Consumer Guide Album

Piconema: East African Hits on the Colombian Coast [Rocafort, 2023]
The amazing thing is what the title indicates: nine approximately nine-minute dance records (what we used to call 12-inches? dunno) originally manufactured or anyway concocted in Indian Ocean Africa but forged or maybe just postulated into a minigenre by dueling Colombian DJs back across both the African continent and the Atlantic Ocean to the South American seacoast (and then inland from there? dunno). Simultaneously delicate and utilitarian, body and spirit, barely hinting at the bassy, more muscular Cuban-derived grooves of Congolese soukous, they're engines of transcendence or maybe just the escape that's the nearest the dancers who cheered them on can get to it. A-