Consumer Guide Album

Nakibembe Embaire Group & Naoyuki Uchida: Phantom Keys [Nyege Nyege Tapes, 2025]
Recorded in Tokyo at the masterminding behest of a Japanese dubmaster named Uchida, this is the slightly fancier recent recording of the last champions of the Ugandan embaire, a log balafon sunk into the earth so as to add resonance to note clusters that conceptually evoke a giant echoing xylophone. Less driving and some might say easier to take even as it inspires shouts and hoots from a live audience, it's clearly some kind of treasure no matter how pure or impure—who knows whether such sounds will ever be preserved for posterity again. A−