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about
Mantra is the new single from Surf Coast multi instrumentalist Immy Owusu and his first with Melbourne label Hopestreet Recordings. Mantra is a dreamy slice of Immy’s ‘Afrodelik’ approach to music, a sound that spans psychedelic rock, funk and West African roots.
Immanuel Kwabena Dreessens-Owusu grew up in two worlds: the sea bleached lifestyle of Torquay and the Surf Coast with its rock n roll soundtrack, and the musical heritage of his Ghanaian / Dutch family. Immy’s father Kojo is one of Australia’s best regarded West African musicians and his grandfather Koo Nimo is a legend of Ghanaian Highlife and Palm Wine music active since the 1960s. From them Immy learned Ashanti music and its instruments, added a fuzz pedal and began to experiment.
Immy spent much of the pandemic living in his caravan in the bush near Bells Beach where he wrote Mantra, letting the Australian landscape and the African rhythms percolate to create a dreamy track with unstoppable momentum. Raw and rhythmic bass and drums at the forefront, Mantra opens with a roughly picked guitar hook. Echo vocals come from all around, spooky but not ominous, telling us to face our fears and give them up to a higher power. ‘When you worry, when you’re feeling down. All your darkness, give it all to me. This is my mantra’. The track builds with layered synthesizers and pads drawing you into an unfamiliar world.
Of Mantra, Immy says ‘My family always said as a kid that when I was worried about something that I could give these negative feelings up to the Angels, The Great Mother, Jesus, God or the Universe, depending on which family member I was asking.’
lyrics
Rolling clouds out into the sea,
Well you know what it means to me
Poison blackened in my mind
Well I feel it, by and by
We all feel it now
We all feel it now
When you worry
When you’re feeling down
All your darkness, yeah
Give it all to me
When you worry
When you’re feeling down
I’ll think of you, yeah
This my mantra
Floating grey shadows in the deep,
I don’t see them yet I think they see me
Padded footsteps in the night
They hear my heart more than I
We all feel it now
When you worry
When you’re feeling down
All your darkness, yeah
Give it all to me
When you worry
When you’re feeling down
Know the dark within
This my mantra
Like so many others, this came like a bolt out of the blue and, even though it's well before payday, I had to have this astonishing album on vinyl to prove it exists. The feel of the tunes makes me feel like the Impressions do, Curtis Mayfield, the big spaces and instinctive horns and stuff drifting in and out. Great grooves and I can see lots of ghosts nodding along to this with big smiles on their faces. At last! Anthony Cottrell
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