African Head Charge - In Pursuit Of Shashamane Land (2LP)

By 1993, African Head Charge had already carved out its own corner of dub, one where ritual hand drums and studio sorcery shared equal billing. In Pursuit Of Shashamane Land caught the project at a beautiful midpoint. Adrian Sherwood’s mixing desk flickers like a character in the story, but the heartbeat is Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, whose percussion maps out a path that feels ceremonial and earthy. The title nods to Shashamane, the Ethiopian community connected to Rastafari repatriation, and the music takes that idea seriously. It seeks. It moves with purpose. It never loses the drum.

You can hear Sherwood’s On-U Sound philosophy all over it. Voices drift in like distant processions. A chorus becomes texture more than text. Bass swells push and pull the room. Then small details steal the ear. A bell pattern tucked under a low synth. A shaker that feels like it’s right beside you. The album doesn’t race to impress. It builds a physical space and invites you to sit inside it. That patience pays off. When the rhythms stack and the delays start to bloom, the whole thing feels both ancient and futuristic.

African Head Charge had just delivered Songs of Praise a few years earlier, a landmark that went deep on spiritual chants and Nyabinghi pulse. In Pursuit Of Shashamane Land keeps that devotion but lightens the mix just enough to make the grooves glide. It’s less abrasive than the early, more feral records and more welcoming than the heavier industrial edges of the On-U catalog. This one breathes. Play it on a solid system and those hand drums feel carved, not programmed, and the sub frequencies roll rather than thump. It’s a meditative record that still loves a big speaker.

What sets it apart is how it imagines dub as a site of gathering. You get call-and-response patterns, but they’re not trapped in the grid. They drift, fold back on themselves, return as ghost images. Sherwood was always a master of negative space, and he lets Bonjo’s parts ring long enough for the room to sing back. It’s a subtle record in that sense. You can file it under psychedelic dub and you wouldn’t be wrong, yet the trippiness comes from feel and restraint instead of easy trickery.

As a piece of the African Head Charge story, it also lands at a moment when London’s global music circuits were widening, and On-U Sound was a hub for that traffic. The record picks up echoes of East Africa and the Caribbean without putting them under glass. It doesn’t posture. It flows. That’s why longtime fans return to it and why it has become a gateway for newcomers who find AHC via a crate-digging rabbit hole.

If you’re hunting for African Head Charge vinyl, this is the one I steer people to after Songs of Praise. The In Pursuit Of Shashamane Land vinyl editions do right by the low end, and the stereo image opens in a way digital sometimes flattens. It’s also back in circulation thanks to ongoing care for the On-U Sound catalog, so you don’t need to pay collector prices. You can buy African Head Charge records online without too much fuss, though I still like spotting this sleeve in a Melbourne record store and feeling the weight of it. For anyone browsing vinyl records Australia shops, it’s an easy recommendation.

Part of the fun is how playable it is. You can drop the needle anywhere and fall into a pocket. Home listening at night works, but it also shines as a warm-up set record that resets the room, the kind DJs used to keep for when the dance floor needed a new center of gravity. It’s devotional without being dour, and adventurous without losing the plot. If you’re looking to start or expand a small run of African Head Charge albums on vinyl, this belongs near the top. Put it on, turn up the bass until the furniture hums, and let the pursuit move through the house.