Spotlight: Awesome Tapes from Africa

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 136, April 2018.



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.

Hailu Mergia - Lala Belu

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 136, April 2018.

Hailu Mergia
Lala Belu
Awesome Tapes from Africa (39 mins)

After reissuing three of Hailu Mergia’s classic albums to great success, Awesome Tapes from Africa have got the veteran Ethiopian jazz musician and full-time cab driver into the studio and produced his first new album for 15 years. And it’s a stonker.

Lala Belu is a great Ethiojazz album, but it’s also a great jazz album, full stop. It’s all played by a trio, with Tony Buck on drums, Mike Majkowski on bass and Mergia on all manner of keyboards – accordion, piano, organ, synths, melodica, you name it – but various overdubs give the ensemble the sound of a hard-driving sextet.

There’s all sorts in here, from cool soul-jazz at the beginning, dub excursions and Herbie-like synth spirals in the middle, and with a lovely piano solo piece at the end. The highlight is ‘Anchihoye Lene’, which starts laying down a deadly groove before Mergia’s organ takes it all the way to downtown Addis Ababa.

Considering all that, the title track itself is a bit of a let-down. It’s a bit cheesy with its la-la-la-ing and solos that don’t have the same level of excitement as the other tracks. Never mind, though. The rest of the album is a blast – dig it!

Mpho Majiga - World Affairs

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 136, April 2018.

Mpho Majiga
World Affairs
Africantunz Records & Promotions (51 mins)

Mpho Majiga is a South African gospel singer with a disco vibe. This is his fifth album, and World Affairs, as its title suggests, deals with big issues – songs encourage listeners to ‘say no to terrorism’ and to help victims of Ebola.

The first impression of the album is MIDI-tastic – so many synthesised xylophones and programmed cowbell’n’claps. It gets less drastic the further through the album you get, but whether that is because it gets more tasteful or your ears just get used to it, I’m not really sure.

Across the seven unique tracks and a handful of remixes and reprises, Majiga’s music is pretty much standard Afrogospel-pop but with less proselytising. It’s very cheesy and the musicality is not always perfect, but I have to admit it is rather charming. A lot of the tracks are fun and feel-good (slip the reggae remix of ‘Dream of Peace’ into your Summer 2018 playlist for smiles) and the best is saved till last, with a house remix of the track ‘Help’.

If you like cheery, cheesy gospel and don’t mind a couple of questionable harmonies or MIDI instruments, maybe give this a shot.

Gili Yalo - Gili Yalo

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 135, March 2018.

Gili Yalo
Gili Yalo
Dead Sea Recordings (41 mins)

Gili Yalo’s love of singing was learnt through hardship. As a five-year-old, he escaped the Ethiopian famine on foot. Music made the journey more bearable. Eventually settling in Tel Aviv, Yalo surrounded himself with funk, soul and dub. On this debut album, all those sounds come together with a large helping of Ethiopian groove.

The cover art says it all: this is one cool album. The whole thing has a strut to its step. With Yalo singing in both Amharic and English, his band cook up a whole range of retro flavours, from golden-age Ethiopian horns and old-school synths to that classic R’n’B rhythm section sound.

It doesn’t turn into a heard-it-all-before fusion, either. At some points the Ethiojazz vibe is strong (the instrumental ‘Tadese’ would be at home on a Mulatu Astatke album); elsewhere it feels like straight-up Afrobeat. When all the elements coalesce, it becomes really special. Look no further than the track ‘Coffee’ – Yalo’s blues-bar-in-Addis vocals run the show, while krar lyre duels with Ali Farka Touré-style guitar over piping-hot soul funk, all to an eskista rhythm.

What a fantastic album. Play it loud and you’ll feel like the coolest person alive – after Gili Yalo, of course.

Introducing Super Parquet

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 134, January/February 2018.



This is the sound of village halls and warehouse raves; rural fêtes and squats; past, present and future.

Super Parquet play folk dance music from the Auvergne region of central France, hallucinated through a lens of distortion, dissonance and dirty electronica. The fusion makes sense considering their line-up: cabrette (bagpipe) player Louis Jacques and banjo player Antoine Cognet both came to French traditional music as children; Simon Drouhin and Julien Baratay, the group’s electronicists, knew nothing of it before the four met. But it works because the two worlds share so much in common. Drouhin recalls the realisation: “Electronic music has the same repetitions, the same drones. We came to the conclusion that it’s the same music!”

The Super Parquet M.O. is clear: “Drones and loops, drones and loops, drones and loops…they are the most important things about our sound!” says Jacques. It’s true. While the classic French dances weave in and out, what stands out are the layers upon layers of sound. It’s as much Éliane Radigue as it is EDM. For Cognet, “drones and loops complete each other.” Drones provide a base for loops, and loops add a concept of time to drones: each gives meaning to the other.

The sounds themselves are harsh. Timbres bounce between the ears as whining cabrette grinds against sawtooth synths and twanging banjo spars with retro drum machines. Then there’s the boîte à bourdon, the ‘bumblebee box.’ It’s a hybrid offspring of a hurdy-gurdy and a shruti box that gives a continuous buzzing drone, to be tuned and detuned at will. It provides deep, complex flavours and some perfectly ear-jangling dissonances. Altogether, it creates a spectacular soundscape.

In this way, the band reclaim folk from its critics and its overbearing lovers. For them, traditions are not – and cannot be – stuck in the past, they evolve with the musicians and with society. As Jacques loudly proclaims, “traditional music is always the music of the moment.”

But talking this much about the intricacies of the music misses the point, really. “We don’t want the audience to think, we want them to dance!” laughs Jacques. Quite right. When Super Parquet play, it’s all about the atmosphere. It makes you dance, yes, but the thrill comes from the suspense. They’re masters of it. With every layer of pulsating loops and discordant drones, the tension builds and builds. The audience swims in that tension and it becomes a transcendent experience. There’s a reason so many religious ceremonies revolve around repetitive, circular chanting. On top of it all, the traditional tunes and songs of the Auvergne transport that transcended mind to another world altogether, at once past and future, city and countryside. It’s an exhilarating experience, and the band curate it expertly.

They don’t have an album just yet. They’re in the recording studio in 2018, but until then, they do have a substantial 43-minute EP from 2015 to keep you busy. If their recent reception at WOMEX is anything to go by, you can expect to see them at many festivals and concerts over the next few years – we can’t wait for our next trip to the upside-down village of Super Parquet.


Photo: Super Parquet live at WOMEX 17, by Jacob Crawfurd.

Batch Gueye - Xamle

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 134, January/February 2018.

Batch Gueye
Xamle
Self-released (45 mins)

Growing up as a dancer in Senegal and reinventing himself as a singer in the UK, Batch Gueye is starting to make a name for himself and now comes out with his second full-length album.

Most of the album has an acoustic feel with twinkling guitars, kora and xalam (lute) creating a bright field of sound for Gueye’s high-pitched Wolof vocals. Backed by traditional drums and percussion instead of a drum kit, it all adds to a laid-back vibe that runs all the way through.

Unfortunately, compared to his impressive debut album, 2015’s Ndiarigne, this follow-up falls a little flat. On Xamle, he seems to have played it too safe, rather than improving the good thing he had going. Every track here seems to have the same atmosphere to it, making it all somewhat repetitious and unexciting by the end.

A small exception is an interesting bonus at the end of the album: ‘Fans Club’ is a club-focused track with drum machines and synths galore that shows Gueye in a different light, which is quite fun. It’s just a bit of a shame that Xamle doesn’t live up to what came before.

The Place of Live Recordings - Songlines Soapbox

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 133, December 2017.



On April 7, 1968 at the Westbury Music Fair in New York, Nina Simone performed a new song called ‘Why? (The King of Love is Dead)’. Written by bassist Gene Taylor and taught to the band just that afternoon, the song was a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, which occurred just three days earlier. It is a 13-minute exploration of sadness, anger and solidarity, performed by the immaculate Dr Simone. It pulsates with emotion and power. The song was never recorded in a studio; it didn’t need to be. The show was recorded live and this first rendition was perfect. It has become known as one of Simone’s greatest pieces.

I have been playing that song almost daily over the last few weeks, so of course it’s right at the top of my mind. But I’ve also been listening to some not-so-good concert albums lately too, and these joint experiences have got me thinking about the place that live albums occupy in our record collections.

There have been amazing live albums through the years that have become essential additions to any collection; some concert-recorded versions of pieces have even become definitive over those from the studio – Bob Marley’s ‘No Woman No Cry’ is a prime example. But when you think about it, the live recording is a rather strange phenomenon.

It’s because the quality of live albums can hardly ever stack up to that of studio albums. First of all, the musicianship on display at a gig is rarely at the same standard. In a studio, an artist can spend days recording the same pieces over and over again and that will necessarily yield near-perfect performances, but if you have just the one chance and one take to record a concert, then the rough edges of a performance will be there to hear forever. And then there’s the sound quality: until recently, live recordings have usually sounded far inferior to those made in-studio. An exciting stage presence and a large, unpadded room makes setting up microphones a less precise science than in the controlled environment of a recording studio. It means that the end results are often noisy or muddy-sounding, instruments don’t sound as sparkly as they should do, and lyrics are harder to discern. That’s not even mentioning the dreaded feedback that still manages to find its way onto albums now and then.

Nevertheless, we love them. The live recording has an enduring popularity. Many artists release live material at some point, whether as an album, as bonus tracks or as special downloads. If they never get released, there are always bootlegs floating about. So…why?

Watching an amazing concert is one of the pinnacles of being a music fan. When everything lines up just right – the music is excellent, the crowd is up for it and the chemistry between the artist and their audience is flowing – it is simply a sublime experience. It’s the reason why the received wisdom is that most bands have to be seen live to fully understand their music. It is natural, then, that both artists and fans want to capture and relive this feeling in some way. But surely reliving only works when the listener went to that specific concert (or at the very least, the same tour). What about everyone else?

It may well be something deeper than our conscious opinions on the quality of art. Maybe live recordings trigger a more instinctive reflex of our animal brains; a subliminal reaction to the unnaturalness of multi-tracked recordings. Perhaps our brains recognise the ‘uncanny valley’ aspect of a piece of music made by musicians who do not occupy the same physical or temporal space as one another. The live album is a reaction against that: music as it was meant to be made ‘naturally’, a group of people communicating communally with each other through sound and song. It is, as humans tend to strive towards, an authentic (as opposed to synthetic) experience.

And humans love to be part of something. It’s one of the thrills of being at a great gig. Audience and artists all experiencing the same moment together, collectively and socially, and that’s a special thing. Live albums can’t replicate it thoroughly (you can’t get that unique heat or smell of a close crowd, especially if they’re in dance mode), but it does let you imbibe some of that same feeling, receiving an amount of that same connection to the artist in their most heartfelt moments. It tells some quiet part in the back of your brain that you are part of this very special group who understands this music in a very special way.

For all their flaws, it could be that we just like it that way. It’s those imperfections that make it sound natural and communal to us. The latest album of a shall-remain-unnamed West African artist was stitched together from material from several dates of a tour. Listening to it, I realised that something about it seemed not quite right. I’d heard all of the pieces before and I felt I knew these versions. These were live recordings, but the sound quality was so good, the audience so quiet in the mix and obviously the best takes used that it didn’t have the live vibe at all. The tracks just sounded like re-recordings of those I already knew.

It seems to me like we crave that imperfection. To err is human, after all. When we hear that not every note is spot-on, when the sound is a bit off and there is a slight bubble of crowd noise in the background, it reassures us that the musicians are real people, and that our emotional connection to them and their music is well-placed.

So, basically: live recordings have to be bad to be good. Within reason, obviously. But so what? Let’s revel the bizarreness of our human brains and enjoy good music, bad or otherwise! After all, some of it may be the best recordings ever made.


Photo: Nina Simone, by Victor Pineda. Used under licence CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.