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Click on the album cover to listen to all sample tracks
Haïti Market
Moulded around its founder Franck Biyong, Massak has been steadily been enriching its funky Afro-Beat with jazz, soul and hip-hop. The Cameroonian singer created this concept in 1997 around the galvanizing beats of drummer Auguste Manly from Burkina Faso. At present, they are nine onstage, six musicians, two back-up female vocalists and a DJ. In 2007, they brought out an ambitious and multi-facetted debut album Haiti Market.
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Franck Biyong took his time, brewed up his sounds on international circuits and the Paris underground scene… and finally unleashed a rousing first CD with a surprise at every corner. Haiti Market is a challenging 14-tracker which embarks the listener on a voyage right from its sizzling opener “Cosmo Riddim”. Biyong’s bass voice invites us to visit “the underground world” of Haiti, although it’s not immediately apparent to this reviewer what his links are to the Caribbean island.
The Afro-Beat he has composed is racy and spiced up by generous doses of funk, jazz and soul – all to a strong bassline that oozes with energy. Biyong’s confident vocals appear to have a certain inspiration from the slick US funk movement of the late Seventies. But the album also perculates along thanks to lighthearted Creole rhythms in “Dad”, or soft acoustic exchanges in “Ralekow”. It makes Haiti Market a fascinating UFO with the slick production of Afrolectric Music reflecting the maturity of the only French group to have played SOBs in New York.
The smoothness of the musical texture contrasts with the toughness of the lyrics. Like a velvet glove
shrouding an iron fist the beauty of the poetry does not hide the anger and denunciation driving Biyong.
“They say mulatto land is a reality,
But when comes time to testify
Same old suckers gonna be laughing with their ego sorry
AKA the control board of the blind.”
This is an enigmatic extract of the single “Anywhere Trouble”, played regularly by progressive radio stations in France like Radio Nova. The mingling of metaphors and poetry are omnipresent in the tracks, sung in English, Bassa, French, Pidgin English or Portuguese. Listeners will also be impressed by the vocal jousts and experimentations between Biyong’s Afro-funk chatter and the beguiling women harmonies. “Night of the Purple Circles” is a fine example of this. This is a chilling song describing an apocalyptic world of shadows and secrets:
“8 billion different perceptions
In the light of their kingdom
There is heat in the hemisphere
There is heat in the atmosphere and
They keep talking softly.”
Offsetting this are throat-freeing laughs, playful ditties, snatches of relaxed conversations and sounds of daily life. It gives a feeling of a musical diary, a stream-of-consciousness with an impressive swagger to it. “Yeah, we are in the studio right now,” explains Biyong in “Radio Underground”, “With my girl Sam and my man Auguste/ And we are working on this album/ And we are just, like, trying to finish those two tracks.” Etc. But the apparent nonchalance does not hide a rigour that should make this little known band break through to greater things in the near future.
Daniel Brown
December 19th 2007
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