Awesome Tapes From Africa is a record label and website operated by Brian Shimkovitz, based in Los Angeles, California. The site was founded in 2006 in Brooklyn, New York.
The site was created as a way for Shimkovitz to share music he had come across while on a Fulbright scholarship in Ghana. He was interested in the variety of genres and artists he found, distributed largely on cassette tapes at markets, but that he had not come across outside West Africa. [1] In 2011, Shimkovitz transitioned the site from just a blog with posted recordings of collected tapes posted without the artists' permission to a commercial record label. [2] The goal of the company is to seed and expand an audience for the artists presented as well as provide opportunities to sell albums and tour. [3] Artists are paid every six months and receive 50% of the profits from an album. [4] Tapes presented on Awesome Tapes come from a variety of sources: gathered in Ghanaian street markets, purchased in stores in the US, or sent by others over the internet. [5] In addition to the website, Shimkovitz DJ's concerts, clubs and at festivals as Awesome Tapes From Africa, as well as hosts a show on Dublab. [6]
Most Awesome Tapes From Africa releases are official rereleases of out-of-print cassettes from African musicians and bands. SK Kakraba's Songs of Paapieye is the first album to consist of a new release. [7] Although music is distributed in Africa via MP3 on mobile phones, Shimkovitz says the widest variety of music in West Africa is still available on cassette tape. [8] In the journal Public Culture, Awesome Tapes From Africa, along with record labels Sublime Frequencies and Parallel World, is discussed as being emblematic of "World Music 2.0" for combining the "open source ethics of online networks with long-standing countercultural networks of circulation" within cassette culture and music distribution in developing nations. [9]
"Home Taping Is Killing Music" was the slogan of a 1980s anti-copyright infringement propaganda campaign by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), a British music industry trade group. With the rise in cassette recorder popularity, the BPI feared that the ability of private citizens to record music from the radio onto cassettes would cause a decline in record sales. The logo, consisting of a Jolly Roger formed from the silhouette of a compact cassette, also included the words "And It's Illegal". The campaign was officially launched by then-BPI chairman Chris Wright on 28 October 1981.
David P. Madson, better known by his stage name Odd Nosdam, is an American underground hip hop producer, DJ and visual artist. He is co-founder of the record label Anticon. He has remixed tracks by a variety of bands and artists including Boards of Canada, The Notwist, and Sole.
This Heat were an English experimental rock band, formed in early 1976 in Camberwell, London by multi-instrumentalists Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward and Gareth Williams.
Hiplife is a Ghanaian musical style that fuses Ghanaian culture and hip hop. Recorded predominantly in the Ghanaian Akan language, hiplife is rapidly gaining popularity in the 2010s throughout West Africa and abroad, especially in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Germany.
Mulatu Astatke is an Ethiopian musician and arranger considered as the father of "Ethio-jazz".
Mahmoud Ahmed is an Ethiopian singer. He gained great popularity in Ethiopia in the 1970s and among the Ethiopian diaspora in the 1980s, before rising to international fame with African music fans in Europe and the Americas.
The Awesome Snakes were a two-person punk rock band from Minneapolis, Minnesota, featuring Annie "Sparrows" Holoien on bass and Danny Henry on drums.
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Aqua Bassino is an alias of Jason Robertson, an Edinburgh-based electronic producer and DJ. He has released 2 studio albums, 3 EPs and 4 singles of downtempo and house on F Communications.
Walias Band were an Ethiopian jazz and funk band active from the early 1970s until the early 1990s. Formed by members of the Venus Band, Walias backed up many prominent singers with a hard polyrhythmic funk sound influenced by western artists like King Curtis, Junior Walker and Maceo Parker. In 1977 they recorded one of the few albums of Ethiopian instrumental music in collaboration with vibraphonist Mulatu Astatke, whose role as a bandleader and composer was also a major influence on Ethiopian popular music.
Brad Laner is an American musician and record producer best known for his work with the shoegaze band Medicine, which he founded and led.
Dur-Dur Band was a musical group from Mogadishu, Somalia. The band was formed in the 1980s and was one of the most well-known acts on the Mogadishu disco scene at the time. The band later performed and recorded based in neighbouring Ethiopia. Their unique sound encompasses funk and disco, with influences of soul.
Hailu Mergia is an Ethiopian keyboardist, now based in Washington D.C., United States. He is best known for his role in the Walias Band in the 1970s, one of the most significant groups in Ethiopia’s "golden age" of music.
Debo Band are a Boston-based Ethiopian music band led by saxophonist Danny Mekonnen and fronted by vocalist Bruck Tesfaye. Ranging from 10–12 members playing horns, guitars, violins, percussion, and accordion, their sound incorporates Ethiojazz, folk, and pop styles from the Horn of Africa infused with tinges of motifs from Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as punk, experimental, and psychedelic rock. Rolling Stone described Debo's sound as, "guitar solos, massed vocals, violin and brass [that] rush in like a Red Bulled marching band...Dance at your own risk."
Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument, also known as Shemonmuanaye, is a 1985 studio album by Ethiopian jazz musician Hailu Mergia, formerly of the Walias Band. After the band split up in 1983, Mergia moved to the United States and began studying music at Howard University, during which time he discovered an accordion and began playing it. Initially intending to record a cassette of himself playing the accordion in a small studio belonging to an acquaintance at Howard, he also incorporated other instruments in the studio, such as a Rhodes piano and synthesiser.
Shaka Bundu is the debut album by South African musician Penny Penny released in 1994. Penny was discovered in a Johannesburg recording studio by producer Joe Shirimani, who was impressed by Penny's unique vocal style. Shirimani's record label Shandel Music enjoyed the demos he produced for Penny, and let the pair record an album together. Recorded over the space of one week using an Atari computer, Korg M1 synthesiser and reel-to-reel tape, the album blends the Tsonga disco style of music with American house music, reflecting the popularity of American and British electronic dance music in South Africa. It has been credited for pioneering a new style of Tsonga disco with its fusion of slow house rhythms, synthesised steel drums and Penny's modern vocal style atop traditional call-and-response female backing vocals.
Songs of Paapieye is the fourth album by Ghanaian musician SK Kakraba, released in October 2015 by Awesome Tapes From Africa, becoming the first album of original material released by the typically reissue-centred label. The album showcases Kakraba's mastery of the gyil, a type of wooden, 14-slatted xylophone originating from Kakraba's native Ghana that features a distinctive, buzzy rattle with a slow decaying sound caused by spiders egg sac silk walls pulled across the gourds' holes, known in Kakraba's Lobi language as pappieye, which gives the album its name. It is smoother in sound than his previous album Yonye and is fast-paced, showcasing complex, intricate rhythms, drones and dialogue between lower, buzzing basslines and higher, syncopated notes. Many tracks feature several modes and move between different sections.
SK Kakraba is a Ghanaian musician and performer of the country's traditional music. He makes and performs gyils, a xylophone containing 14 suspended wooden slats stretched over calabash gourds containing resonators. He was taught to build the instruments using a rare wood known by the Lobi as neura. Kakraba explained: "It's a very hard process, because you have to get the wood from five different places, only found in Ghana’s forests. The trees fall on their own and when they do, you cut them, dry the wood and lay the keys." LA Weekly have referred to Kakraba as the "world's greatest" xylophone player, and he has toured worldwide playing the gyil.
Lala Belu is the second studio album by Ethiopian singer-songwriter Hailu Mergia. It was released on 23 February 2018 under Awesome Tapes From Africa.
The Ethiopian Golden Age of Music was an era of Ethiopian music that began around the 1960s to 1970s, until the Derg regime progressively diminished its presence through politically motivated persecutions and retributions against musicians and companies, which left many to self-imposed exile to North America and Europe. Several artists and musical companies, as well as recording groups, emerged to produce their own singles and albums; the first being Amha Records, and Philips Records, Ethiopia Records and Kaifa Records, which is primarily based in Addis Ababa.