangements, with mixed results. Topé Malangui Kpode carries sprightly guitar melodies inspired by Ghanaian highlife and percussive polyrhythms. Fair Molly (Mál Bhán Ní Chuilleanáin) adds Gaelic vocals from guest singer Irene O'Meara, while The Swift draws on the intricate folk violin of Ben Moneypenny.

Each song alights on snatches of Baka vocals, but splicing those unique melodies into different genres creates what our source review calls "an uneven patchwork of sound." The album astonishes when the Cameroonian vocals are placed front and centre — the fusion works less convincingly when they are buried beneath busier arrangements.

The record nonetheless marks a rare case of a cross-cultural partnership sustained across generations, with the new field recordings extending an ancient oral tradition into a new Baka generation.