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This summer sees the return of the unique cross-continental collaboration between Ghanaian xylophonist Isaac Birituro and his band of live international musicians, The Rail Abandon. Having created something of a buzz back in 2019 with their debut album 'Kalba', gaining support along the way from Gilles Peterson, Cerys Matthews, and Tom Ravenscroft to name but a few - and after something of a hiatus, the duo teased us earlier this spring with the 'Lapaz' EP in preparation for their new LP 'Small Small'.'Small Small' is a very Ghanaian saying, a direct translation to English, which is used in a wide variety of contexts to mean 'bit by bit, one step at a time' or 'slow and steady'. Vocalist and musician Sonny Johns, from The Rail Abandon, was first introduced to the phrase on his initial trip to Ghana in 2016, when he met Isaac in Kalba, and the phrase has popped up over and over ever since.'Any second album is a difficult process -how do you make something that follows on from the first but is different enough? It's particularly difficult when your first album was made under the unique conditions of having never played together, in unusual surroundings. It is also difficult when you live on different continents from each other. To add to those difficulties, we had to make a record in the middle of a pandemic. Fortunately, just before the world was locked down, we'd written and recorded the basis of the album over 3 days while on tour in Germany, October 2019. Then Isaac and the Rail Abandon went about adding their own musicians to the recordings in Ghana and the UK respectively, bringing everyone together via the internet instead of physically. Everyone involved had been hit dramatically during this period, some physically, some financially, all emotionally.The rise of the BLM movement during this period also made a big impact on a project designed to unite people, brin
