Aphrodesia's sunny and irresistible debut from 2003! Original liner notes:

Aphrodesia. The name conjures images of erotic bliss, of sweet nectar removing all inhibitions, a gift from the Goddess of Love herself. And now of a young San Francisco-based 11-piece musical orchestra that marries the rumble of 10,000 wildebeasts marching through your bedroom to the gentle aroma of a drop of honey on your lover's trembling backside. True children of the world, Aphrodesia interweaves the threads from many traditional songs from Africa, Cuba and Brazil with the band's shimmering new electrified color, as if your village ancestor showed up tomorrow in a sparkling new suit ready to give you a lift to the big city in a jet-powered Lincoln Continental. "Shackrobeat Vol. 1" begins fittingly on Olodo with Lara singing an Afro-Cuban praise song for the river goddess Oshun- Aphrodite herself- over a bed of motoring percussion, guitars and horns and impossibly funky backbeats, while the rump-twisting Papa Mashala sits a sidewinding nod to James Brown's Funky Good Time besides a blend of Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban praise songs for Ogun, God of iron and remover of obstacles. With obstacles now removed, the band roars into their original Step Into Your Life, an urban groove jitney bus shuttling between New York, Lagos, Detroit and the Cincinnatti of Collinnses Catfish and Bootsy. Side 1 closes with Ting Be, a string of traditional Ewe songs from northern Ghana normally sung to the gahu rhythm but here rocketed to outer space with a walloping afro-beat groove and a bustling horn section so hot it may burn your fingers when you turn the record over. Now having got your attention, Shackrobeat Vol. 1 shifts gears, visiting the billowy dreamscape of Black Rhino, where Lara's mbira sets traditional Zimbabwean Shona shona melodies, including Nhema Musasa- a song about spotting rhinos in a musasa forest- against a shimmering backdrop framed by floating saxophones. But if Black Rhino is a lullaby, then Kari Buro is surely the charging lion who wakens you after a dusty night on the Ethiopian grasslands. This frightening 6/4 groove barrels along appropriately enough under another Zimbawean Shona song calling all the young women to dance to the beat of the drum, and by virtue of Aaron Bennet's searing baritone saxophone alone must be kept from small children for fear of permanent nightmares. Mi Jole sets a string of traditional kpan logo songs from Kokrobite, Ghana (a city near the capital of Accra) to the band'd tribute to Ghanaian highlife, complete with shimmering, interlocking guitars, enormous horn lines and a blisterng three note bass riff. The two versions of Slowly that close the album tie together the many aspects of Aphrodesia in an intruiging manner. The second of these blasts off to the Martian delta by way of King Tubby's Jamaican dub shack and needs no explanation. The first uses a trance-inducing mbira melody that varies the Zimbawean mahororo rhythm with a bedrock reggae groove bass-heavy enough to rattle your windows from several blocks away. Meanwhile we hear several different songs, one of which is an English translation of a poem by Lala, a 14th century North Indian mystic who shunned clothes in her normal dress and reads:
Slowly, slowly I tended
the bellows of my throat
until the light inside grew
and filtered out through
the dark, so that within
even within it, I saw the truth

Towards the end, over some beautifully measured saxophone dialogue, we hear a Cuban song for los muertos that perhaps encapsulates at once the group's reverence for the traditional sources of of much of their music and their willingness to dress it in their own garments.

I call to my mother, she doesn't come
I call to my father, he doesn't come
I call to my guardian spirits, little by little they come

After listening to Shackrobeat, Vol. 1, many of us too will be coming to Aphrodesia for a long, long time.
- Garrison Utikay Duchamps- San Francisco Afro-Surf Musique Monthly