Jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid has announced a new album that she made with the multidisciplinary artist and musician Naima Nefertari. The album, Journey to Nabta Playa, is out on May 2 via Spiritmuse. Leading the full-length is the new song “Procession of the Equinox.” Hear it below.
Dawid and Nefertari’s new album takes inspiration from Nabta Playa, an ancient astrological stone circle in the Nubian Desert. It was also inspired, in part, by the late children’s books author Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales: “They say the people could fly,” Hamilton wrote. “Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic. And they would walk up on the air like climbin up on a gate. And they flew like blackbirds over the fields. Black, shiny wings flappin against the blue up there.”
Revisit Pitchfork’s review of Angel Bat Dawid’s 2019 debut, The Oracle.
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Journey to Nabta Playa:
01 Neptune Desert Sounds
02 Nabta Calling
03 Bishmillah
04 Procession of the Equinox
05 Exorcism: Clearing the Electromagnetic Field
06 Heru: The Oasis
07 Black Stones of Sirius
08 Prayer [ft. Dr. Asar Hapi]
09 Burial: String Quartet in E Minor by David Ornette Cherry
10 Chariots of Expanse (People Could Fly)