Various
Taa! - Our Language May Be Dying, But Our Voices Remain
Mesmerizing field recordings from Botswana. Producer/recordist/Grammy winner Ian Brennan ventured to an end-of-the-road location to document songs sung in Taa, a rich language on the verge of extinction. This captivating music is created by solo and layered voices, handclaps, found percussion and thumb piano. Shamanic, ghostly ballads from the farthest reaches of Southern Africa. The Taa language in Botswana possesses 112 sounds, the most of any language in the world. In contrast, English has approximately 44 sounds, Italian 32. But there are only around 2,500 Taa speakers remaining and the language is dying. The songs on this album are mostly mantras- prayers that repeat the same words or phrases over and over again. The song titles tell entire stories by themselves, and with the Taa languages heavy use of click consonants, the sounds carry the meaning as much as the words.