Youba - Congo Sanchez mix feat. Khaira Arby & Cheick Hamala Diabate

Congo Sanchez vs. The Sway Machinery (Electric Cowbell) feat. Mali's finest... Khaira Arby and Cheick Hamala Diabate

Have you ever had a gift that keeps on giving? Or a birthday party that kept on going-even 11 months after the fact-only to segue into your birthday the next year? That's the way we feel with the Khaira Arby song "Youba" that was featured on our special limited edition 45 we released in 2010 that featured an amazing collaboration between Khaira Arby and The Sway Machinery-the latter a more or less supergroup of NYC-based musicians who've lent their talents to pop music luminaries as diverse as TV On The Radio, Antibalas, Arcade Fire, and Iron and Wine. Initially recorded over 3 years ago in Timbuktu with Khaira Arby lending her soulful bombastic vocal stylings to Sway Machinery's fierce onslaught of Led Zeppelin-like attack employing bartione sax and drums, we still receive emails and comments about how dope and fresh this track is. Eventually it ended up on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington DC where producer/drummer Congo Sanchez of Thievery Corporation and ESL Records scooped up the files for this new remix. Congo Sanchez brought the flavor of southern Mali by adding the ngoni of the great griot-and current DC resident-Cheick Hamala Diabate with underpinnings of deep dub and expansive electronica. The results are genre-bending to say the least and the kind of collaboration that Electric Cowbell loves to construct-kind of like connecting the the dots to make a new constellation where all the stars shine their brightest, defying borders and forming handshakes across a global spectrum.