Awesome Tapes From Africa
The label's founder Brian Shimkovitz talks to Richie
Troughton about how his blog of obscure and rarely heard cassettes from Africa
became a record company determined to track down artists and see how they finally
get the praise they deserve for their work.
During a Fulbright fair in Ghana, ATFA founder Brian
Shimkovitz became fascinated with the discovery of new sounds by collecting a
large number of cassettes and sharing his findings via the blog with a wider
audience eager to discover new ones. to hear music from the continent.
Starting in 2011, he expanded his original idea by launching
the record label Awesome Tapes From Africa and re-releasing some of his
favorite cassettes (on vinyl, CD and download) by artists who were often really
obscure or forgotten, just to to be discovered. once again by new generation of
listeners. The names include Ata Kak, Hailu Mergia, Dur Dur Band, Awa Poulo and
Aby Ngana Diop just to name a few.
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I met Shimkovitz during the Atlas Electronic Festival in
Marrakech after his early evening DJ set at the festival's Pool Stage. The
playlist covered a wide range of curious pop, funk, disco, Afrobeat and hi-life
music, including 'Zombie' by Fela Kuti and the previously obscure tracks
released on his own label, such as' Say You Love Me 'by' Om 'Alec Khaoli.
Shimkovitz says: 'There was something I played people for. It seems like the
people who come here are very serious about music.”
He is jovial and generous with his time to discuss many
aspects of the work and operations of Awesome Tapes From Africa in detail. From
the beginning as a blog that brought dozens of long-forgotten or unknown
artists outside Africa to attention, to the detective work carried out to find
artists and re-publish their work while the project became a record company,
with many of the musicians who are reliving their careers or who have a career
point as a direct result.
The launch of Awesome Tapes From Africa at the Fulbright Fair in Ghana
Brian Shimkovitz: In 2002, I studied ethnomusicology. I had never traveled overseas before and my college gave me the opportunity to study abroad. I thought it would be very nice to experience real culture shock and go somewhere far away, or very different from what I was used to.
I was exposed to Ghanaian music on cassettes by a friend at university and had the idea that it would be cool to dive into a whole different culture and spend a semester there. I went back after five or six months after doing independent research on the music industry in Ghana, and some of my professors were really not encouraging. They put a lot of their values into it, like, 'Oh, are you interested in studying hip hop in Ghana? This is not cool. The pop music in Ghana is not good. It's low forehead. 'Or whatever. It's crazy, when I look back now, how clueless some of those professors were.
However, there was one professor, the head of department, and we just met to get ideas. She said, 'You know what? There is this one allowance that you can apply for. You do not need a master's degree or a PHD. 'This idea was characteristic because at that time, around 2003, people were not doing much academic scholarship on hip hop elsewhere, outside of Europe and America. My professor said, "Okay, you have a chance to fight if you apply for this." She supported me and helped me.
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Then I finished school and had some good professors who also helped write letters of recommendation, and I used the initial research I did in Ghana to apply for this award. I went to Ghana for a whole year, and then I was able to travel through the west of Africa and collect a lot of tires.
What inspired you to collect tires?
BS: Just candid interest. True enthusiasm that just comes from a place where you are interested in many different kinds of music. I know people like to project a lot of ideas about who I am, or where I come from. I've seen people say things like, 'He's a rich kid, parents gave him money and let him go around the world and do what he wants.' Let me tell you how I tried for many, many, many years to make this project happen.
It was a musical search, the way people search for records, or people visit Spotify, or go through Youtube. I was just very, very hungry for music you did not hear at home. At home we have world music, and that was all before Youtube, that was the MySpace era, and things were pounding in my head about how cool it would be to bring artists overseas. All the Ghanaian artists I spoke to when I did my research asked, 'How do we get music in America over the radio,' or 'How do we sell records in America?'
I had no idea about that, because I was just a student who had just finished school. But at the same time, when I came back from Ghana, people were talking about MySpace, and the web 2.0 started - people blogging. I thought there might be a way to communicate some of the music I came across that was not for sale at home. When I moved to New York after coming from Ghana, I did not have any money and I was bored and I just lived in this shitty apartment and I started working on a project in my house and Awesome Tapes From Africa is what it has become.
When I started the project, it was a blog. That was in 2006, and in many places in Africa they still used tapes at the time, and my collection of music and my interest in contemporary music led me to collect many cassettes. Over time, cassettes have disappeared, but they still do, so I spend time looking for them.
The use of cassette decks for DJ set
BS: When people started asking me to DJ, it made sense to do it with bands. And when I started doing that, it was pretty weird and fun and interesting enough for me to keep trying to get better at it.
I never tried to be a DJ, I was never a kid with decks/turntables. Many of my friends were DJs, but I never had much interest in it. But I love music and grew up on drums, so I have an interest in rhythm and timing, which helps with DJs on cassette decks, because you show control on both channels, to try to mix and match reports. . It's a little harder than just using the CDJ.
The search for new and different sounds
BS: I spent a lot of time going to specific neighborhoods, where I knew I could run into people from other parts of West Africa and trying to figure out different kinds of music. When I went to music stores in Ghana back then, 2004, 2005, they still had physical music stores and CDs were not yet popular. They were still very expensive to produce. So there were a lot of cassettes and when you see all these lids, it's sometimes the cover that sticks out, so you grab it.
They were all pretty cheap, like maybe a dollar, and I would not be able to get them at home, so I bought a lot and could ask a lot of questions, because people are very friendly in Ghana, just incredibly warm and generous with their time.
I would go and say, "I'm looking for folk music," or, "I'm looking for music in a specific language," because Ghana has dozens of languages. Or, "I'm looking for music. Do you have any music from this one instrument I've heard of?"
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If you go to different regions of the country, you hear completely different kinds of music and they have different things for sale. Over time, just because I was a nerdy collector type, as I always have been, I got along very well, and I sent many parcels home to Chicago if my parents lived. I just wanted to go see a little bit of everything.
A lot of the music I bought knew that I would not necessarily listen to it much, but I just wanted to know about it and have some sort of physical document of these artifacts, because I knew it was popular on the radio, or that it was really an indication of a certain region or subculture. It was not to find something rare, or something I could DJ with. I did not even have an idea about a blog back then. It was just for my own personal discovery. When I was overseas with different music, I learned as much as possible about it.
How blogging has become a viable medium for sharing music
BS: People at that time did not stream music on the internet, but people mostly downloaded music. There were not as many download sites in Africa that I could find. When I got home and tried to do research, I found that a lot of the music is incapable of using Google. It's different these days. In most countries, there are so many different Africa-based, different region-based sites where you can find music. Mostly illegal. But it's there now and it's all on Youtube, which only started when I started the blog in 2006.
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I was trying to figure out how to upload and make the music so people can click on it, stream it and download it. It's also illegal, but at the time there was no way to buy this music. I felt that it made more sense to at least let people know, because I felt that it deserved to be heard by more people, and that there might be an ultimate market for some of these. With which money and praise can descend to the artist in the correct way.
Evolution of the fantastic bands from Africa blog in a record company
BS: I spent time in Ghana with all these musicians, many of whom are not paid fairly for the work they did locally, and many older musicians whose time has passed. They were no longer popular and they did not book for shows. I have heard many hardship stories about the economics of making music in West Africa. I knew that if I were to do a label, I would have to create a new paradigm, or a style where it would not be colored by all these white people who stole or exploited the music and the musicians. I wanted to find a way to do it, a kind of punk rock style.
By the time I started the blog, I started working at a music PR agency in New York City. I worked there for seven years with many artists who were from Africa, Cuba or other parts of the world. I have worked on many projects, including jazz, world music, experimental music or even electronic music. The non-mainstream stuff. I learned how records were released; the process, the timeline and I learned how managers and marketing teams work.
All the while, as a hobby, for fun, I did the blog. More and more people in Brooklyn have figured it out and said, 'Oh, you're the guy doing the thing, you need to put some of it on wax, we'd like to make it DJ, or else people should buy that. "Then people will of course commenting on the blog, "Where can I buy it? I want to find it? How can I buy it? How can we support the artists?"
After a while, I got an email from a distribution company I knew from the city where I went to college. They said: "If you ever want to ruin your life and start a record company, we'll be happy to help you." I knew that more than one person needed to put up a record and get it in the stores, and I did not want to do anything small because if you were going to do it, you wanted to send money back and you wanted a devised way to pay people.
I was invited to work with their distribution company and it took a long time to get it up and running. Then I had to figure out which artists I wanted to work with, and it made sense to find something that was a little familiar, rather than something completely out of the left-field that no one had ever heard of.
The launch of The Record Label
BS: I was able to make contact with Na Hawa Doumbia, a wonderful singer from Mali, who has released many records over the years. There was a particular report of her from the beginning of her career that not many people outside Mali knew about. Fortunately, she trusted me to work with her.
I do these 50/50 deals, where the artists get an advance on cash, and if the record makes money, we split everything 50/50. I was able to use the PR background to get people writing in the media about it, which helped a lot. And the blog has a built-in fanbase of people who wanted to support these artists. There was just no setup for this.
Meanwhile, there were people who criticized me for saying that it was not fair to give away free music. As YouTube got bigger, I really wanted to find a way to earn their music so that it would not just be stolen online. I also started to see people selling music from artists I knew they did not own.
In particular, After Hawa Doumbia's album, La Grand Cantarice Malienne Vol 3, I knew of two other companies that did not have the rights to it that put it online and tried to sell it. It's like a completely open field, especially with streaming and Amazon and Spotify, where many catalogs from different parts of Africa are just thrown up there without transactions being done and many people being ripped off.
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Looking for the musicians behind the tapes that appear on the blog
BS: One of the most important criteria for releasing a record on Awesome Tapes From Africa that prevents me from putting out just tons and tons of stuff I love is that I have to find the people and make a deal with it . Sometimes it's hard to find the right owner or to communicate with them what you're trying to do, especially since I can never just hop on a plane and go somewhere. I always just contact people via Skype, or whatever, and sometimes it sounds a little weird or dodgy. Fortunately, I was able to prove through the previous examples the kind of work I do to make it easier. But for the first ten or fifteen times, it was hard to explain and make people trust.
The hardest thing is just finding people
BS: There are so many other artists I have never been able to contact, or with whom I have made contact for a while and with whom I have talked. There are other artists I have been in contact with for years. There's one group I've been in contact with since 2012 and I still can not find anything going on. But I did not give up. I even flew to Washington DC a few months ago to meet them and they picked me up. I wasted all this time and money. I went there and they did not meet me through a variety of strange communications. But I'm still going after it. I'm still going to try to make it happen.
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Over the years with the blog, there have been many of my favorite, favorite bands, favorite music, the most interesting, catchy stuff. I always go through the old blog posts for ideas for releases.
I keep chopping down the rocks, seeing who I can get, emailing random journalists, asking random friends from the countries if they know anyone who knows anyone and sometimes it just happens.
In January, a record appeared by an artist from Senegal, who lives in Paris, with whom I have always wanted to work. I searched for him for a long time and finally found the people and was able to make contact with those who originally put this band out and made a deal with them. But this is something that will come many, many years.
The album that just appeared, Our Garden Needs Its Flowers, is another band that was blogged a few years ago by Jess Sah Bi & Peter One, a country music duo from Ivory Coast, that I was looking for and never found. And then I started finding clues. One of them was in Delaware. One of them was in Philadelphia. Yet I still could not find them. Eventually a friend pushed me to really work for it, and I just crept up on them and finally found them. Now we work together. They have just played shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco and they have shows in New York and across the East Coast. I get them a booking agency in Paris and a lot of things happen to them. Knowing them and hearing them play was something I always dreamed about. They were big in Ivory Coast, but then you never heard from them again.
The Search For Ata Kak
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