Our Calling

Two decades after their first ever collaboration, British-Italian folk songwriter, Piers Faccini, and Malian kora virtuoso, Ballaké Sissoko, return with a mesmerising album: Our Calling. Set for release in February 2025, this new and captivating musical dialogue — between a prodigious instrumentalist at the height of his powers and a gifted songwriter and wordsmith — deftly bridges continents and traditions, inventing new song forms.

The seeds of Our Calling were first planted when Sissoko and Faccini met at Label Bleu in the early 2000s. Their friendship grew as they linked and explored uncharted paths between Manding traditions and folksong forms. With its ten finely crafted tracks, Our Calling is a sonic and narrative praise song for migration in all its manifestations: seeds borne by the winds; Nightingales flying between West Africa and Europe at the turn of the seasons; humans, across the centuries, and along trade routes, sharing musical practices and rhythms.

The album’s originality is that it feels deeply Malian at its core, while also being seamlessly infused with an essence of folk songwriting; the two elements blending without one ever overshadowing the other. The duo’s ambition when they began imagining the album was clear: the musical language begins and ends with Manding traditions and modes. The songs had that creative brief. Their melodies, although sung in English, are constructed and stepped along Manding lines.

The originality of Sissoko and Faccini’s dialogue is best exemplified with the song “If Nothing is Real” — a song that succeeds in finding a home away from home, both on the African and European continents. It is a testament to the Nightingale, or Sorofé Kono in Bambara, the songbird that first inspired these old friends to compose music of their own calling.