karl hector & the malcouns

Munich serves as home to the shape-shifting collective Karl Hector & the Malcouns, whose sound fuses Krautrock, neo-psychedelia, jazz-funk, and Afro-beat into a singular hybrid. Visionary guitarist, producer, and songwriter JJ Whitefield (Jan Weissenfeldt), keyboardist Thomas Myland, and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Zdenko Curulija formed the core of the project, which has operated in configurations from quartet to big band. Whitefield previously launched Poets of Rhythm and the Whitefield Brothers, ensembles whose analog-recording ethos and retro-funk revival paved the way for imprints such as Daptone and Truth & Soul. Although the Malcouns maintain an unrelenting tour schedule, studio output remains sporadic; after the 2002 debut single “Watou”/“Broken Ribs,” six years and three additional singles elapsed before the 2008 long-player Sahara Swing appeared on Eothen “Egon” Alapatt’s Now-Again label. The same deliberate pace has persisted, with albums spaced five to six years apart and supplemented by limited-edition, hand-silkscreened EPs whose scarcity has expanded and diversified the group’s following, as evidenced by worldwide coverage surrounding the 2019 release Non Ex-Orbis.

The unit coalesced in late 2001 during Whitefield’s hiatus from Poets of Rhythm, an act active since the early 1990s that has spawned numerous one-off projects—including Bus People Express, Dynamic Soundmakers, the Ghanaian-German collective Johnny!, Karl Hector & The Funk-Pilots, and more than half a dozen others—solely to issue singles. This timing overlapped with the Whitefield Brothers’ first full-length, In the Raw, led by Weissenfeldt and his brother Max. Although the two ever-mutating outfits have run in parallel, their aesthetics diverge sharply: the Brothers emphasize neo-psych and funk, while the Malcouns pursue a broader global palette. Following the initial Soul Fire single in 2002, the group began European touring and issued four further singles, all on Now-Again.

Sahara Swing emerged in 2008 with a quintet comprising Weissenfeldt on bass, guitars, keys, and metallophone alongside Curulija and Myland (both Poets of Rhythm alumni) plus the horn-and-vocal team of Ben Abarbanel-Wolff and Wolfgang Schlick. The album’s grooves connected James Brown and Fela Kuti to the Ethio-jazz of Mulatu Astatke and the sonic experiments of Jean-Claude Vannier. International acclaim for this distinctive approach propelled the band onto festival stages alongside African luminaries such as Ebo Taylor, Zamrock figures, and England’s Heliocentrics. Almost immediately they issued the single “J.B. Rip” b/w “Popcorn with a Feeling.” While Whitefield pursued other projects, he persuaded his Malcouns colleagues to undertake German and European dates that soon expanded into an extensive trek.

Although Now-Again continued releasing occasional singles, the next album, Unstraight Ahead, did not arrive until 2014; it merged Ghanaian and Ethiopian pop with a funky prog-rock sensibility informed by Can, Agitation Free, Ibliss, and Tomorrow’s Gift. Subsequent years brought the EPs Tamanrasset, Ngugna Yeti Fofa, Coomassi, and Ka Rica Tar, later collected in the four-LP box set Can’t Stand the Pressure. Whitefield meanwhile sustained a parallel pace of band formations and recordings, both with and without his Malcouns associates, traversing an ever-widening stylistic range.

Early 2019 saw the release of Non Ex-Orbis, an album that delved further into Krautrock mythology by building upon the innovations of Amon Düül, Popol Vuh, and Embryo. The set was heralded by the limited-edition single “Mother Seletta.”