condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (1" rip near edge)

Gatefold sleeve with booklet glued inside.

One of the records that made Ocora's reputation: Michel Vuylsteke's 1967 recordings of Burundi, issued the following year with the label's usual austere cover and a booklet that took the music as seriously as any Western repertoire. The famous track is the whispered inanga, a zither played under a singer's barely voiced murmur, a sound with no equivalent anywhere that has been sampled, imitated and written about ever since. The rest of the disc has the royal drums (ingoma), which the country later made a UNESCO heritage item, and the flute and vocal music of the hills.

Ocora was Radio France's ethnographic wing, run by Charles Duvelle with a documentary rigour that also happened to produce beautiful objects. This first pressing (OCR 40) is the one with the original notes. A record that belongs in any collection of sound, not just of Africa.