Dan Masks

Back in 1984, the renowned ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp noted the tension he felt between his scientific analysis ‘and the pleasure of the eyes and the ears.’ This did not stop the French Swiss academic tracking and recording sounds as far afield as the Solomon Islands or the Ivory Coast. In the latter, he studied the music behind the renowned masks of the Dan people who straddle the Ivorian and Liberian frontiers. Those who speak the Dan language nurture a complex liturgy around celebrated facial masks designed to invoke supernatural powers.

Zemp’s missions to the mountainous west of Ivory Coast in 1965 and 1967 resulted in a plethora of publications and an album in 1971. Ocora producer Charles Duvelle lovingly revisited, enlarged and enriched the original with three new tracks and extensions to two others in 1993. Dan Masks features the sounds that accompany ‘dressed’ and ‘doffed’ masks, worn for rituals, ceremonies, wars and games. It brings us unique sounds produced, for example, when blowing through the leg bone of a hornbill, with a membrane made of the web some spiders weave to protect their eggs; or the eerie use of competing bull-roarers. Zemp draws us into a compelling world of sight and sound with his unmatched eye for detail, faithfully reproduced in the sleeve notes.