Ethiopian Music Selections Vol. 1

I just finished digitizing the Ethiopian Music Mixtape I mentioned in a previous post. It has now been uploaded and is available for download. this comes as a lot of people were really very curious about the mix itself but don't own tape players. Some technical notes: this mix was made from YouTube videos, recorded onto cassette and then digitized and encoded at 320 kbps MP3. So there are some general third-generation recording issues, but the overall sound quality is well on the side of listening quality. Anyone desiring to sample Ethiopian sounds might well look for a better master to work from, but for educational purposes it's more than sufficient. Bear in mind that a lot of the tracks were somewhat lo-fi due to the state of the Ethiopian recording industry during the past few decades.

Here is the cover for the mixtape, which includes the playlist. If you feel like dubbing your own tape, you can use the file and the cover provided.

African and Latin Remixes and Edits

Over the summer I had a lot of time on my hands to work on music projects. My plan was to follow my usual tradition of making up a batch of DJ-friendly edits and remixes of various stuff from my collection. I worked with a variety of sourcematerials, but where I really had a lot of fun was in working with African and Latin sources. the Latin sources were almost entirely vinyl. i got a big stack of salsa 45's  a few years back and eventually got around to chopping them up for samples. the African sources came from a mixture of vinyl and mp3. When assembling new music out of parts, i'm not particular about what format the source material comes from, I'm more concerned about using the best and most authentic source material I can find.

That being said, the summer was a fertile period for creating these remixes and edits, and now I'm going to share them with you by way of this blog.

Music of Africa Mixtape Series

 

Anyone who knows me well knows how much of a nut for African music I've become over the past year. A lot of this had to do with discovering a couple of African music blogs such as Awesome Tapes From Africa and Electric Jive. Ethiopian music especially piqued my interest, having earlier in the year picked up a Mulatu album and really liked it.

What really interested me about Ethiopian music was the relatively contemporary sound of Ethiopian music, with its characteristic round, skipping, slightly off-kilter rhythm and intriguing, complicated sounding vocal style. So I ran some YouTube searches for Ethiopian music, and what I found surprised and delighted me.

When I decided to do the first Ethiopian mixtape, I was just creating a compilation of stuff that most interested me, without much plan for doing any kind of 'series'. But after I finished the first tape (Ethiopian Music Selections vol.1, shown above), I found a lot of extra stuff in and around the Ethiopian music genre that made for a good full second volume, so I went for it and created the second one (Ethiopian Music Selections vol.2). It should be noted that some of the tracks are named based on what information there was on the video from which it came, so I'm certain there may be one or two inaccuracies in the track listing.

The response the the first two, at least as far as reaction to the announcement that I was doing it, was very positive. After designing covers for the tapes, I dubbed up a bunch of copies to have on hand as tradable or promotional items, especially among tape nerds. So far I've only given out a handful of them, mostly because not as many people have tape players.

There were two motivations in doing a series of mixtapes at all, on the cassette medium. One being that I'd been scoring lots of blank tapes and wanted to put them to use, and the other being the far easier process of making a tape live off of YouTube as opposed to the dodgy prospect of ripping the videos and making a CD. Making a tape is a different, more hands-on process, and it's worth the extra effort.

After the two volumes of the Ethiopian music compilations, I though it would be fun to continue traveling through Africa by way of YouTube videos, and I began looking for distinctive music from interesting areas, looking for enough quality material to fill up a tape.

The next mixtape titles came about from following leads from other videos. "Extended Play Afro Jams" was a result of these finds, and contains a handful of especially long and psych-jammy tracks. Then as a result of that, The Masters of Zam Rock" tape was born. The work of several psychedelic bands from the 70's in Zambia has been coming to light the past few years, and this tape is an enlightening tour through the genre.

Why YouTube as a source of music? Well I suppose the purist in me would love to be able to only DJ with vinyl (original or repress, doesn't matter to me) but when you start getting into parts of the world whose infrastructures have not reliably supported a vinyl industry, it becomes much more difficult to find. CD's and cassettes are much easier to find, and are generally closer to where the authentic music lies. What makes YouTube such an appealing source for music hunting is that it makes it much easier to stay up to speed of contemporary music in places from which you might never otherwise be able to find music in any format, short of being there yourself.

There has been demand for these tapes to be digitized and made available as downloads. I'll eventually get around to that. For now, the point of the project was to create a 'tapey' experience for those who like the potential the mixtape has. There are still a few copies of each title around, so if you want one, get in contact, make a comment, and we'll see about getting you one.

There's also a Senegalese mbalax mixtape in the works. It's actually finished, but the design needs to be done for it, and it needs to be duped, after I get my new dubbing deck. Stay tuned for more info on this series.

Black Friday DJ Session at CD World

We had a fun DJ bro-down at CD World on Black Friday. It was me, Avitar Virgonian, Josh Burrington (Rock and Roll Damnation) and Ian Lawless. Unfortunately these sessions don't tend to get recorded, but we're working on that. Here are some pics of the DJ crew in action.

Ian Lawless and Josh Burrington

Jon Seven

Josh Burrington and Avitar Virgonian

The view from the DJ booth

Media Sashimi Thanksgiving Mix

Happy Thanksgiving everybody! I felt like celebrating with a mix today and it's a two-parter. I grabbed the stuff that looked most interesting from the stuff I don't get around to playing often. Tapes, CD's and vinyl all in this mix. Here's a photo, until I post an artist list.

Fuji Chrome Blank Tapes

I picked these up the other day. I pick up blanks when I find them no matter what kind they are, but in my mind I always seemed to remember not being very fond of the Fuji tapes. Maybe it was the slim cases. Anyway I was about the unwrap these here in the photo when I noticed they were hi-bias chrome! So I snapped this photo and stuck them back, unopened in my tape storage box (the box from my Stanton headphones).

Media Dig Mix 11/18/12

I did a quick mix of the stuff I found at the Goodwill today, one track from each item. the mix is about an hour long and it's free to download here below.

Artists in this mix include: Singin' Sam, Happy Guitars, Brassy, Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, The Willesden Dodgers, Dave Guard & The Shaw Brothers, England New Order, Gary Wright, Solomon Burke, Tin Machine, Ernie & Lefty, Congo Percussion, Jimmy Boyd, The 5th Dimension, Wendy Carlos, Rumpelstiltskin, Jim Olivier/Shakti Gawain, James Ingram, Harold Faltermeyer & Steve Stevens. Have fun!

Here's a printable poster utilizing scans of the tapes and records in this mix.