It is perhaps when faced with a Congolese guitarist now resident in Stockholm playing music which feels infused with the same Celtic-soul magic that made Van Morrison’s Irish Odyssey such a scintillating sonic experience that you realise just how small a place the world is.
There was a time when you could assign sounds and styles to certain places, but as artists like Marius Billgobenson prove, those days are long gone. His is the sound of a citizen of the world, and A Little Bit of Honey, his new single, is a piece of music that is more than first meets the eye.
Infused with a soul-jazz heart, it also takes in some reggae-ish sways, the gentlest hints of afrobeat grooves and even lovely layers of gospel-inspired harmony vocals; this is the sort of music you could describe as restless. Not in the sense that it isn’t a focused and perfectly formulated song but more from the point of view that such is its influence, garnered as they are from far and wide, that it doesn’t have a specific home.
Part the product of his African roots, part European folk sounds, and part American soul-blues traditions, A Little Bit of Honey not only reflects the wanderlust and wonder found in the man who made it, but it also has a lot to say about the world that we find ourselves in today, creatively and otherwise.
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