Mo’ Horizons enter a new chapter with their seventh album and remarkably, celebrate 25 years of their exultant and globally enriched, forward-thinking, electronic grooves. Featuring guest singers, Gyedu-Blay Ambolley and Noam Bar Azulay. MangoWoman is a fiery and sample-heavy blend of future-funk, balearic, Ghanaian highlife, Brazilian drum n bass and lo-fi hip hop and set to be released on their longstanding label Agogo Records, on 6th October.
Spanning over three decades DJ and production duo Mo’ Horizons, led by Mark Wetzler & Ralf Droesemeyer, is a relentless force on the global groove scene and this incredible achievement, 25 years after their furtive production steps, is testament to remaining on-point, undeterred by scenes and artists, coming and going.
Familiar and warming sounds pervade Mango Woman; the call of the Brazilian cuica, the snapping snares, rolling breakbeats, swooning sax licks, and warm and dreamy beach-scene vibrations. Yet there are brand new tricks; Arthur Lee’s gravelly voice underpin a Funkadelic groove in Havanna B-Boys and the mesmeric vocal samples from Anglo-Portuguese singer Guida de Palma (Jazzinho) on album opener Anotha Bossa – they
both shine as lead singles.
Ever-present in the contemporary jazz infected club culture of the early 2000’s, alongside contemporaries like Gilles Peterson, Jazzanova, United Future Organisation, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Fila Brazillia and Dining Rooms, it was a live show of acid jazz pioneers Galliano, in Hannover in 1995, that would act as a turning point for the duo. And having always immersed themselves in the ‘digging’, it was to labels and compilations from the likes of Something Else, Acid Jazz and then Soul Jazz, Ninja Tune and Freestyle Records that would feed their insatiable appetite for new realms of music from all ends of the Afro-Latin-Brazil-Funk and drum n bass spectrums.
