Geeta Dayal
For weddings and for funerals: an album of live recordings of the raucous, high-speed music of southwest Malagasy festivities.
Tsapiky! Modern Music from Southwest Madagascar, featuring Mamehy, Drick, Befila, Behaja, Mahafaly Mihisa, Meny & Ando, Rebona, and Mirasoa & Mahapoteke, recorded by Maxime Bobo, Sublime Frequencies
• • •
The tsapiky genre, originating from southwest Madagascar, is music that is amped up to dizzying, frenetic heights, with high-powered vocals, sped-up guitars, rolling basslines, and hard-driving percussion. These songs are popular everywhere in the country, and they are traditionally performed during mandriampototse, rites marking funerals, weddings, and other major events. The funeral music is generally not glum and melancholy but rather a celebration of life—impassioned and energetic, played at marathon ceremonies that can last up to a week, with musicians jamming day and night. Tsapiky is purposefully loud, with amplifiers cranked to maximum volume and horn speakers mounted in tall tamarind trees to project the sounds as far as the neighboring villages. An intensely strong, home-brewed sugarcane rum known as toaka gasy fuels the festivities.
Horn speakers used to amplify the guitar and vocals. Photo: Maxime Bobo.
The enthralling new compilation Tsapiky! Modern Music from Southwest Madagascar was culled from songs recently captured live on the island by the French musician Maxime Bobo, using a portable six-track field recorder. The album is a perfect fit for Sublime Frequencies, a label that has released an inspired crash-collision of international field recordings, chaotic radio transmissions, lost tapes, and other obscure artifacts since its inception in 2003. “When [Bobo] sent the first video clip of the electric tsapiky style, I was hooked,” Alan Bishop, the Sun City Girls bassist and label cofounder, told me in an interview. “I’d never heard anything quite like it, particularly the speed and relentlessness with electric guitar and that kind of rhythm section, and when the semi-distorted vocals appear above the mix, the whole thing goes into the stratosphere.”
Tsapiky, which was born in the 1970s, is not so well known outside of Madagascar, and live albums can be difficult to find; few people are recording the latest songs outside of a studio environment. To fully capture the immediacy and intensity of mandriampototse ceremonies, Bobo followed several groups during these events to record them in the moment. In order to reflect the local variations of tsapiky within the region, he tried to include musicians hailing from many different towns—not just Toliara, the main city in the area, but also Betioky, Bezaha, Ampanihy, and Sakaraha.
Los Belia band’s equipment at a mandriampototse in Besaly, near Ampanihy, August 2023. Photo: Maxime Bobo.
Bobo fell in love with tsapiky music in 2010, after being inspired by the 2004 compilation Panorama d’une jeune musique de Tuléar and reading Le tsapiky, un jeune de musique de Madagascar, an in-depth 2009 book by the French ethnomusicologist Julien Mallet. The music of Damily, a tsapiky legend living in France, was another source of excitement, and Bobo listened to every tune he could find on YouTube. “I immediately loved deeply this music, the rhythmic intensity, the saturated sonorities, the unique soloist role and very unusual techniques of the guitarists, the piercing voices, the freedom of the bass,” Bobo told me.
It helped that many of these musicians in Madagascar were already aware of Bobo’s work, both as a saxophonist formerly with the French band Electric Vocuhila—who released a popular tsapiky-inspired album, Kiteky, in 2022—and for his collaboration with the tsapiky band Behaja. This made it easier for Bobo to gain the performers’ trust, but it was still a challenge for him to get the compilation done. Obstacles included driving over bumpy roads for hours, organizing the musicians, and renting instruments and amps. These setbacks were amplified by multiple car breakdowns along the way, busted equipment, and extreme heat.
The band Mamehy in Amboroneoke, Toliara, August 2023. Photo: Maxime Bobo.
All of these troubles were worth it for the result. Tsapiky! Modern Music from Southwest Madagascar is startling from beginning to end, opening jubilantly with Mamehy’s brilliantly titled “Je mitsiko ro mokotse” (“Those Who Talk Dirty Behind Your Back Tire Themselves Out for Nothing”). The band, led by Bodida, one of tsapiky’s top vocalists, is backed by guitar, bass, and drums surging dramatically in tempo and raucous intensity. Drick’s “Sinjake Panambola” (“Dance of the Rich”), recorded at a funeral in Toliara, moves with even more vitality. The track is head-rushingly fast, at over two-hundred beats per minute. Drick, a skilled guitarist, is cool and collected, spinning out catchy riffs during a song that bolts forward like a freight train. “Fanoigna” (“Heated Debate”), by Mahafaly Mihisa, is similarly dynamic, with emphatic vocals and a mash-up of different rhythms.
Drummer Tsivery and dancer Black with the band Rebona at a mandriampototse in Anantsono, September 2023. Photo: Maxime Bobo.
Meny and Ando’s “Ka tseriky iha” (“Don’t Be Surprised”), a soft and melodic vocal duet by two female singers from the band Rebona, offers a break from all the frenzied action. There are no guitars or drums, just voices. “Zana-Konko” is a total scorcher that highlights the kifafa guitar technique inspired by mandolin playing, with rapid strumming. The album closes with “Bleu bleu,” by Mirasoa and Mahapoteke, a popular dance-floor anthem that is triumphant and joyful. Mirasoa’s earthy voice floats above the euphoric groove of Mahapoteke’s band, with guitar, bass, and drums.
Mahapoteke’s band at a mandriampototse in Besaly, near Ampanihy, August 2023. Photo: Maxime Bobo.
The genius of this music is that it is noisy and exuberant, but also orderly and unhurried. No matter how speedy and fierce the tsapiky music becomes, the songs somehow also feel calm and centered. The idea of a 200-bpm tune—faster than even the fastest techno tracks out there—being played at a funeral might seem odd to some. But even though the different parts of the song move extremely rapidly, the overall effect is like staring at the ocean; though there are many crashing waves, it also feels serene and endless. To put it another way, if your brain already tends to be hyperactive, flying around to many places and thoughts at once, then listening to slow ambient music, with its vast open spaces, might not be very soothing. But hearing dynamic music like punk rock or tsapiky can be a cathartic release.
In these recordings, we see a portrait of a thriving ecosystem—one that respects ritual and tradition, but is constantly shifting and evolving. The music is an overpowering rush of high velocity, dexterity, and stamina. Tsapiky! Modern Music from Southwest Madagascar is not only a document, but also a vital dispatch from a completely unique genre.
Geeta Dayal is an arts critic and journalist specializing in twentieth-century music, culture, and technology. She has written extensively for frieze and many other publications, including the Guardian, Wired, the Wire, Bookforum, Slate, the Boston Globe, and Rolling Stone. She is the author of Another Green World (Bloomsbury, 2009), a book on Brian Eno, and is currently at work on a new book on music.