Al Africatown - Ancestor Sounds (CD)

A collection of landmark recordings of residents from the Africatown neighborhood in Mobile, AL, Ancestor Sounds features descendants from the Clotilda, the last ship to bring enslaved people across the Atlantic to America. Conceived by GRAMMY-winning producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ramblin' Jack Elliott) and filmmaker and photographer Marilena Umuhoza Delli, the project features accompaniment from the local community as well as ambient recordings from the factories that surround and pollute the community. Meant as an impressionistic document rather than a definitive historical narrative, it was captured on-site as live, first takes. The outdoor nature of the recordings graphically renders the encroaching and ominous industrial sounds and foregrounds the environmental racism that has plagued the community. These surprising and often arresting "ancestor sounds" resonate across centuries and continents on this important, irreplaceable document.

Track List:

Disc: 1

1. Run, If You Can (Don't Go Down That Road)
2. Family Secret
3. Do You Hear Me Now?
4. Lead Me Home
5. Black Part of Town
6. Illegal Factory (Smokestack Sighs)
7. Africatown in Their Face
8. Kept Me
9. First Thing He Did When Freed Was Build a Drum
10. Haunted By Her Capture
11. Sent to Vietnam, But Never Been to Africa
12. Only Black School
13. Reconstructed Memory
14. Cudjoe's Statue Defiled
15. Birdsong Beside the Refinery
16. Walk with Thee
17. Graveyard Shift Emissions
18. The Blues Returns (Taking Flight)