Witch Camp (Ghana)

★★★★

I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be SIX DEGREES. DL

Alternative subtitle: ‘Now That’s What I Call Witch House, Vol 1’.

To say that Ian Brennan’s musical collaborators haven’t usually had easy lives would be putting it mildly, but the records he elicits from them are far from a cheap holiday in other people’s misery. These 20 short tracks, recorded in Ghanaian refuges for those accused of witchcraft, have the same electrifying intensity as his earlier releases by Cambodian and Rwandan genocide survivors or the hard-pressed albinos on Ukerewe Island. Check out the lusty whoops of Love Please, cathartic surge of Witch Song or spookily percussive backing vocals on I Am A Beggar For A Home. These primal statements of personal identity have melodies picked out on guitar or marimba and rhythms tapped out on handy household objects. If that’s not the living spirit of rock’n’roll, I don’t know what is.