Romare
Love Songs: Part Two

Romare that pisses when you drink a bottle of afrobeat with the MD inside.

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You don’t have the club culture. You’re a provincial kid.
But I have two friends and a pair of AKG K518DJ.

The AKG K518DJ are the top of the line in terms of quality/price ratio. Imagine Arnold, Kevin, and Gianni from AKG passing the Olympic torch during a board meeting, planning an amount of decibels to handle with circuits and materials they are not capable of handling: -"eh but we just put the ohms, the frequency response on the box…" -"...not the ingredients" -"ajajajaj, nice one Arnold, not the ingredients." These headphones come out as a joke, with c a r i c a t u r e bass that if you have nice flacs and a flashy equalizer, they give your pituitary gland Chinese massages. A Panda Seat with the horsepower of a Tirrenia ferry. Sixty yuri all inclusive. Top of the line for quality/price ratio.

The quality/price ratio is the opium of the poor.
But my two friends have speakers.

G. does vinyl DJ sets. He plays old funk, soul, afrobeat, things with serious bass. He has the power to travel hundreds of thousands of kilometers in an a112 to hear Tony Allen and Mulatu Astatke at some summer festival in some village deep in Barigadu.
L. is from Scotland. He has the power of Hawaiian shirts. Give him the bass, the clap, the sampled black voices, the straightforward beat, and he has the power of the smile. We spent hours searching for all the existing songs with cowbells, to make our playlists. It's an ongoing research, we’re seeking funds: we reciprocate with bottle caps, seen up close.

So once it happens that G. and L. find themselves at a little party in my old, central loft, and one of them puts on Romare. The perfect synthesis [connection gesture with the hand]. Among roses. And flowers. It turns out that both know Romare, and from there all the «oh but do you know these?» from the most roots stuff to what's currently going on in the basements of Berlin and London.

I didn’t know Romare at the time. I catch up this morning and realize one thing: with my plastic AKGs, I've churned through terabytes of music, various genres, perhaps almost all, in various formats and qualities; and nothing, I swear nothing, had ever come out this way from these crappy headphones.

So there are two options.
Ninja Tune: make a special edition of this record with the K518DJ included.
Arnold, Kevin, Gianni: put at least the download link in the package with the K518DJ.

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Romare takes vocalizations, percussion, and some grooves from afrobeat to enhance them with the sharpest resources of boiler room techno.
In the rhythmic palette of this record, you find the assertive beat of Who Loves You?, with the double punch bass: one of those club anthems nobody sings along to, but it arrives on time, and on time makes everyone happy. There's L.U.V. which is a standard afrobeat, with the offbeat hi-hat openings, but with a nice house synthesizer on top and a bass of fat plasticity.
But there’s also the semi-dubstep of Come Close To Me, which starts and seems like Burial, then corrects course, then comes a little acidic synth line, then comes an easy-peasy arpeggio, on a bass all made of soft flanger. And the deconstructed drumroll snatches in the Burial style return, and at one point there’s that too much which is never too much, but just enough.

In All Night I glimpse the concrete possibility of peace in the world for those who listen to music with the AKG K518DJ. All the major representatives of the various global groove fronts, including the roots fanatics, sitting at a table and nodding, in rhythm.

Sisters, brothers of the heart, this is an important record.