ON OUR OWN CLOCK - On Our Own Clock
MUSHROOM HOUR HALF HOUR
Hip Hop / Drum n Bass / BreaksVintage Vinyl LP (GAT) / 21.95 EUR
Media NM / Sleeve NM
Pre-pandemic, there was a plan. The plan was for musicians from South Africa and Senegal to travel to London’s influential Total Refreshment Centre to make an album with musical kindred spirits in the UK. Like so many plans, it had to be adapted.
‘On Our Own Clock’ contains interludes titled ‘How To Make Art In A Pandemic’. The phrase became a byword and a prayer to keep the process going across the multiple hurdles that presented themselves: people getting Covid; the fear and fury that proliferates in the twin pandemics of Covid and racism; the practicalities of making music across two continents. It builds on another phrase, in the spirit of evolution and improvisation: two words used in the foreword to Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz in which she describes the ‘unreasonable optimism’ of musicians. Making this album was unreasonably optimistic even before1the pandemic. To have created a deeply-rooted and warm-hearted gem like this is extraordinary.