Lisbon – On its fourth studio album, Terrakota keeps on mashing up frontiers to bring together music and people from around the world. With the help of some surprising special guests, the ambassadors of Portuguese multiculturalism keep on expanding their musical horizons, to Rajasthan, Angola, classical India, urban Cuba, and beyond.

It’s been ten beautiful years since that first trip to Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal. Junior, Alex and Humberto went to get a real pulse of African drumming and harmonies, creating a strong bond with the n´goni and balafon and reaching another level playing African guitar and percussion. That travel was a huge musical inspiration and travelling has been Terrakota’s most significant source of ideas ever since. Brazil, Morocco, India, Jamaica, Cuba, Guinea, Gambia, Ivory Coast, Mozambique, Cape Verde, México, Turkey… Name it and they’ve been there.

Mixing up all these cultures is nice, but how do you call the result? Fusion, world fusion, musique métisse as the French call it. Terrakota’s Facebook-page suggests: Afro/world mestizo explosion! Doesn’t matter any longer, Terrakota has founded its own musical genre: world massala! World standing for world music and massala for the fusion, as massala is a mixture of species used a lot in Indian cuisine. So don’t look any further and file under ‘world massala’, meaning bringing new innovative musical fusions over and over again, without any fear of experiment, just jamming until you find a formula where ancient musical traditions embrace the 21st century. Punjabi afro-reggae

The starting point of this album is India. “We were working on a reggae based on a traditional Indian raga when the Ladakh Confluence called us to perform in India, on the rooftop of the world, the Himalayas, in August 2009,” says Junior, the male voice and multi-instrumentalist. “We seized the occasion to record several musicians in our improvised hotel room studio in Leh. Back in Lisbon, we blended these recordings with our own spice and that’s how India made it’s first real entrance in Terrakota’s music, on the first single ‘World Massala’.”

The band introduced the sitar on its 2007 album ‘Oba Train’ but hadn’t really dared to make an Indian song until this trip to India, staying true to its fundament of soaking up new musical traditions by travelling and taking their time to learn from local musicians. The single ‘World Massala’ is a groundbreaking musical fusion that might never have been done before: Punjabi afro-reggae. Bridging the gap between India and Jamaica, but also between Rajasthani folk and classical India. While the gypsy musicians of Rajasthan Roots take care of the rhythm and give the song some authentic gypsy guts, the carnatic singers Mahesh Vinyakram and Bollywood-star Vasundhara Das take the song to new mystical heights.

Political message
Conscious lyrics have been Terrakota’s trademark since its beginnings, so when the band turns to afrobeat, you’d better make sure it’s outspoken! On ‘Slow Food’, recorded with our musical friends from the Portuguese funkband Cool Hipnoise on bass, keyboards and brass, Terrakota is staying true to afrobeat’s tradition of music with a message, telling people to eat ‘good food’ – vegetables, healthy stuff – and to stop eating all that crap fast food and advising that soon, the only way out will be planting yourself… Terrakota making afrobeat shouldn’t surprise as the band has an afrobeat sideproject, the KotaCool Afrobeat Orchestra, that has done some powerful gigs around Lisbon the past year.

Barcelona-based Cuban rapper Kumar adds some slamming rhymes on the afro-Cuban ‘Gripe Económica’, a strong critic on the misleading information about the vaccination against Mexican Aflu, an example of how big corporations, corrupt politicians and mass media can create an apocalyptic frenzy that makes people go crazy enough to take the vaccine. Terrakota’s message is clear: “no tomen la vacuna!” (don’t take the vaccine!)

Nobody is illegal
Romi wrote the words of ‘Ilegal’ out of frustration of her situation: she had been without papers for six years, not being recognised as an Angolan citizen as her birth certificate was burnt during the war in the south of Angola. Portugal didn’t recognise her either, even though she had arrived as a refugee, surviving a hail of bullets in her fleering mother’s arms, when she was just two years old. “Incredibly, my situation finally got solved while I was writing this song!” she says with a breathe of relief. “I wrote it to support all those that don’t have any documents, especially people displaced by conflicts. It is a horrible situation to live in, it’s inhuman. We should stand up against this treatment many Africans get in Europe! The Western powers have to stop this hypocrisy of continuously exploiting the natural resources of developing countries and not accepting its people in search of a better life in the richer West. We Terrakota think every person should have the right to travel and live wherever he wants, independent of skin colour, nationality or belief.”

Recording with singer-songwriter Paulo Flores, the brightest star of today’s avant-garde in Angola, gave us the most goose-bumps in the studio. He leads the African princess Romi in the search for her Angolan roots on ‘Raiz’, an amazing Zap Mama-style a capella that explodes into an up-tempo, guitar driven semba. ‘Né Djarabi’ takes us to the ancient Mande empire, with Alex on Mansour Seckstyle acoustic guitar, accompanying Romi’s singing in Dioula (Burkina Faso) while Flores’ warm vocals give the song an Angolan twist. This intimate acoustic setting opens a new perspective for Terrakota and lets Romi’s voice shine as it never has done before.

Maturity
On this album, once again the masters of Afro-Lisboa fusão have used a broad palette of colours to paint a world without borders, masterfully recorded and mixed by Lisbon’s Afro-scene producer Bruno ‘Beat Laden’ Lobato. Whether it’s mbalax, funana, samba, reggae, Afro-Cuba, gnawa, afrobeat, desert blues, batuque, flamenco, maracatu, rap or chimurenga, Terrakota intermingles it with ease in its world massala.

It’s no secret that Terrakota is a live band with one of the most energetic shows of the world music scene. With this fourth recording, Terrakota has reached its tremendous potential in the studio too. On each album, the band has made an impressive progress, punctuated by this exceptional fourth album that should bring the band to new horizons, taking their music to even wider audiences and spreading their message of changing the world into a more positive, equal and balanced planet, where an optimistic and vibrant humanity can exist in harmony, TOGETHER.