Full article available at The Quietus
"1994 by Maputo, Mozambique-based producer Nandele imagines a writer called Vandole Ukaloyi traveling through Maputo after ceasefire in the Mozambique civil war and the country’s first democratic election. Ukaloyi witnesses a country in transition, documenting his journey using a cassette recorder – capturing enough to fill “a terabyte of hard drive of today’s technology”. Exactly where fact and fiction split in this story isn’t clear. More than anything, this tape feels like a deep investigation by Nandele into the culture that surrounds him. The first half of the tape sees him in far less beaty terrain than he’s explored before, a love letter to the hypnotic, time warping power of slow morphing synth sequences and how eerie they sound when overlayed with voices from the street and snippets of field recorded song and drums. That’s especially true of the album’s centrepiece, the long-form ‘Fofoka’, a beautifully paced meditation which feels like it could go on forever without getting stale. Things start to twist from there. Something ominous hangs in the air on ‘LeV1’. While on the final pair of tracks, beats agitate the drift to conjure a sinister utopianism. Forward propulsion colliding with a nagging dread, perhaps. The whole tape is a journey. Nandele displaying a rare grasp of the storytelling possibilities of the album format." - Daryl Worthington
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