Album Review: Groupe RTD- The Dancing Devils of Djibouti

I swipe a couple dozen new albums and a towering stack of digital singles into my streaming queue almost every Friday morning.  It’s not unusual for me to forget why a particular title initially came to my attention.  I was stumped, consequently, when I finally checked out Groupe RTD’s The Dancing Devils of Djibouti earlier this week.

I initially reckoned it was a reissue of 1970s recordings by an Indonesian party band.  But the Bollywood elements belied the assumption.  Is it Indian?  That wouldn’t account for the Jamaican or Ethiopian jazz components.  And what about the clue provided by the name?  Pathetically, I needed to reference an atlas to locate Djibouti on a map.  The African country on the Gulf of Aden is just 18 miles southwest of Yemen.

The ensemble’s base in a global crossroads accounts for the unlikely array of styles, but learning The Dancing Devils of Djibouti was recorded in 2019 shocked me.  Dated keyboard textures and the dampened sound field make the recording an anomaly in the space-time continuum.

A 60-second promotional video overstates the quality of the album while offering tantalizing glimpses of the musicians.  The Dancing Devils of Djibouti isn’t the most transcendently uplifting or irrepressible dance party released in 2020, but exploration of the novel hodgepodge is a mandatory trip for aural globetrotters.


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Any album with song titles like “King Tubby,” “The Euchirist,” “Flavor Flav,” “Slew Foot” and “Ramesses II” merits my attention.  Shrines, the word-drunk release by the underground rap duo Armand Hammer, sounds as if it was recorded in a cloud of noxious smoke.  Mask off.

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I caught 23 sets of Sunday’s Bang on a Can Marathon.  My ten favorite performances: Iva Bittová, Roscoe Mitchell, Terry Riley, Rhiannon Giddens, Don Byron, Conrad Tao, Tomeka Reid/Vicky Chow, Ailie Robertson/Gregg August, Paula Matthusen/Dana Jessen and Helena Tulve/Arlen Hlusko.  Iva Bittová’s stunning Czech folk drones led me to Bartók: 44 Duets for Two Violins.  The new reissue of a magical 1997 album is even more psychedelic than the Armand Hammer title referenced above.  Here’s appropriately loopy archival footage of “Pillow Dance”.

(Original image of a flight board at Ben Gurion Airport by There Stands the Glass.)