Cserepes – The Beginning of the Beginning (Fonó, 2024)
Károly Cserepes returns with The Beginning of the Beginning, his seventh remix album. This new installment draws on African musical traditions to create nine reimagined tracks.
Africa’s influence is central to the project. As Cserepes notes, the continent holds unmatched depth and diversity in folk music. Unlike the strophic forms typical in European traditions, African music often emphasizes repetition, melodic development, and cyclical structures. These features, along with polyrhythmic layering and call-and-response vocals, form the foundation of Cserepes’s reinterpretations.
The rediscovery of African folk music in Europe began in the 1950s and ’60s, aided by portable tape recorders like the Nagra and Uher. These tools enabled researchers to capture high-quality field recordings, which later fueled archives and publications that remain accessible today. These recordings, once niche, went on to inspire minimalist composers such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. In Hungary, the 180 Group carried the torch of this repetitive aesthetic, while African-American jazz, rooted in similar traditions, shaped 20th-century classical composers like Stravinsky and Gershwin.
Despite this legacy, the intrusion of Western technology and ethnographic interest typically triggered the erosion of the very traditions they sought to preserve. Cserepes’s album thus functions not only as a remix but also as a reminder: these are endangered musical artifacts, worthy of both reinterpretation and respect.
Track titles reference a variety of African cultural terms and groups:
- Ngoni – An ethnic group across southern Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.
- Banda-Linda – A dialect of the Banda people in the Central African Republic.
- Iboga – A hallucinogenic plant used in West African rituals.
- Nganga – A spiritual healer or diviner in Central African religious practices.
- Nyankanga – A significant gold deposit in northern Tanzania.
- Dikoboda Sombe – A pygmy children’s song, cited as a nod to early oral traditions.
Earlier recordings include Blacklake (2016), Cserepes Remix – The Big Slalom (2020), and Pink (2023),
Strangely, The Beginning of the Beginning seems to be available only from Apple Music.
Author: Angel Romero
Angel Romero y Ruiz has dedicated his life to musical exploration. His efforts included the creation of two online portals, worldmusiccentral.org and musicasdelmundo.com. In addition, Angel is the co-founder of the Transglobal World Music Chart, a panel of world music DJs and writers that celebrates global sounds. Furthermore, he delved into the record business, producing world music studio albums and compilations. His works have appeared on Alula Records, Ellipsis Arts, Indígena Records and Music of the World.
