Kate Hutchinson 

Auntie Flo: Theory of Flo review – heady blend of world music and house

Glasgow’s Auntie Flo picks far-flung musical styles – from Congo to Colombia – and welds them to 4x4 house music with skill and subtlety
  
  

Auntie Flo
Sensitive attenae … Auntie Flo Photograph: Record Company Handout

Dance music that attempts to incorporate global influences is often as subtle as wearing a Native American headdress to Coachella. Glasgow producer Auntie Flo, however, breathes new life into house by bending his sensitive world music antennae to, among others, West African marimbas, the Niger-Congo language of Ga, 70s Colombian Palenque and Afro-Cuban influences, and these become a heady whole without ever feeling tokenistic. Su La has a meditative pulse and warm synths that Caribou and Daphni fans will find familiar, while So in Love smoulders with precise percussion, futuristic flashes of synth and a subtly euphoric vocal from the Noisettes’ Shingai Shoniwa. There are some adventurous moments that don’t quite come off – Dreamer is an airy piano house tune lacking a bassy bite, while For Mihaly is a curious combination of sombre elegy on strings and crunchy 4x4 beat – but for the most part this is music best suited to a giant speaker stack, on a pitch-black dancefloor, where no one can jolt you out of its alluring groove.

 

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