Tape To Tape

The first time Brian Shimkovitz went to Africa, in 2002, he was on exchange in Ghana – a jazz percussionist studying ethnomusicology in Indiana who had, 'til that point, never actually left North America – to have a “culturally unique student experience”. In Accra, he first uncovered the great black market of African cassettes: market stalls teeming with an entire continental culture effectively unknown on Western shores. He went nuts in a record-nerd kind of way – “cassettes are really cheap, and you can find them all over markets in various cities, so I ended up going pretty crazy”– and, on a return trip in 2004-'05, travelled through West Africa, buying up big, then posting boxes of cassettes back home to himself.

In 2006, Shimkovitz found himself living in New York, finished with his degree, and working as a music publicist. Carefully going through his boxes of cassettes, he decided to digitise the results, and started a blog called Awesome Tapes From Africa with no grand ambition. “I was just doing it as a way to relax on the weekend,” Shimkovitz recounts. “I thought I was making it for me and my friends, and the odd world-music nerd who'd come across it on the internet. I was coming out of academia, and I just wanted to do something that wasn't wordy and encyclopaedic. I thought it was a novel idea to write about something that there was often absolutely no information on. And it seemed like this music was too cool to just go unknown.”

The Awesome Tapes From Africa blog arrived right when the indie world was growing increasingly interested in African guitar-pop; with bands like Dirty Projectors and Vampire Weekend wearing its influence openly. This made Shimkovitz a pseudo-spokesperson for a cultural shift; being asked to both defend himself against charges of post-colonial exploitation and decry others for doing the same. It's a reductionist, condescending, shielding-the-poor-third-worlders attitude that Shimkovitz has no interest in.

“It's really easy for jaded armchair critics, especially in New York, to sit and scoff and talk about politically incorrect appropriation and exploitation,” Shimkovitz says, “but those ideas are way off the mark. I guess discussion is healthy, but slagging off Vampire Weekend isn't contributing much to the greater good.”

Similarly, he sees how “there's a lot of misguided ideas that white, Western audiences impose” on music from Africa. “People can get bummed out if they hear African rap that sounds too much like American hip hop, or if they hear dance music that sounds not 'African enough' for them,” Shimkovitz offers. “I thought it was exciting that that band Blk Jks were talking about being really inspired by Radiohead and The Cure, but for some people that crossed some imagined line. Like, it's cool if they're influenced by James Brown and make West African funk music, but it's not cool if these black South Africans are inspired by indie rock.”

With Awesome Tapes From Africa spiking in interest, Shimkovitz is in the slow process of turning his blog from its own black-market enterprise into a legit record label; following imprints like Sublime Frequencies and Sahel Sounds in the transition from musical tourists to cross-continental collaborateurs. Thus far ATFA the label has released reissues of '80s recordings of Malian singer Nâ Hawa Doumbia and Somali outfit Dur-Dur Band, and (truly awesome) '10s recordings from Ghanaian wailer Bola. To pay for this enterprise (record labels aren't exactly mints these days), Shimkovitz tours, playing his awesome tapes as twin-cassette DJ.

“I don't get super-technical with it, but I've managed to get pretty good at blending tracks together, and sometimes I can even match beats,” Shimkovitz laughs. “From the very first time I did it, I thought it made sense to go straight back to the source and DJ from the tapes. To me, it was the best chance of getting the best sound quality, which is ironic given people think of tapes as being of bad sound quality.”

Awesome Tapes From Africa will be playing the following dates:

Friday 11 January - Ghost Ships Bar, Adelaide SA
Saturday 12 January - Bar Open, Fitzroy VIC
Sunday 13 January - Hell Towers Saloon, Melbourne VIC
Wednesday 16 January - The Bird, Perth WA
Thursday 17 January - Black Bear Lodge, Fortitude Valley QLD
Friday 18 January - Sydney Festival, Town Hall, Sydney NSW
Saturday 19 January - The Parade Ground @ Old King's, Sydney NSW
Sunday 20 January - Faux Mo, Hobart TAS