Downloads and streaming are king. CDs are holding on and vinyl is still enjoying its resurgence. So who’s flying the flag for the humble cassette? That would be Awesome Tapes from Africa. ATFA is a many-headed beast – online digital archive of music, record label for obscure re-releases and exciting new material, unique DJ sets…but it all comes back to the eponymous awesome tapes. Keeping it all together behind the scenes is Brian Shimkovitz.
The adventure started during a 2002 study-abroad period in Ghana, where cassettes were the prime currency of music exchange. Shimkovitz amassed tapes of all sorts, from traditional to popular and the most left-field recordings he could find. Even back in the US, he continued to pick up interesting African cassettes wherever he could, eventually starting the ATFA blog in 2006 to showcase just some of this rare, wonderful music. As the blog’s tagline proclaims, ‘this is music you won't easily find anywhere else—except, perhaps in its region of origin.’
The blog now contains hundreds of tapes from all over the continent, from rare, domestic-only releases by world music superstars to artists that you’d be hard-pressed to find, even if you knew what you were looking for. It wasn’t long until the idea formed to create a label to re-release some of these hidden gems. It blossomed, and since 2011, ATFA has released 15 full-length albums of reissues and original material, plus a bunch of EPs and remixes, featuring artists from Mali, Ghana, Somalia, Ethiopia, South Africa, Senegal and Eritrea.
The label doesn’t have a signature sound, but it certainly has a signature quality. Out of his collection of thousands, how does Shimkovitz pick the perfect albums to release? “It has a lot to do with just trying to find challenging music that other labels wouldn’t produce,” he says. “Mostly it’s to do with whether it seems like a crucial thing that isn’t otherwise available, or if it’s an important statement and a relevant or interesting way to look at a place.”
Summing up the ATFA philosophy, Shimkovitz says it’s “not really trying to do the hippest or trendiest stuff, never doing compilations, just letting the artists’ work speak for itself.” And so, Shimkovitz himself plays no real creative role in the label’s releases: the reissues are presented in exactly the same way as the original (including tape-hiss and original artwork), and if they’re recording a new album, the artist makes it exactly how they want, and get half of all profits, too. This is the way that ATFA has helped to revive careers (such as Hailu Mergia, the Washington DC taxi driver whose latest record, Lala Belu, is an Ethiojazz tour de force) and launch new stars (Ata Kak’s proto-techno-highlife-rap was little known even in his native Ghana – now he tours the world).
For Shimkovitz, it’s all a case of so much music, so little time: “There’s so many sounds that I want to focus on, different movements, different folkloric traditions. I always have so many plans to deal with.” With a bunch of new tapes of traditional, electronic and even country music ready to be reissued this year, there’s plenty more Awesome Tapes From Africa still to come.