As I listen to multi-instrumentalist and tradition-bearer Nana Osei Twum Barima’s debut album Journey into the Unknown, I have the distinct impression that I am not just an audience for his music, but a witness to him. His performance here is intimate. He sounds nearby. His voice and instrument—the seperewa, an Akan instrument resembling a lute and a harp that Nana Osei learned growing up in a musical lineage in Ghana—are often naked before us, except when layered to suggest a crowd.
Each song comes from Nana Osei’s deeply personal experience as he tells stories of ancestry, growing up, moving to his current home in Belgium, and what he remembers of home. This is the artist, without artifice, on full display and welcoming onlookers to engage with his story.
Supporting Nana Osei is a small cohort of collaborators. Nicolas Mortelmans’ sitar adds rich microtonal sentiment to several tracks. Stefaan De Rycke on cello and Lara Rosseel on double bass are crucial in balancing the lilt of the other strings with a weighty low end. Blues musician Roland Van Campenhout adds gravelly recitations to the Anglophone track “Belgium and Rain”.
Burkinabe singer, multi-instrumentalist, and experimental artist Kaito Winse joins his fellow West African Belgian with his trademark intensity as “Until When” recalls the past and mourns struggles of the present and future. Nana Osei’s uncle Osei Korankye brings a second seperewa and accompanies his nephew on “Odo” in a sparkling familial duet. This little circle adds to the warmth that radiates from Nana Osei’s delivery across the record.
Though the stories Nana Osei tells come directly from his life, they are all broadly relatable, making it easy to connect with him. In the delicate opening track “Mpaebo” (“prayer”), he expresses thanks and hopes for the new day. He spends “Message to My Ancestors” wanting solutions to the many hardships he encounters in the world. There’s a livelier pace to the song “Owea” (“owl”), which invokes nature lore in between bubbling seperewa lines. “Belgium and Rain” recalls Nana Osei’s feelings of homesickness upon arriving in Europe and finding a fondness for his new home.
“Moni” is a poignant and sonically dense tribute to Nana Osei’s dear and now-departed grandmother, culminating in a heated exchange of notes between bass and seperewa as layers of Nana Osei’s voice cry out with love and sorrow. After the melancholic reminiscing of “Until When” is the earthy, energetic parent-child dialogue of “Akwalaba” and then the joyful waltz of “Odo” with which Nana Osei honors his uncle. The latter two tracks are especially meaningful, given that Nana Osei’s father died when the artist was young.
The album ends on its most graceful note with “Nipa” (“human”). Here, Nana Osei reminds us as his witnesses of our common humanity and our rights and responsibilities as beings with brief mortal lives. It’s a beautiful send-off, building from sparse fingerpicking to a garden of chordophonic blooms.
This is one of many touching moments on this first album from Nana Osei Twum Barima. For a musician so young and fresh, there’s no questioning his skill or his wisdom on Journey to the Unknown. Even so, there’s a wonderfully guileless quality to the softness of his steady voice that makes the album all the more touching in addition to its loveliness. There seems little question he’ll have more stories soon and no trouble making them sound beautiful.