Gordon Koang is one of four million people displaced by the civil war in South Sudan, a country that has barely known a moment’s peace in its decade of existence. In late 2013 the president Salva Kiir (who belongs to the predominant Dinka tribe) accused his deputy (a Nuer) of planning a coup, throwing the country into ethnic violence. Koang is Nuer (easily spotted by the tracks of scars that run across their forehead, a traditional facial marking). Neither his status as a celebrity, nor his disability (he’s been blind since birth) offered any protection. His bank account was emptied, his house bulldozed. He and his family fled to Uganda.
The next year, he and his cousin, percussionist and ever present companion Paul Biel were in Australia for a series of concerts and took the wrenching decision that they could not return to South Sudan. They applied for refugee status. He now lives in the Suburbs of Melbourne. He has not seen his wife and six children for five years.
I tell you all this only because it brings into sharper relief what is already clear on first listen – Unity, Koang’s eleventh album and first since arriving in Australia and hooking up with Melbourne’s Music in Exile label, simply glows with optimism, hope, and love.
He’s more a storyteller than a poet, so on the opening Asylum Seeker, over shuffling, shuddering rhythms, he deals with the simply drudgery and fear of waiting, in some cases years, to be approved for a protection visa, in direct, factual, tender terms.
The bouncing, gold-flecked Stand Up (Clap Your Hands), the centrepiece of Koang’s exultant live shows (“We love you, audience” is a key line) — is probably the best showcase for his limpid playing of the Thom, a boxy metallic lyre, somewhere between a harp and a banjo, which glows and clangs in equal measure, rhythm and melody melded.
On the closer Te Ke Mi Thile Ji Kuoth Nhial — which adds jazz piano chords to the mix, to startling and gorgeous effect – Koang sings to his absent family, including a five-year-old daughter he has never met, across worlds, across literal lifetimes: “We will not lose you, and you will not lose us”.
Aesthetically the album is a fairly organic melding of synths, organs, guitar-drums-bass, with Koang’s Thom and Biel’s percussion, a collision of several countries’ idea of pop music. The tracks lock into a groove and then ramble and meander till the groove is exhausted — there’s a sense that the live set has simply been transposed to the studio.
A little is lost in that transition, only because it couldn’t be otherwise, but not much. The reason for this is in what the record does preserve – by removing the sense of community that propels his live shows, it allows us to focus in on Koang himself; a man possessing quite remarkable capacity for love. And, on that account, the true guts it takes to maintain hope.
Dancing to Architecture 