Damily

After decades spent shaping the sound of southern Madagascar, Damily returns with Fanjiry, his most intimate and focused record to date. A key figure in tsapiky as a guitarist and composer, and a driving force behind a genre he helped define, Damily has long expressed himself through the voices of the singers accompanying his bands. With Fanjiry, he takes a singular step forward: for the first time, he carries his compositions himself through singing — not by claiming the role of a singer, but as a natural extension of his playing and personal storytelling. Known for igniting village ceremonies and carrying the fever of Toliara far beyond Madagascar’s shores, he makes a shift here — not away from trance, but deeper into its core.

Recorded and mixed in just three days at Studio Black Box with analog sound engineer Peter Deimel, Fanjiry reduces tsapiky to its essence: a single guitar and a single heartbeat. Damily plays alone, yet fills the entire space — bass, rhythm, melody, breath and pulse merging into a dense, vibrating and constantly moving sound. Each riff becomes architecture, each harmonic opens a door onto memory, childhood landscapes, and those nights when music heals, connects, and pushes back the dark.

Free of nostalgia and frozen folklore, Fanjiry unfolds as an intimate territory where tsapiky naturally converges with memories of village life in the 1980s — the Pecto, Radio Mozambique, East African 7-inch records, Malagasy national hits — alongside possession rituals and the practices of local healers. Added to this is a second life lived far from Madagascar, which has allowed Damily to explore the depths of his guitar more freely, pushing his sound further, beyond constraints. Raw and precise, suspended between earth and sky, the album is born from gesture and necessity. Its title — the last star visible before dawn — captures that fragile moment when a single guitar can hold an entire world and still move forward.

With Fanjiry, Damily does not step back — he opens the horizon. A solitary record reaching toward others, where intimacy becomes universal and the dance begins again, softly, before sunrise.