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For Vaudou Game’s third album, Togolese vocalist Peter Solo gathers his Lyon-based band in a recording studio named Otodi in Lomé. Built along with 20 almost identical studios by Scotch, Otodi was left untouched unlike its sibling studios whose analog innards have since been swapped for newer, more efficient digital counterparts. A devoutly analog group, Vaudou Game found a bit of a kindred spirit in Otodi, a place embedded with a history of the country’s funk the group has perplexed and made their own since their inception.
The backbone of Vaudou Game’s sound is taken from the Vodun funk put on the map by 1970s Beninese groups, namely Orchestre Poly-Rhythmic de Cotonou and El Rego. A few other funk variants not far from Solo’s home of Aného-Glidji, Togo and the double-jointed rhythms of American R&B and funk round out that sound. Solo’s father, a police commissioner who collected collecting mostly Afrobeat records, frequently traveled out of the country and picked up records throughout his travels. It’s easy to imagine how these youthful exposures inflect the nuanced parts Solo creates.
Solo’s home of is a central place of voodoo culture and Vaudou Game’s mission, of sorts, has been to sift through the musical properties of these traditions and apply them to a Vodun funk instrumentation. Voodoo (or “Vodun,” “Vodou,” or “Voudou,” among other variations), although given an appropriated satanic and negative spin, is a tradition born through a practice of consulting nature. Solo’s ancestors’ belief was that nature is alive and that is possesses vibrating energies; coming in contact with these vibrations is at the center of voodoo traditions and ceremonies, and these traditional ceremonies can’t exist without music. Solo’s goal with the Vaudou Game is to offer his home a distinguishable, contemporary music, one that anyone would attribute to Togo, by elevating those Voodoo trance properties.
Like with previous records, on Otodi, Vaudou Game demonstrate nothing but complete control. They make a bare, grinding funk intertwined with traditional Voodoo trance elements. Slinky, but defined guitars and small but light and punchy brass sections rotate on top of unflappable drums with tight snare heads and evenly proportioned hi-hats. Flourishes of sweeping strings, open hat hits, and subtle filtering offer a disco feel on a few tunes, noticeably on “La Chose,” but this is predominantly a funk affair. Solo’s uncle, funk pioneer Roger Damawuzan, makes his way to two tracks like the past two Vaudou Game records. Contrasting Solo with a grainier voice thrown from the gut, Damawuzan seasons his appearances with some healthy “Good Gods!” and other yelps. In many ways, Damawuzan has felt like the group’s Vodun funk sponsor. The addition of a female voodoo choir and a Togolese rhythm section make Otodi warmer, providing a few more notes to stick to the bones of the album’s tight structures. Creating stimulating, mortar-and-pestle grooves, Vaudou Game might have been successful in awakening the dormant funk spirits of the studio Otodi.
