5 songs you need to hear this week
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Bobo & Behaja: “parepare”
“parepare” goes all over the place and I’ve followed each thread to its end. This is the lead track on Bobo & Behaja’s new tape Aia Haja?, invented someplace between Budapest and Zurich and recorded using horn loudspeakers, karaoke amplifiers, and homemade pedals that “reproduce the sonorities of the bal-poussière ceremonies of southwest Madagascar.” Bobo & Behaja blend free jazz, garage rock, and tsapiky together, corking feral guitar lines with saxophone honks that strobe then spiral. On the topline, Ekaly’s vocal unspools like an instrument governed by its own chaos, while François Rosenfeld and Gérard Rakotoniaina’s half-staccato, half-anarchic rhythm section brightens the tune from below. These are Malagasy virtuosos bouncing off each other’s impulses. I’ve never heard anything like it. —Matt Mitchell