Angel Bat Dawid - The Oracle (IA11 Edition) (2025) [Hi-Res]

The collection of compositions on The Oracle present a deep blend of powerful and emotive songs alongside heavy and free improvisation. In true DIY fashion, with pure presence and a spirit of creative abandon, Dawid recorded and mixed the album using only her cell phone, entirely. "Angel's fieldnote approach affirms that the everyday remains a legitimate site of creative production," says percussionist, collaborator, and IARC labelmate Asher Gamedze in his liner notes for the album's IA11 Edition.

Gamedze – the only other musician to appear on The Oracle besides Dawid, who constructed most of the album's tracks by layering, overdubbing, and arranging lo-fi symphonies of her own voice, wind instruments, percussions, and keyboards – waxes extensively about Dawid's significance in his notes, calling her "a living exemplar and extension of the spacious sonic horizons opened by the likes of the AACM and their refusal of any limitations on their creative vision and the destruction of the demarcation between composer and improviser."

Revisiting The Oracle, it's abundantly clear that it was Dawid’s artistic vision and compositional skill that pushed the scope of her explorations so far. It’s how, despite their sonic contrast, the layered delay-drenched clarinet improvisations of “Black Family” or “Impepho” sit nicely with the unadorned fly-on-the-wall majesty of “London” or the nearly sidelong freedom of “Capetown” (which documents her first-time meeting with Gamedze, at his home in South Africa). The laid-back minor key gospel-folk of Dawid’s vocal tunes tie The Oracle together and sit similarly comfortable within the sides of the record.

Gamedze gets to the essence when he writes: "The album's profundity perhaps lies in its everydayness. Its beauty is in the worlds and work which are the music's root. What I do know is that it is a joy that this album exists. An instant classic with anthems ancient to the future. A totally idiosyncratic and grounded orientation to technology and production. A refusal of the lines between composition and improvisation. A multi-layered collage of history, struggle, organising and travel, both physical and metaphysical."