A Sense of Doubt blog post #3611 - Ibeyi and Spell 31 - Music Monday for 2501.06
Yes, I know it's January 6th,a nd I know what's happening. But, for now, I am done addressing politics.
Pronounced "ee-bay." Listen to "Sister 2 Sister" wherein they tell listeners jhow to pronounce their band name that means Twins (see notes below).
- The sisters grew up in Paris and are of Cuban and Venezuelan descent.
- They released their debut album in 2015 and have been touring almost constantly since then.
- Their music has been described as "doom soul."
- They've made concept videos that include being submerged underwater for their acclaimed video River.
https://www.instagram.com/ibeyiofficial/?hl=en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibeyi
https://www.huckmag.com/article/ibeyi-on-loss-sisterhood-and-spirituality
Ibeyi on loss, sisterhood and spirituality
At the tender age of 27, fraternal twins Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz – better known as the neo-soul duo Ibeyi – have been exposed to more than their fair share of grief. Their father passed away when they were just aged 11, and their sister followed a few years later. Music has been a way to explore their pain and try to make sense of the unfathomable.
“Our first album was about our sister and dad’s death,” Lisa says. “Ash [2017 album] was about the way we saw the world, and Spell 31 is about the way we want to heal as women.”
Released in early 2022, third-album Spell 31 marks a step forward. At only 26-minutes long, it’s certainly concise. It’s also a cohesive and captivating listen from the first note to the very last. Despite it being named after the corresponding spell found in the Book of the Dead (ancient Egypt’s sacred text aimed to assist the dying’s passage in the afterlife), Spell 31 is not as funereal as the derivation may suggest. Rather, it’s a life-affirming collection that showcases a group exploring new musical horizons without losing what makes them so special in the first place.
Speaking to the sisters, it clear that Lisa is very much the yin to Naomi’s yang. Lisa is the more talkative of the two, while Naomi is much more taciturn. “Ibeyi is the middle ground between our two worlds,” Naomi says. “We have so many cities, countries, cultures, beliefs, and religions in our family that we add it all together and it comes back how it comes back.” Lisa concurs: “It’s mixed, like we are.”
Born in 1994 in Paris, the Díaz twins spent their first two years in Havana. Their father, the virtuoso percussionist Anga Díaz, was a fixture on the music scene as a member of Chucho Valdés’s Afro-Cuban jazz outfit Irakere and, later, the hallowed Buena Vista Social Club ensemble. By the time Ibeyi set to work on their own music at 17, they were back in Paris, cutting their creative teeth there.
Even in their most embryonic form, their spectral, experimental R&B proved to be a hit among industry figures and those in the local live scene. By 18, they were signed to XL recordings. Label supremo Richard Russell took on production duties for their first album – a role that continues to this day – and also placed a call to Gorillaz and Blur mastermind Damon Albarn, who subsequently worked with the duo on their track ‘Top of the Mountain’.
While the song may have only surfaced on the Japanese version of their debut, for the sisters, it opened the doors to the benefits of collaboration. Albarn left an impression, too (“Damon is Damon. He just comes in[to the studio] and puts himself into it. It’s genuine. I love him,” gushes Naomi). On Spell 31, they enlisted the services of Gambian-British rapper Pa Salieu, Jorja Smith, and BERWYN.
“We love collaborating,” affirms Naomi. “We’ve done a lot of stuff for other people, huge artists that we can’t talk about because they haven’t put it out yet. They ask for our voices a lot.” Both confirm that Kendrick Lamar tops their list of dream collaborators. “I think we are kindred spirits,” Lisa says. “But we’re open. I’ve always wanted to work with Jack White. I’d love to mix it up and see how we would make that work. And I love rock. Gorillaz would also be amazing.”
‘Sister 2 Sister’ is Spell 31’s centrepiece, an anthem to sisterhood, as expressed through lyrics like “Dancing in front of the mirror/Singing along with Shakira/Washing our souls in the river”. Lisa calls it their “declaration of love to each other,” she says. “It’s us promising to each other to keep going. And it’s us despite it all. Together. Singing together. Creating together. It’s a song we needed: a song for when we go through rough times that we get to sing, find comfort in, and find love in.”
The sisters will headline London’s KOKO on 14 November and are set to tour the US next year. In the meantime, a new single has arrived in the form of ‘Juice of Mandarins’, which Lisa says is about the “ecstasy of falling in love”. Although a leftover from the Spell 31 sessions, the soulful track is no rotten fruit (“We loved ‘Juice of Mandarins’, but it just didn’t quite fit,” admits Lisa).
A recurring theme when people discuss Ibeyi’s music is that it is spiritual. While an existential thread runs through their lyrics, the twins say this is neither deliberate nor consciously planned: “Everybody talks to us about how spiritual our music is, but we don’t really think about it,” says Naomi. “We don’t really say like, ‘I’m spiritual’, or [for example,] ‘Hi, I’m Naomi and I’m a spiritual person’. That would be weird.”
When it is suggested that it may remain one of modern Western culture’s final taboos, Lisa nods in agreement. “I think it’s such a shame, because ultimately, everything ends with death also starts with that, because it’s not an end, it’s just a new beginning to somewhere,” Lisa says. “The more you talk about and accept [death], the less anxiety you have around it. You’re also more connected to the ones that are gone. And for us, it is important because we lost our dad when we were 11 and our sister really young too.”
She continues: “You continue living, but you miss them. And you start to realise somehow that they are present. You can connect with them. For some people, it would be placing flowers at their grave, for others it is cooking the plate they used to cook for them. For us, it is listening to our dad’s music or singing to or with him. You find ways to have them around you.”
he first time I interviewed the Afro-French-Cuban musicians Ibeyi – twin sisters Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz – was in 2015. I was a student, Skyping from my damp bedroom, writing about them for my university magazine. They were excitable 20-year-olds in Paris on the brink of putting out their self-titled debut album, the name derived from the Yoruba word for twins with divine powers. “It’s so weird!” beams Lisa-Kaindé now, “People who’ve been following us for 10 years are still here, and still write to us, and still want to see our shows!”
This should come as no surprise. Since that beguiling first album of soulful music pulling from the breadth of their heritage, Ibeyi have grown and grown. Their gently experimental songs teem with harmony and synchronicity, while soft chants in French, Yoruba and English shimmer with warmth and spirituality. Their second album, 2017’s Ash, made several end-of-year lists, and in 2016, they appeared on Beyoncé’s groundbreaking visual album Lemonade.
On our video call today they are as sweet and exuberant as ever, but where once they would quickly interject and finish one another’s sentences, now they seem calmer and more mindful of letting each other speak. Lisa-Kaindé joins the call from her apartment in London, the city she has called home for the past few years. Her hair is in long braids, and the room behind her is filled with plants and colourful cushions. Naomi, speaking from Paris against a plain white wall, is more reserved.
Born in Paris, daughters of the late Cuban percussionist Angá Diaz (known for his work as part of Buena Vista Social Club) and the photographer Maya Dagnino, the girls spent their childhood between France and Cuba, involved in music and dancing from an early age. Shortly after their father died in 2006, Naomi began to learn cajón (the box-shaped instrument he had played) and Lisa-Kaindé, encouraged by their mother, began to write songs. By their late teens, they had formed Ibeyi, with Lisa-Kaindé as lead vocalist and pianist, and Naomi providing vocal harmonies and percussion. They soon signed to the independent label XL Recordings, headed by producer Richard Russell, and released an EP before that first album. Both records encompassed love and grief, mourning not only their father but also their sister Yanira, who died in 2013.
PHOTO: We are family: Naomi, left,
and Lisa-Kaindé show
their early dance moves.
Photograph: Courtesy of Ibeyi
 |
Spell 31, their latest, is their most accomplished, ambitious album yet. Naomi steps up more as lead vocalist, and ups her contribution to production, alongside Russell. The record speaks to growth, healing, sisterhood and the catharsis of weeping. “It’s a new chapter”, says Naomi, “It’s the most balanced between us.”
The album takes its name from a passage in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of rites to be read to accompany the embalming of the departed in order to afford them protection in the afterlife. It is this that Lisa-Kaindé quotes at the end of the majestic, twisting beats of the single Made of Gold, featuring Pa Salieu: “Oh, you with a spine / Who would work your mouth against this magic of mine / It has been handed down in an unbroken line / The sky encloses the stars / I enclose magic”. The song, Lisa-Kaindé explains, is about the reclamation of ancestral histories and magic lost to enslavement, to hold and heal intergenerational trauma. “We still can reconnect to that fire and knowledge and power, because it’s inside of us,” she says. “Singing has always been our way of reconnecting to it – we sing for our dad, our sister, we sing with our ancestors.”
Indeed, the final track of Spell 31 lifts an idea from their late father, listing the names of deceased loved ones and influences on Los Muertos, recalling his Rezos. They even sample him on the song, as a way of folding him into the work. It’s a “way to say ‘we love you’”, says Naomi. Or a “mausoleum”, Lisa-Kaindé offers: “Creating something they are a part of that is beautiful, to say thank you.”
Ibeyi had planned on challenging themselves on album No 3 by recording around the world, in Jamaica, France and America. Instead, as the pandemic hit, it became a challenge even to record in their normal location in London. Naomi had to travel from France, and isolate for 10 days each time she made the journey. “It was the hardest way to do music,” she says. “But at least we were all in the same place.”
The sisters also managed to get their collaborators into the room with them, with big names such as Jorja Smith, whose appearance, unusually, is not a guest verse but a third harmony with the duo’s vocals, “like a third sister”, says Lisa-Kaindé. It’s a reminder that at the centre of every Ibeyi record is the intimacy of their sisterhood. “Lisa is my biggest love, you know?” says Naomi.
On Spell 31 the pair are older, wiser while continuing to build on the themes for which they are known. “It’s funny, I remember when I was young, I went to my mum crying,” says Lisa-Kaindé. “And I said: ‘The only thing I can write about is love, I’m a bad songwriter.’ She laughed and gave me a book about Francis Bacon – he said he always painted about the same thing, just in millions of different ways. My mum said: ‘That’s what you’re gonna do.’”
She tells me about an interview with musician Seun Kuti, in which when asked why he never sang about love, he replied that he had no time for love when he needed revolution. “It’s interesting,” she says, “Because for me both are so intertwined.”
Their songs have always been woven with a sense of communal care. Ash has a track sampling a Michelle Obama speech about Trump’s treatment of women; another is about police mistreatment and an incident in which Lisa-Kaindé was wrongfully stopped and searched in Paris as a teenager. When I mention their cover of the punk band Black Flag’s Rise Above with its guest verse from rapper-producer Berwyn referring to George Floyd, their response is measured. “We don’t talk about this stuff to be ‘political’,” says Naomi, “We talk about stuff that touches us, and that can maybe spark something in someone else. We’re not here to tell people how to do things.”
“I would never call myself an activist,” Lisa-Kaindé adds, laughing. “We are the same as everyone else, just trying to figure this stuff out.”
A lot has happened in the world and for the Diaz sisters since we spoke seven years ago. As Naomi puts it, “We were teenagers, and now we’re women, so of course we’ve changed!” She smiles. “But our relationship? That hasn’t changed at all.”
https://tomtommag.com/2018/09/ibeyi_issue33/
Words by Geoff Shelton
Photos by David Barron
If you can’t imagine an Elysian future where multiple cultures, diverse ideas, and a myriad of human and celestial energies have found harmony, then take some time to listen to the music of Ibeyi. Born and raised in Paris, with stints in Cuba, Ibeyi is 23-year-old fraternal twins Lisa Kaindé and Naomi Diaz. In Santeria, the Afro-Cuban, Yoruban religion they practice, Ibeyi are divine twins who bring joy to their followers. The word comes from the Lacumí pidgin dialect of the West African Yoruba language that arrived in Cuba with the slave trade starting in the 16th century. It is a name reflective of not only their literal reality, but also the importance of tradition, spiritual belief, and family that runs deep through their musical history.
These sisters weave musical traditions of Europe, West Africa, Latin America, and the US into a sacred blanket of sounds that is spiritual and danceable. We spoke with the twins through email about their goals for their sound: “We want our music to be 100 percent us,” they emphasized. “When we’re making and recording our songs, we live in between two cultures and four languages. We have family all over the world, and we both listen to different things. So, Ibeyi is a mix of all our influences. It’s about finding the balance between electronic sounds and organic sounds; the old Yoruban chants and the music we love today. Between Europe and the Caribbean. Between both our desires and inspirations.”
The drums are to thank for this musical pair. At age 18 their mother, Maya Dagnino, a French-Venezuelan singer and composer, began to study conga and learn the batá chants of Yoruban music prevalent in Cuba. This musical path led Dagnino from France to Cuba and thus to the man who would become the father of her children. He was the late Miguel “Angá” Diaz, a world-renowned, Grammy-winning, Cuban percussionist who gained huge recognition as part of the Buena Vista Social Club. “Our earliest memories of the drums are of the batás and congas that our father had at home,” they reminisce. “There are pictures of us around those drums throughout our early years. Everybody thinks the drumming and the love for Yoruba chants were only inherited from our father, but it was actually because of [our parents] that we got in touch with that part of our Afro-Cuban culture.”
Both sisters began studying music at the conservatory at age seven. “Lisa was studying classical piano, and I was studying classical percussion, marimba, and snare drums,” says Naomi. “My sister, mother, and grandmother told me that the day after my father died, at some point, I sat on one of his cajones [at age 11], and for the first time in my life, I started playing it. They told me that nobody moved and [they just] stared at me for a while. They felt it seemed as if our dad had been there with me. But sadly, I don’t remember anything.”
“Both [of] our parents brought us up with the assurance that nothing was impossible to achieve as women. Being a woman was not an issue, we thought we could do anything we set our minds to do just as any man would.”
Meanwhile at age 14, Lisa’s first song came to her through the advice of their mother. “I felt miserable, because Naomi was at a party, and I was not invited,” Lisa explains. “I did many things I would usually do, like finishing my homework, reading, making rings and necklaces with beads. Luckily, I had no computer at the time, because after doing all that, I still went to see my mom to tell her I was really bored and frustrated. She answered that I should write a song. I discovered then that finding melodies and eventually putting words on top of these melodies made me very happy. It became my way to create some beauty out of anything that I felt, witnessed, or thought. It became my way to feel alive and useful. Nothing compares to the joy of making a song.”
With the encouragement of their mother, Lisa would continue to write songs throughout her teenage years. At 17, the twins started talking about making a band. “I met my teacher, the great Peruvian cajon master, Miguel Ballumbrosio,” says Naomi. “I started to love the cajon as my own instrument. When Lisa was asked to do an EP, I told her she couldn’t possibly do it without me.”
When a YouTube video of the duo performing their song “Mama Says” came to the attention of Richard Russell, head of label XL Recordings, he quickly sought them out and brought them to London to record. Around this same time, Ibeyi faced another tragedy when their older sister Yanira passed away due to a brain aneurysm. The culmination of this artistic success mixed with personal loss resulted in the career-launching sounds and lyrics that made up their eponymous debut LP. Upon their arrival at SXSW 2015, they were one of the most buzzed about groups of the festival where they not only lived up to but surpassed all of the hype surrounding them.
Shortly thereafter, the twins found themselves on giant billboards for Apple Music, making cameos in the film for Beyonce’s Lemonade, and touring the world for two years. “We learned a lot!” exclaims Lisa. “We experienced all kinds of audiences, venues, and festivals—over 167 live dates. All that experience made us realize what we wanted for our next album.”
In the winter of 2017, Ibeyi returned to the studio in London with Russell to create their second LP and work on some of the lessons and experiences they took from the road into the new music. “We wanted a bigger sound, and yet we also wanted the songs to not lose the organic feeling we had on the first album with its mix of electronic and live percussion and voices,” they explain. “We wanted to be able to play festivals like Coachella and make people move, but [we] also [wanted be able to] play a more intimate venue—to be free to play the songs anywhere.”
About that balance, Lisa notes, “We always experiment in the studio with Richard. When we go to London, we already have certain rhythmic ideas on certain songs, but they don’t always work in the end. Everything is open. Some songs stay the way we wrote them at home like ‘Vale.’ Some change a lot in their melodies & lyrics; like ‘Transmission,’ and some are completely born in the studio, like ‘I Carried This for Years.’ ‘Me Voy’ is our first song in Spanish, and we invited the great La Mala Rodriguez to rap on it, so it was obvious we needed a Latin rhythm. We made an Ibeyi reggaeton song. Feminine, soft, and we hope, sexy.” Naomi adds, “For me, it’s absolutely amazing to work with Richard Russell, because he is a percussionist, too! During the recording, he and I often jammed in the studio for pleasure. Sometimes, we get good stuff that we can use out of those jams. On one jam, Richard played the Roland 808, which matches greatly with the batá cajon sounds and the cajon. We try things. There is no pressure. We have fun.”
Ash was released this past fall to further rave reviews for Ibeyi. The duo’s updated sonic palette and empowering lyrics struck a chord immediately as the #MeToo movement was taking the world by storm. That paired with xenophobic rhetoric from the US White House made the album timely. On the track “Deathless,” Lisa sings about an encounter she had with a racist policeman when she was 16. While “No Man Is Big Enough for My Arms” features the sisters singing the title repeatedly in harmony while samples from Michelle Obama’s speech during the Hillary Clinton campaign repeat: “The measure of any society is how it treats its women and girls.”
“We’ve been raised by strong and independent women,” they note. “Our mother and our grandmother always worked and supported themselves on their own. Our father and grandfather in Cuba were the cooks of the house. Women in Cuba are very strong. So both our parents brought us up with the assurance that nothing was impossible to achieve as women. Being a woman was not an issue; we thought we could do anything we set our minds to do just as any man would. Growing up, we then discovered that women are still living under men’s laws all over the world, and that some women are still treated as objects that men can use as if they belonged to them. ‘Grab them by the pussy’ is still a sentence that some men dare to say publicly; thinking they’re funny. That’s a real shame. There’s been lots of progress around women’s rights, but we are still far from equality.”
Throughout Ibeyi’s short and successful career, it is clear that their family continues to be a driving and grounding force in their lives. Their mother now works as their manager and co-writes some of their songs. “She has been a solid support all the way from the beginning of this adventure. It’s a blessing to have someone you trust next to you, because you often need an external eye on what you are doing. Doubting is a part of the journey,” they say. “She knows us so well that we can have real honest conversations about artistic choices.” The words of their late father continue to resonate with them through the phrase “pa’lante,” a slang phrasing of the Spanish words “para adelante” meaning, “go ahead” or “go forward.” “Pa’lante for us means whatever happens, life must go on. We lost our father very young, then our sister at 18 one day before leaving on our first tour. We didn’t cancel the tour and [instead] sang all the shows with her in our minds and hearts,” the twins share. “Then we wrote the song ‘Yanira’ for her. That’s what ‘pa’lante’ means in our daily lives. Like we wrote in our song ‘Away Away,’ ‘I don’t give up, I feel the pain, but I’m alive.’”
This was originally published in Tom Tom’s Spring issue. Read the full version here.
SPELL 31 album reviews
https://chicagoreader.com/music/ibeyi-spell-31/
Ibeyi find euphoria and strength in the physical and nonphysical worlds they inhabit. They can’t help but see magic all around them, and they conjure it in turn through their music.
https://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk/2022/05/17/ibeyi-spell-31-xl-recordings/
After a debut album that focused on family mourning and a follow-up describing rebirth, Ibeyi have returned after a five-year absence with a third record entitled ‘Spell 31′ that has the subject of healing as its nucleus. The French-Afro-Cuban sisters continue to use the strengths that they have displayed up until now to help them explore different forms of healing; their respect for historical traditions and languages, and their mash of modern hip-hop with minimal Yoruba spirituality.
https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/albums/ibeyi-spell-31-album-review
"Lavender and Roses" deploys Jorja Smith miraculously, using her voices as a third partner alongside Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi. "Sister 2 Sister" is the stand-out though; with a defiant chorus where they chant their own band’s name, it’s a celebration of their bond as siblings, both "cleansing their souls in the river" and dancing in the mirror to Shakira. The song captures in one breath both the momentousness and goofiness of family and, with a firm grasp on the present and a great deference for the future, it’s one only these sisters could make.
https://www.albumoftheyear.org/album/468494-ibeyi-spell-31.php
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2501.06 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3475 days ago & DAD = 131 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
