Fatoumata Diawara • promotion

Still rewriting the rules, Fatoumata plunges us back into her eclectic, avant-garde universe. With the different styles and approaches she brings to her music (afrobeat, jazz, pop, electro and even hip hop),‘London KO’ is an album that’s impossible to categorise.“I put all my love, my soul and my body into the creative process for this album,” she says. Sharper than ever lyrically, Diawara strikes a perfect balance between contemporary synthetic sounds and traditional Malian rhythms. Fatoumata also plays with geographic spaces, as we see in the title of the album,‘London KO’. It’s an eologism that’s also symbolic of her collaboration with Damon Albarn, which gives rise to a new world, a fusion of Bamako and London. A nod to the richness of mixing cultures and of being open to the ‘other’.