Blick Bassy just announced the release details for a new album ‘Madíbá’, which is due out on Friday May 26 2023 via InFiné (Sabrina Bellaouel).
His fourth album ‘Madíbá’ is sung in the Baasa language of France based Bassy’s native Cameroon.
It follows the acclaimed 2019 album ‘1958’ (winner of the Sacem World Music Grand Prize & Songlines’ Best African Album
The album honoured Cameroon’s efforts to overthrow French colonial rule) and featured a collaboration with Disclosure and the publication of Blick’s award-winning debut novel.
Titled after the word for water in the Douala language of Cameroon, ‘Madíbá’ brings together twelve songs in the form of fables, dedicated to the theme of water.
‘Hola Mè’ features a melody that is hauntingly beautiful and stirring vocals from Blick Bassy.
Released on World Water Day, the poignant new single ‘Hola Mè’ (meaning ‘Help Me’) surveys the damage wrought on access to clean, safe water by human interference.
Blick is also supporting NGO water.org (co-founded by Matt Damon) around the single release, using his platforms to raise awareness of the global water crisis, and the work water.org is doing to provide people with access to safe water and sanitation.
‘Hola Mè’ is now streaming from here.
Blick Bassy’s albums have always been characterised by a humanist, universal dimension, and ‘Madíbá’ is no exception, considering global climate crisis and issues surrounding access to water, without issuing didactic or moralising speeches.
The fables of the album, all created by Blick, explore in a more concrete way different themes related to water, its rarity, its necessity as a source of life, its energy or its vital power.
Speaking about the intention behind ‘Madíbá’, Blick says “I am neither a colour nor a nationality, but one of the different water-based forms. My last album, ‘1958’, was about the war of independence waged by our fathers and mothers against the French army.
This led me to question the feelings that can lead us to the point of sometimes committing the worst. This approach led me in an obvious way to the cause of our decline: the relationship of subordination and exploitation that we have established between ourselves, humans and other living beings.
From this unhealthy relationship comes the destruction of the living elements essential to our survival.”
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