OK-OYOT SYSTEM!

All you guys should checkout Extra Golden. The band is comprised of the two guitarists of Golden (ethnomusicologist Ian Eagleson and Alex Minoff of Weird War), and Otieno Jagwasi and Onyango Wuod Omari of the Nairobi, Kenya based benga band Orchestra Extra Solar Africa.They met on one of Eagleson's research trips to Nairobi where he would spend months studying the Benga music of Kenya for his PhD. This album was recorded in 2004 over a couple months around Kenyan nightclubs, and is truly a joy.It combines the Golden guitarists' crafty songsmithing with the vocals of Jagwasi and the groove on the drumkit of Omari in such a way that is so unique and yet is quite familiar somehow. Probably because a lot of the Kenyan Benga music comes from or is very similar to congolese rumba or Soukous music, a style that I've been listening to for quite some time.I'd really love to see these guys live, but apparantly their singer died last year due to a liver failure complicated by HIV. Very sad. I want to check out his other bands (Solar Orchestra Africa and Extra Solar Orchestra Africa). If you want to read the whole story of the band you can check it out "here":here on the Thrill Jockey website, who claim that they're playing a show in New York at the end of the month, which intregues me.Look at the cover. How could you not want to hear this?[here]http://www.thrilljockey.com/catalog/?id=100373