UNIVERSAL TONGUE

‘Music is a universal language, but spoken language can help you think about what makes you emotional, what makes you feel certain feelings, what you want to see in the world,’ says Eno Williams, frontwoman of Ibibio Sound Machine. When Williams uses both English and the Nigerian language – from which her band’s name is derived – for their dazzling new album Doko Mien, the group somehow produce a world of entrancing specificity and comforting universality. It is a language entirely of their own. Long praised for their jubilant, explosive live shows, Ibibio Sound Machine fully capture that energy and communication on Doko Mien, their third album. Williams was born in the UK but grew up in Nigeria, steeped in her family heritage. She obsessed over west African electronic music, highlife and the like, but was equally influenced by western genres such as post-punk, disco, and funk. The London-based octet have proudly enveloped themselves in that maximalist quilt since forming in 2013, cracking apart the lines separating cultures, between nature and technology, between joy and pain, between tradition and future. They play The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea, tomorrow, doors, 7pm. Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.