Confucius MC Bastien Keb - Songs For Lost Travellers

South London rapper Confucius MC returns to Shabaka Hutchings’ Native Rebel Recordings for a new project alongside producer and multi-instrumentalist Bastien Keb. Merging unexplored pathways between rap, folk, and jazz into a spiritual triumvirate, Songs For Lost Travellers,  is an album unlike any either artist has made previously, possibly unlike any record in existence. 

Honest and direct, the duo imbue Songs For Lost Travellers with knowledge and truth from their lived experiences. There is grief hidden in the notes, an inherent sadness that is balanced with an awareness that grief is a protest against the social machinery of remaining numb. The record lingers in a meditative state, unafraid of restlessness and embracing solitude, with the expectation that peace is just as imminent as death.

Neither Con nor Keb bothered much with the professional studio in making Songs For Lost Travellers. Instead, they opted for the raw state of their home recordings and first takes, matching the intimacy of being alone and reflective in their creative energies. Room static on ‘Tell Me Lies’ makes it feel like you’ve entered their apartments. The immediacy continues on ‘Gutters’, as Keb plays guitar while watching the tele and Con hums along to the vocal melody in search of the proper pocket for his verse. 

More drawn to Keb’s recent folk recordings on the Songs For Lilla EP than his funk roots circa Dinking In The Shadows of Zizou or the cinematic soul of The Killing of Eugene Peeps, Con leaned into the spacial freedom he heard in Keb’s lo-fi production cobbled from field recordings and voice notes. Both artists placed their families into the tableau; Con wrote ‘Little Man’ for his son, hoping to add a positive contribution to the canon of parental rap songs. Later, his son appears at the end of ‘Paramount’ to deliver a passage from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. Keb secretly recorded his mum playing saxophone and sampled his cousin playing sax as well. The result is a near-drumless album (save for ‘Toulouse’ and light tapping on ‘It Would Speak’) in which Keb’s raw production (plus a few sessions with Kofi Flexxx on flute) gave Con a liminal zone, unencumbered by beats per minute, to craft melodies that turn his philosophical rhymes into mantras.