All Those Who Came Before: Afro Celt Sound System and "House of the Ancestors"

This will be a short post today because I am getting ready for the second day of our great global music festival, Globalquerque. A bonus for you for the next few days will be that I am taking some video of some of the great acts we are seeing and will be posting them up on this blog.

House of the Ancestors by the Afro Celt Sound System is a special song for us. Because we host the KUNM Global Music Show on the first Monday of each month, in November our show always coincides very closely with Day of the Dead. I believe, though don't hold me to it, that House of the Ancestors was the first song we played on our first Day of the Dead global show. We've done these for a few years now, and House of the Ancestors seems to make it's way more often than not on that playlist.

As I get older, I'm starting to lose people in my life - particularly the previous generation. My uncle died about half a year ago, and a couple of other uncles have gone in the past 3-4 years. My mom is in her 80s and feeling the effects of older age. The concept of Day of the Dead gives me comfort that for at least one day, my ancestors share this world with me before the curtain is drawn between their world and ours. I would like to think that they are still somehow present in my life, even if they seem gone.

The Afro Celt Sound System fuses modern electronic dance rhythms with traditional Irish and West African songs. They were formed by British producer Simon Emmerson and Afro-pop star Baaba Maal in 1991. Since then they've been proclaimed a world music supergroup, and have collaborated with Peter Gabriel, Sinead O'Connor, Robert Plant, Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Ayub Ogada and many other pop and world stars. House of the Ancestors can be found on their 1996 debut release Volume 1: Sound Magic.