ANGEL BAT DAWID – The Oracle (IA11 Edition) – LP – Vinyl [SEP 12]

LP – Classic black 140-gram vinyl LP inside a heavyweight reverse-board jacket, with an 8-page 11×11″ insert booklet. IA11 Edition pressed at Pallas in Germany, with lacquers cut by Gearbox in London.

Angel Bat Dawids International Anthem debut The Oracle introduced her multifaceted voice to the world. The response to its modest, initial cassette/digital release in January of 2019 was immediate, and immense. Within a month of its announcement, Dawid was being featured on magazine covers and receiving offers from international festivals; and her subsequent activity marked the beginning of an epic run of creative output (including her critically-lauded 2020 LIVE album with Tha Brothahood, the same year’s EP Transition East, 2021’s Hush Harbor Mixtape Vol. 1 Doxology, and the sprawling opus Requiem for Jazz, released in 2023) that continues through the present moment (hear: Journey to Nabta Playa, her recently-released collaboration with Naima Nefertari).

The collection of compositions on The Oracle present a deep blend of powerful and emotive songs alongside heavy and free improvisation. In true DIY fashion, with pure presence and a spirit of creative abandon, Dawid recorded and mixed the album using only her cell phone, entirely. “Angel’s fieldnote approach affirms that the everyday remains a legitimate site of creative production,” says percussionist, collaborator, and IARC labelmate Asher Gamedze in his liner notes for the album’s IA11 Edition.

Gamedze the only other musician to appear on The Oracle besides Dawid, who constructed most of the album’s tracks by layering, overdubbing, and arranging lo-fi symphonies of her own voice, wind instruments, percussions, and keyboards waxes extensively about Dawid’s significance in his notes, calling her “a living exemplar and extension of the spacious sonic horizons opened by the likes of the AACM and their refusal of any limitations on their creative vision and the destruction of the demarcation between composer and improviser.”

Revisiting The Oracle, it’s abundantly clear that it was Dawids artistic vision and compositional skill that pushed the scope of her explorations so far. Its how, despite their sonic contrast, the layered delay-drenched clarinet improvisations of Black Family or Impepho sit nicely with the unadorned fly-on-the-wall majesty of London or the nearly sidelong freedom of Capetown (which documents her first-time meeting with Gamedze, at his home in South Africa). The laid-back minor key gospel-folk of Dawids vocal tunes tie The Oracle together and sit similarly comfortable within the sides of the record.

Gamedze gets to the essence when he writes: “The album’s profundity perhaps lies in its everydayness. Its beauty is in the worlds and work which are the music’s root. What I do know is that it is a joy that this album exists. An instant classic with anthems ancient to the future. A totally idiosyncratic and grounded orientation to technology and production. A refusal of the lines between composition and improvisation. A multi-layered collage of history, struggle, organising and travel, both physical and metaphysical.”

The IA11 Edition vinyl LP featuresnew for IA11, with unpublished photos and new liner notes by drummerAsher Gamedze), IARC 2025 obi strip and printed poly-lined printed innersleeve. IA11 Edition pressed at Pallas in Germany, with lacquers cut by Gearbox in London.

Tracklist:

A1 Destination (Dr. Yusef Lateef) [2:22]
A2 Black Family [6:18]
A3 What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black (Dr. Margaret Burroughs) [3:20]
A4 Impepho [3:39]
A5 We Are Starzz [4:23]
A6 London [2:46]

B1 Capetown [15:36]
B2 The Oracle [5:23]