Ibibio Sound Machine Produced Chopping Mountain Themselves Again

Eno Williams of Ibibio Sound Machine.

For two records, Ibibio Sound Machine handed the desk to somebody else. Hot Chip produced Electricity. Ross Orton produced Pull the Rope, and pushed the eight-piece towards something darker and more club-facing. On Chopping Mountain, out 11 September through Merge Records, the band took the job back and gave it to their own saxophonist.

Max Grunhard co-founded the group and last produced one of its albums in 2019, on Doko Mien. He is behind the board again here, and the record was made primarily at Vanguard Studios, the band’s own room in South London. That is a lineage decision as much as a logistical one, and it shows up in how the songs are built.

Back to the Room They Own

The album is the band’s sixth, and it arrives with a production credit that reads like a correction rather than a retreat. Outside producers gave Ibibio Sound Machine two records with a clear external hand on them. Grunhard’s return puts the arrangement decisions back with the person who has been playing in the horn section since the start.

Working in their own studio also changes the method. According to the band, the songs were built through live jams, rhythmic experiments and instinctive interplay rather than assembled around a pre-set production concept. An eight-piece playing in a room it controls can afford to let a groove run until it finds its own shape, and that is audible in the length of the cycles here.

The sound the sessions landed on is broader than either predecessor. The band describe it as drawing on the earthy textures of classic West African highlife alongside post-punk, Afrobeat, soul and electronic music, which is close to a description of the group’s whole catalogue but with the highlife pushed further forward than it has been in years.

Concept of Love and the Vocoder

The lead single is “Concept of Love”, released with the announcement in June. In the video, directed by Joe Gist and William Wade, Eno Williams walks into the centre of the frame and delivers the chorus refrain through a vocoder before switching into Ibibio, the language she grew up with, over an Afro-disco pulse.

The vocoder is the detail worth pausing on. Running a lead vocal through one is a disco and boogie move that descends from the late 1970s, and using it as the vehicle for a question rather than a hook is unusual. The refrain asks what your concept of love is. It is a plain question delivered through the most obviously synthetic tool available.

Williams has said the track took a long route to that arrangement. “It went through many different stages and ended up with a soulful, electronic Afro-disco feel,” she said of the single. “What you give out into the world is what you receive back, it’s beautiful to be loved.”

The bilingual switching is not new for the band, but it carries more of the song here than usual. Williams moves between English and Ibibio inside the same passage, so the language change functions as an arrangement device, the way a horn line or a key change would.

What the Tracklist Is Built From

Ten songs: “Burning in Lagos”, “Chopping Mountain”, “When You Want to Dance”, “Concept of Love”, “Return to Sender”, “Give Me Peace”, “Menso”, “Love”, “Kukuru” and “River Don’t Rush”. “Return to Sender”, released earlier in the spring as a standalone single, is not the Elvis song, as Stereogum was careful to point out.

The band single out “When You Want to Dance” for euphoric disco energy and “Return to Sender” for spiritual intensity, and those two poles describe most of the record’s range. The titles carry the same double register the group has always worked in: Lagos and London, a chant and a floor-filler, a Nigerian language and an English one.

The album title itself is a phrase, not a metaphor imported for the sleeve. Set against songs about peace, love and return, it reads as a description of effort rather than of scenery.

Why the Highlife Is Louder This Time

Highlife is the oldest thread in this band’s sound and usually the least foregrounded. It is a Ghanaian and Nigerian dance form built on interlocking guitar lines, a walking bass and horn arrangements written to be sung along to, and it predates almost everything else Ibibio Sound Machine draw on. On the last two records it sat underneath the electronics. Here the band place it nearer the surface.

That reordering follows directly from the production decision. An outside producer working with a London collective tends to reach for the elements that translate most cleanly to a club system, which on Pull the Rope meant the machine parts. A saxophonist producing his own band reaches for the horn and guitar interplay instead, because that is the material he has spent a decade arranging.

The effect is that the record sounds older and newer at once. The guitar figures and horn voicings are drawn from a tradition that ran through West African dancefloors from the 1950s onward, while the vocoder, the synth bass and the sequencing keep it anchored in a contemporary electronic frame. Neither element is treated as a costume for the other.

It also explains the record’s structural habits. Highlife arrangements are cyclical rather than verse-chorus, built to sustain a groove across several minutes and reward small variations inside it. Songs assembled from live jams naturally fall into that shape, and the band have leaned into it rather than editing it down to radio lengths.

A Record Made Against the News

The band have been explicit that the album was made in reaction to an increasingly unstable world, and that the response they chose was to hold onto love, resistance, togetherness and hope without losing sight of the dancefloor. That last clause is the important one, and it places the record in a specific tradition.

Dance music built as a response to political instability is not a new arrangement. It descends from the same instinct that produced the disco records made in collapsing 1970s cities, and it is the reason so many of those songs have outlived their moment. A groove carries a position further than a lyric sheet does, which is a lesson the genre keeps re-learning; it is why the most-sampled records ever made tend to be the ones built for the floor first.

Ibibio Sound Machine have been making that argument for a decade, and Chopping Mountain is the clearest version of it they have released. The band’s own framing calls it the clearest rendering yet of a longstanding mission to promote love, unity and resistance through music.

Eight Players, One Room

The group is an eight-piece, and the arrangements on this record are written for that number rather than around it. That matters more than it sounds. A band that records live in its own studio can keep parts that a producer working to a budget would strip, and the density of the horn and percussion writing here is the result.

Williams remains the focal point, but the record is not a vocal album with a backing group. The instrumental passages carry substantial weight, and the interplay the band describes between players is what fills the space that a heavier electronic production would otherwise occupy.

It is worth noting what the band gave up to make it this way. Two outside producers brought two distinct audiences and two distinct sonic signatures. Choosing an internal producer for a sixth album is a decision to sound like yourself rather than to sound new, and it only works if the group has something specific enough to return to.

Where It Plays Next

The touring behind the record is European. The band played WOMAD in Glasgow and Jazzaldia in Donostia over the summer, along with festival dates in Belgium and Spain, before a UK and Ireland run through October taking in Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham, Dublin, Birkenhead, Brighton, Oxford, Newcastle and Edinburgh.

There are no North American dates attached to the release, which is a notable absence for a band on a North Carolina label. BrooklynVegan listed the full itinerary when the album was announced, and it stays on one side of the Atlantic throughout.

Pre-orders run through the usual independent channels in black vinyl, green smoke vinyl and CD. The band’s own announcement carries the full detail, including the video for “Concept of Love” that introduced the record in June.

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Will Lisil

Founder of MW3.biz, building technology that empowers creators and democratising access to digital tools.

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