Biography
'Sahara Swing' (Album on Stone's Throw/Now-Again, July 2008) press release:
Now-Again Records follows up The Heliocentrics’ percussive excursions into the astral realms of psychedelia with an album of Afro-tinged funk music originating from the Southern Sahara and recorded in Germany.
Karl Hector has, to date, only appeared on one 7-inch, from 1996, as the leader of the Funk Pilots. For this album, he has teamed up with Jay Whitefield (producer and guitarist for the Poets of Rhythm and the Whitefield Brothers, and founder of the now defunct Hotpie & Candy Records) and Thomas Myland and Zdenko Curlija, founders of The Malcouns.
Alongside Bo Baral, other members of the Poets of Rhythm and crack Munich- based session musicians, Whitefield, Myland and Curlija have crafted nearly twenty tracks that follow the musical roads that Hector has travelled. The underlying groove that ties these ideas together, of course, is as rooted in James Brown as it is Fela Kuti. As informed by Mulatu Astatke of Ethiopia as it is by Jean-Claude Vannier and Can. This is an album of the world. Not “world music” – but that will appeal to any culture ever transfixed by rhythm on “the one.”
Current line-up (for Sahara Swing, July 2008):
Karl Hector - Vocals, Percussion
Thomas Myland - Keyboards, Percussion
Zdenko Curulija - Drums, Percussion
J. Whitefield - Bass, Guitar
Stu Krause - Trumpet
Wolfi Schlick - Saxophone, Flute, Bass Clarinet
Ben Abarbanel Wolff - Saxophone
Franz Brunner - Saxophone
Bo Baral - Percussion
Arsene Cimbar - Djembe, Vocals
Their third album Non Ex Orbis, which means Out of This World, came out in 2019. Producer Whitefield says it uses a musical vocabulary from "when underground musical culture (in Germany) had its creative peak."
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