Brian Shimkovitz created the blog Awesome Tapes from Africa in 2006 after returning from an ethnomusicology scholarship in Ghana.  The idea behind the blog was simple: "Awesome Tapes from Africa is place where people who know very little—or a whole lot— can explore new sounds that happen to be most easily available on cassette,"  Brian told us.  Among music lovers and Africa-philes, Brian is a celeb, someone on par with the stars (BLK JKS, The Very Best, Ziggy Marley, Phish) that he represents (Clark-Kent style) at his music publicist day-job.   Brian's a star because of Ata Kak, because of the Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, and because he's the guy that turns a bag of dusty tapes into gold.  More than a blog for collectors, Awesome Tapes offers fodder to average joes and artists alike.  It's a renewbale resource for anybody on the look for what's different, for what's next, for what happens outside the "world music" canon.

Have you every killed a man for a cassette tape?
I’ve never killed a man for a tape but I almost got myself in trouble once with a sinister cassette dealer in a Bamako market. I rather bluntly told him his prices were way too high and he proceeded to follow me around with an insane look in his eye for the next half hour. Oh man, things are really dangerous out there collecting tapes. 

What's the most harrowing thing you've ever done to get music for the blog?
I spent a couple days walking the streets of Tamale, Ghana, not really eating or drinking or resting much. I naively thought this kind undiscovered Fela Kuti-type brilliant musical character might have existed at some point up in Northern Ghana and no one knew it yet. And I wanted to find him or his cassette. I didn’t know I was going to make an African tapes blog at the time but I had some weird thing where I just walked down the street for hours and hours talking to every group of old men standing around, listening to whatever fifth-generation dubbed cassettes they had of a mostly talking sort of praise music. Not quite what I was looking for but I found some interesting things along the way.

The best part about being famous because of Awesome Africa Tapes?
The girls.

How has your work on the blog informed your work as a music publicist?
I found out pretty quickly that way more people are into music from abroad than I thought. This helped me realize broader ways of looking at promoting a record. I was thrilled to return from Africa a few years to find everyone stoked about MIA and Animal Collective and other artists that draw from different sounds. “World music” is not for your pot-head uncle anymore. Now you guys can jam together.

What about your ethnomusicolgy training have you had to throw out the window?
Everything. Not only do I provide little-to-no context for each cassette, I am further exoticizing the whole thing by putting it in this little awesome tapes from africa box for the world to pet and marvel at. But I believe sitting in the library writing up research papers about rap in Ghana would do very little for anyone. So I’ve taken my ethomusicological battle to the streets. While I’m pretty sure my professors would be bummed about me giving away people’s music for free, I know this is the cheapest and fastest way of getting it to people who would care.

What's been the most useful part of that same training?
I think studying ethnomusicology showed me how to look deeply at and think critically about things that are terribly mundane—like your average warehouse noise show or a dude playing guitar in his underwear in Times Square—and seriously fucked up or unique musical events. Both ends of the spectrum are interesting and worthy of study. An open-mic night at some random coffee shop makes for more nuanced and fascinating analysis (to me) than many studies on colorful ceremonial music from faraway places. One could argue a few of the things I’ve posted are the African equivalent of someone singing in a coffee shop.

Who were your early inspirations in African music?
The first time I heard Fela was a revelation on so many levels. I then realized there is a whole world of pop music out there from all these different decades and historic periods. Everything I was learning about world cultures and fieldwork kind of swirled together in this quest to learn about some musical past and present from a given place. I guess I ended up focusing on Africa. But for a while I had a pretty intense collection of music from Thailand going, though it pales in comparison to the knowledgeable chap over at Mon Rak Pleng Thai.

What are you listening to right now?
Disco 12”s from the mid 70s, like “You+Me=Love” by Undisputed Truth (below) and Universal Robot Band’s “Dance And Shake Your Tambourine.” And the soundtrack to the film, Witness.

What aren't you listening to right now?
The Beatles. I’m not mad at the Beatles but I noticed everyone is excited about the new video game and reissues.

What's your oldest cassette tape?
That’s a really good question. I have no idea. In Mali I got this one compilation of old Bollywood tunes which is hot pink and totally wrecked in the most beautiful way. It includes amazing versions of “I Am A Disco Dancer” (below) and “Jimmy Aaja”.  The magical thing about tapes from Africa is that they could be two months old or twenty years old and they’d be equally fucked, depending on where they are played.  

How have blogs changed since you first started yours?
Blogs have become more plentiful and their designs have gotten snazzier in the last few years. I am also impressed by how incredibly esoteric they’ve become. Just in case you’re obsessed with 70s proto-smooth jazz LPs from the CTI catalog, there’s a blog that has most of them for you. Or if you are, like me, totally gay for mellow and minimal new age records (see the excellent Crystal Vibrations blog) then the music blog thing has become some seriously fun and overwhelming times.

Tell us a story.
I was hunting for records in a shop in Berlin recently and I came across some African records, one of which had this insane disco-highlife track on it. Upon further inspection I noticed the drummer is a certain Ata Kak, whose enigmatic music and mysterious persona has captured my imagination since I found the tape in Cape Coast, Ghana. His was the first thing I posted to Awesome Tapes from Africa and it remains my one of my all-time jammers and is definitely in the top 3 of AFTA fan faves. After so many years of wondering who the fuck this guy is and where I might find him, he turns up on a mostly-crappy 1989 highlife record in Kreuzberg. 

Brian DJs this Saturday in Brooklyn with Cool Places.

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com