Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Talitakum, the second album by Belgian-Burkinabe electro-punk trio Avalanche Kaito, bursts to life with a resounding horn fanfare. It sounds like a clarion call—an invitation to come running, gather ’round, and get on board, for something is about to kick off. And so it does; the horns intensify and escalate in urgency before suddenly dropping out, replaced by a sturdy, foreboding beat and clattering percussion. Over its almost nine minutes, “Borgo” gathers momentum with joyful flourishes of peul flute, droning guitars, sputtering electronics, and rapidly escalating rhythms. There are few vocals on the opener, which is notable considering that Burkina Faso-born Kaito Winse is a griot, whose role would normally be to bequeath wisdom through ancient proverbs and stories.
And yet, on “Borgo” and subsequent tracks, Winse and his bandmates—French drummer/producer Benjamin Chaval and experimentalists Belgian guitarist Nico Gitto—do tell stories, experimenting with different forms of communication and conveying a whole lot of emotion through their incendiary, ever-morphing sound.
In the album notes, the Brussels-based trio mentions the influence that Romanian artist Tristan Tzara (a humanist and anti-fascist who joined the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and later protested French atrocities in Algeria) had on the atomic countercultures of the 1950s and 1960s (as expressed in Jeff Nuttall’s 1968 polemic, Bomb Culture). Tzara believed in the power of chaos and randomness in creating new forms of expression, and the revolutionary potential of subverting creative norms. Avalanche Kaito seem driven by the same rationale, distilling each of their musical backgrounds down to their most powerful essence, incinerating old ideas and forging new beginnings—the fact that Talitakum means “Dead, come back to life!” in Moore is perhaps not a coincidence.
Songs rarely follow a “traditional” structure; instead, they meander through different soundscapes as if they were scenes in a movie. “Donle,” which means “welcome,” is particularly cinematic, with washes of ambient sound and low, humming synths setting the scene for Winse to spin a tale about traveling back to his village: “I was filled with joy/ I understood that I had arrived in the land of my ancestors, where all my childhood stories and beautiful memories were to be found.” The music glides between the organic and electronic, making the track feel as if it’s at once grounded in the village while also drifting into a dreamlike, timeless dimension.
Things get more frantic on “Tanvusse,” meaning “relive,” where an eruption of percussion, rhythmic vocals, and chanting, glitchy electronics, and Winse’s distorted mouth bow gather over the low, shifting rumble of the bass below. Some songs, such as the title track, eventually settle into a hypnotic groove, but others flit around, jumping from one sound fragment to another.
After the release of their debut album in 2022, the Avalanche Kaito toured incessantly, and on Talitakum, they build on the collective, ritual energy of those live performances. Embracing elements of chaos and anarchy, they are nonetheless able to channel myriad musical histories and personal stories into their sound without losing any of the integrity and power of the real, living traditions they draw on. With its open-ended approach, Talitakum makes a mockery of the very concept of borders, musical and not.
