Releases
Bibi Tanga & The Selenites - Dunya Instores June 22, 2010
The future of funk is being written right now by a pair of Parisian groove theorists named Bibi Tanga and Professeur Inlassable. Already having made a stir in France, the group now teams up with Nat Geo Music to bring their fashion-forward funk vision to audiences worldwide by way of their full-length international
debut, Dunya.
Together with Bibi’s band, The Selenites, the duo forges a stunningly original new sound, and creates a space where Afro-futurism meets steampunk, Fela Kuti jams with Sidney Bechet, and Marcel Duchamp gets down to Chic.
Bibi’s music is marked by slinky, sinuous basslines and a wicked falsetto that conjures up Prince and Curtis Mayfield, while producer Professeur Inlassable (“The Tireless Professor”) digs deep beneath the cobblestones of Paris to unearth the sound and spirit of another era.
Album track Red Wine is on the A list on French National radio, France Inter.
Played live on weekly live show on France Inter called Le Pont des Artistes (600 000 listeners per show / every Saturday) and performed Red Wine on national French TV talk show ‘Ce soir ou jamais’ on France 3 with over 500,000 viewers.
Playing festival appearances around Europe over the summer, Bibi Tanga will tour North America in earnest later this year.
Recording live concert on cable TV channel France 0 for a show called Zandolive.
Press features in 3 of France’s top media outlets: Vibrations, Mondomix, Word Sound.
For the latest tour information and to watch video, please visit www.myspace.com/bibitanga
- For more information, please visit http://worldmusic.nationalgeographic.com
Dunya takes its name from the word for “existence” in Sango, the language of the Central African Republic, and the album is both a vivid snapshot of the present moment in global music and a roadmap to the future.
Deftly juggling English, French and Sango lyrics, Bibi embeds hyper-literate, socially conscious messages about immigration, malnutrition, AIDS, slavery and more in some of the most danceable grooves this side of Gnarls Barkley. “Dunya” takes listeners on a wild, eclectic tour through the history and pre-history of funk,
layering afrobeat rhythms over electro-tinged soul and cosmopolitan trans-Atlantic grooves.
Born in Paris in 1969, Bienvenu (Bibi) Tanga didn’t see his homeland until the age of 2, when his parents brought him home to Bangui, the dusty capital of the Central African Republic. Growing up, Bibi was one of 10 children and spent his earliest years shuttling from Paris to Africa to Moscow to Washington, D.C.,
and Brooklyn, thanks to his father’s diplomatic postings. “I remember the first time that I realized I wasn’t white,” Bibi recalls “I was 4 years old, in Moscow, and the idea of race, of colour, just hadn’t occurred to me before. I always felt like an outsider until I was 10 years old and my parents returned to Paris.”
Thanks to a coup d‘état in the Central African Republic, his father turned from diplomat to refugee, and Bibi’s family ended up living in the suburbs of Paris. “My mother supported us then, she worked as a nurse.
It was hard, but I was happy to be in Paris, because it felt like home to me, I knew I could make real friends here.”
It was in Paris that his musical education began in earnest. “My parents used to go to a lot of parties,” he recalls, “And my father had a lot of records. I grew up listening to everything. Franco and Tabu Ley from Congo, Fela Kuti from Nigeria, Bembeya Jazz from Guinea. I grew up on all of that. American music, too – James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix and of course Bob Marley. I love disco, funk, soul, reggae, R&B. It’s all like a big library to me. I feel like there’s this heritage of black music from around the world,
and I’m the heir to it.”
Together with Bibi’s band The Selenites – Arthur Simonini on violin and keyboards, Rico Kerridge on guitar and Arnaud Biscay on drums – Bibi and Le Professeur craft an otherworldly sound. “We call the band The Selenites because that’s the name of the people who lived on the dark side of the moon.” Bibi explains. “It’s from a story by H.G. Wells. People think our music comes from outer space, like cosmic rays. So the moon is a big inspiration for me, I’m definitely a romantic that way – but my music is also rooted firmly on the ground.”
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