Bush Party

Freedrum is a drum circle band. Freedrum makes the most basic and primal music devised by humans to date. We didn't invent this music, our earliest ancestors did. Hominids getting together celebrating life and using their bodies and whatever devices at hand to move a groove as a backbeat for their life experiences. The formation of Freedrum was simple. Both my partner and myself, (he's Leon, I'm Dana) had played in bush bands in the 80s. When we got back together in the 90s we started recording songs for an album. A rock soul funk stew as it were. During the sessions a lady friend of Leon's brings him a set of bongos, I dig out my skin drum and lonely conga and we jam it up. When we heard the playback I became a servant of the drum, this was our destiny! Freedrum was born and the fire was lit. We started gathering drums, cowbells, agogos, djembes, hollow logs, garbage cans, cookie tins, my mother's oak waste basket, five gallon paint buckets, pots and pans, kid toys, and basically anything we could find to throw a beat down on. Then when the moon was full with the smell of oak burning on the fire we would tell the story of our lives through the drum. This is intoxicating music. The bush lives in all of us and in every form of music you've ever heard. Playing your heart out without boundaries or the restrictions of traditional time and space opens the doors to the spiritual rhythms of the world. To sum up, what you're going to hear on this album is linear playing, intense, sexy and danceable. There is no cut and paste, no loops and no sequencing. This is not authentic African music other than what lives in us from the past, however, the rhythms do, to my musical experience, sound African in nature. The instrumentation is all drums and percussion outside of a few vocalizations for effect, crowd sounds in the lounge, and animal noise played in real time on sample pads. The origin for each song was based on an original jam on drums between Leon and myself. What you're hearing is based on some part of our life. We hope you enjoy and feel the power of the rhythm. Look for more Freedrum in the future because we love playing this music and we want to share it with you.