The roots of Angolan popular music explored in the meticulous guitar studies of Mário Rui Silva 1980s albums.
Born in Luanda, Angola in 1953, Mário Rui Silva is a guitarist, researcher and intellectual who has dedicated his life to Angolan popular music. His fifty-year career has seen him live between Angola and Europe, learn from the likes of Manu Dibango and Francis Bebey, and bring forth a series of albums and textbooks that document the musical and spoken languages of Angola.
Combining Mário’s fascination with the traditional semba and kazukuta rhythms of legendary Angolan band Ngola Ritmos with a range of traditional instruments and contemporary influences, this compilation features tracks taken from three albums released in Luanda in the 1980s.
Whether on achingly beautiful acoustic ballads or groove-led, jazz-inflected tracks, the music has a melancholy quality, woven into the dynamics of Mário’s deft guitar playing, the ngoma drum and dikanza (scraper) which define the semba rhythm.
What might sound like the intonations of Brazilian influence are what Mário attributes to the “African rhythms taken by the slaves [which] gave rise to other musical cultures” around the globe, not least bossa and samba (which takes its name from semba). Instead, this music emerged from a collective instinct to assert a cosmopolitan Angolan identity free from the patronising falsehoods of Lusotropicalism.
Over the course of his musical career, Mário drew inspiration and mentorship from Ngola Ritmos founder and activist Liceu Vieira Dias, through whom he gained technical, political and spiritual understanding of Angolan musical culture. In the hands of Liceu, the semba of the 1940s and ‘50s helped create an emancipatory sense of national pride and collective agency that awakened its listeners to the racism and tyranny of colonial rule, underpinning the country’s push for independence in the process.
A selection from Mário’s three 1980s albums, Sung’Ali (1982), Tunapenda Afrika (1985) and Koizas dum Outru Tempu (1988) have been compiled here as a 2xLP release by Time Capsule’s Sam Jacob and Kay Suzuki. Together, they provide a snapshot of one man’s journey to the core of his nation’s music, charged with the search for a culture uprooted by colonialism.
Born in Luanda, Angola in 1953, Mário Rui Silva is a guitarist, researcher and intellectual who has dedicated his life to Angolan popular music. His fifty-year career has seen him live between Angola and Europe, learn from the likes of Manu Dibango and Francis Bebey, and bring forth a series of albums and textbooks that document the musical and spoken languages of Angola.
Combining Mário’s fascination with the traditional semba and kazukuta rhythms of legendary Angolan band Ngola Ritmos with a range of traditional instruments and contemporary influences, this compilation features tracks taken from three albums released in Luanda in the 1980s.
Whether on achingly beautiful acoustic ballads or groove-led, jazz-inflected tracks, the music has a melancholy quality, woven into the dynamics of Mário’s deft guitar playing, the ngoma drum and dikanza (scraper) which define the semba rhythm.
What might sound like the intonations of Brazilian influence are what Mário attributes to the “African rhythms taken by the slaves [which] gave rise to other musical cultures” around the globe, not least bossa and samba (which takes its name from semba). Instead, this music emerged from a collective instinct to assert a cosmopolitan Angolan identity free from the patronising falsehoods of Lusotropicalism.
Over the course of his musical career, Mário drew inspiration and mentorship from Ngola Ritmos founder and activist Liceu Vieira Dias, through whom he gained technical, political and spiritual understanding of Angolan musical culture. In the hands of Liceu, the semba of the 1940s and ‘50s helped create an emancipatory sense of national pride and collective agency that awakened its listeners to the racism and tyranny of colonial rule, underpinning the country’s push for independence in the process.
A selection from Mário’s three 1980s albums, Sung’Ali (1982), Tunapenda Afrika (1985) and Koizas dum Outru Tempu (1988) have been compiled here as a 2xLP release by Time Capsule’s Sam Jacob and Kay Suzuki. Together, they provide a snapshot of one man’s journey to the core of his nation’s music, charged with the search for a culture uprooted by colonialism.
We are sealing some of the thoughts and feelings, the vibrations of our day
In what you may call a me capsule, which itself has been sealed with cosmic love”
Weldon Irvine - Time Capsule (1973)
Time Capsule is a reissue focused record label born out of a loose musical community based around the long running party Beauty & The Beat, and East London’s music venue brilliant corners.
We are multi-cultural, cross-genre musicologists & obsessive record collectors. We like to share the music through audiophile analogue sound system which reveals the details of the sound as well as the emotional impact of the music. Regardless of its style, origins or era, the music we love shares a strong sonic experience and deeply emotional connection.
Our objective is to explore, study, curate and spread the sonic experience of this “time art” as meticulously as we can with as much love and care as possible, so that anyone who open these time capsules will experience the the same magic of the music in its purest and most accurate recreation.
Stories From Another Time 1982-1988
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