Afrobeat Vinyl 463 Items

Social Joy records is very pleased to present Burkina Azza's debut Album Wari bo - a musical tale that covers every aspect of Burkina Azza's values and world view. The album takes us to the very soul of Burkina Faso, giving us a taste of the deep connection of the artists to the beauty and culture of this country. The Burkinabe collective, from Nayerina in the Djibasso region, was born from a lineage of Balafonist and Percussionist musicians called "The Griots", often referred to as a "living archive of the people's traditions". Wari bo was Produced in January 2020 on the brink of the coronavirus pandemic in Ouagadougou, after Label owner Guilhem Monin discovered an outstanding street performance via the African Drumming Facebook group. Two years later, this release is the result of a friendship and love of music that connects two continents and travels across borders, space and time.

Ahemaa Nwomkro, which means queens of Nwomkro, are Victoria Osei and Theresa Owusuaa. Nwomkro is an old Ashanti musical style, which played an influential role in the origin of the typical more roots-like Highlife style of Kumasi, the cultural capital of Ghana in the middle of the jungle.
On this release the two singers have teamed up with the young generation of Highlife muicians of Kumasi. On guitar is Akule Pepe, who served for years in the group of Highlife legend Alex Konadu, the most on demand band in its time. The two songs are a rare example of how good pure Nwomkro gets together with typical Highlife.

Acapella versions of every! single! track! from Off The Meds’ self-titled debut album released in late 2020. The Swedish-South African super group’s front man and vocalist Kamohelo Khoaripe standing alone in the spotlight this time, his unique Zulu-Tsotsitaal-English flow lovingly recorded and processed by the Off The Meds production team. Each track comes with a short/sweet musical introduction, fully optimised for the modern professional discjockey. Out now as a super limited hand-stamped 12′’ vinyl .

In many ways, DJ Black Low's debut album, Uwami, shows the signs of an artist's first offering in any musical genre. Showcasing fluency in a broad range of styles and stuffing a number of ideas to the record's brim is the 20 year-old producer's attempt to both introduce himself to a wide listenership and stamp a recognizable sound in their minds. In other ways, somewhat out of the young South African producer's control, Uwami goes against the grain. The album comes at a time when South African electronic music is being fundamentally disrupted. Amapiano, the electronic music movement which first gained popularity with a small, core group of followers, now dominates the mainstream. Well-known and pervasive, amapiano borrows from a diverse palette of musical styles which are popular in South Africa's largely Black townshipsjazz, kwaito, dibacardi, deep and afro house among them. Instead of pandering to the seemingly insatiable local appetite and growing global penchant for amapiano though, on Uwami DJ Black Low seeks out the limits of the sound du jour and tries to stretch them. On his solo productions, he uses the samples and compositional norms that make amapiano hits the bedrock on which to experiment and improvise. With collaborators, DJ Black Low improvises within the boundaries of listener-friendly grooves. The sound he creates has foundations of what could easily have progressed into captivating amapiano songs on their own. But he uses improvised but structured electronic percussion and distortion sounds to drive the tracks in a particular direction. What remains is something like a deconstructed amapiano. For a young producer living in the townships of the greater Pitori area of South Africa's Gauteng province, there were few avenues available for Radebe to pursue a career in music. His trajectory shows the vulnerability of this pursuit. "I had started producing in 2013 and it so happened that I lost my equipment in 2014. I couldn't afford to buy equipment. In 2017, a friend of mine who had been making music found a job and decided to quit music. He gave me his equipment and I was able to start producing again. That's when I started getting back to it. I tried to pick up where I had left off, with hip hop and commercial house but I found that amapiano was the popular music. I liked it, so I started producing it."

"A Bangin South African bubblegum tune, with house club mix on the flip!"

The start of the 90's brought the final wave of House music that would cement it as the future of South Africa’s music scene. In the years leading up to the new decade, Disco had already naturally evolved into the very early stages of what would become South Africa’s signature House sound, with Instrumentals and Dub Mixes earning themselves spots on the Pantsula records leading the charts of the late 80s, it would be an influx of remixes appearing on import singles that would make the “House mix” the premier b side sound for those bubblegum artists trying to stay relevant in the 90’s. The House remixes coming from Chicago and New York dominated the airwaves at first, eventually gaining genre status by the later part of the decade as International House or just International for short. At the time this would have been synonymous with House music everywhere else in the world. After a years of these tracks getting remixed by the touch of the local talent, International no longer fit the description of what the music was and Kwaito became the sound of the streets. In the studio, Kwaito was the sound of the next generation of producers that was coming up under the Disco legends of 80s. In total it took less than 5 years total for the sound to evolve. It would be in this transition period between International and Kwaito, with the help of the new wave of studio talent, that we find the ingredients that gave birth to a short lived yet unique African House sound. After a long career with the soul group The Savers, Morgan Kwele cut two solo records under his own name in the late 80’s. Without much success and after being dropped by EMI, Morgan was picked up by Peter Snyman and independent Sounds of Soweto. At the time it was becoming a premier label for the emerging house sounds. M’du and Joe Nina would both end up working at Snyman’s studio, and it would be their collaborating project LA Beat that would launch their respective careers further. For his new album Morgan would team up with legendary producer and long time friend from the 70s Koloi Lebona. They would work together once more and record what most likely became Morgan’s final Album. The title track Vakonwana became the lead single, with the original bubblegum version on the A side for the old timers and the Club Version on the flip for the late nite parties.

A new ship of fools sails on Bolombia lands! These strange people seem to celebrate the whole jazz universe and african idioms, but they've never been in Africa. The great continent, more than physical, is a mental place of encounter and psychedelic skids. Neurotic and schizoid sorcerers, a furious wind drags them towards the total effervescence of the groove: an unprecedented cauldron of dangerous substances, hybrid styles and influences mixed with secret recipe. Their music is an explosive bubble of expressions, a feverish, impulsive and unstoppable ritual. A cosmic attitude, such as Heliocentrics or Embryo, marries the majestic and floating sounds of synths and psych organs, acidified by toxic dub sparks and deadly funk forays. A crazy horn section travels without maps from Sun-Ra and Ethiopian echoes, hard-bop reminiscenses, to sudden and virulent Balkanisms, making this soup an indecipherable combination of flavors.

It was in Benin City, in the heart of Nigeria, that a new hybrid of
intoxicating highlife music known as Edo Funk was born.
It first emerged in the late 1970s when a group of musicians began
to experiment with different ways of integrating elements from their
native Edo culture and fusing them with new sound effects coming
from West Africa ́s night-clubs. Unlike the rather polished 1980 ́s
Nigerian disco productions coming out of the international
metropolis of Lagos Edo Funk was raw and reduced to its bare
minimum.

Someone was needed to channel this energy into a distinctive sound
and Sir Victor Uwaifo appeared like a mad professor with his Joromi
studio. Uwaifo took the skeletal structure of Edo music and
relentless began fusing them with synthesizers, electric guitars and
80 ́s effect racks which resulted in some of the most outstanding Edo
recordings ever made. An explosive spiced up brew with an odd
psychedelic note dubbed "Edo Funk".

That's the sound you'll be discovering in the first volume of the
Edo Funk Explosion series which focusses on the genre’s greatest
originators; Osayomore Joseph, Akaba Man, and Sir Victor Uwaifo:

Osayomore Joseph was one of the first musicians to bring the sound
of the flute into the horn-dominated world of highlife, and his
skills as a performer made him a fixture on the Lagos scene. When he
returned to settle in Benin City in the mid 1970s – at the
invitation of the royal family – he devoted himself to the
modernisation and electrification of Edo music, using funk and Afro-
beat as the building blocks for songs that weren’t afraid to call
out government corruption or confront the dark legacy of Nigeria’s
colonial past.

Akaba Man was the philosopher king of Edo funk. Less overtly
political than Osayomore Joseph and less psychedelic than Victor
Uwaifo, he found the perfect medium for his message in the trance-
like grooves of Edo funk. With pulsating rhythms awash in cosmic
synth-fields and lyrics that express a deep personal vision, he
found great success at the dawn of the 1980s as one of Benin City’s
most persuasive ambassadors of funky highlife.

Victor Uwaifo was already a star in Nigeria when he built the
legendary Joromi studios in his hometown of Benin City in 1978.
Using his unique guitar style as the mediating force between West-
African highlife and the traditional rhythms and melodies of Edo
music, he had scored several hits in the early seventies, but once
he had his own sixteen-track facility he was able to pursue his
obsession with the synesthetic possibilities of pure sound, adding
squelchy synths, swirling organs and studio effects to hypnotic
basslines and raw grooves. Between his own records and his
production for other musicians, he quickly established himself as
the godfather of Edo funk.

What unites these diverse musicians is their ability to strip funk
down to its primal essence and use it as the foundation for their
own excursions inward to the heart of Edo culture and outward to the
furthest limits of sonic alchemy. The twelve tracks on Edo Funk
Explosion Volume 1 pulse with raw inspiration, mixing highlife
horns, driving rhythms, day-glo keyboards and tripped-out guitars
into a funk experience unlike any other.
Double LP pressed on 140g virgin vinyl comes with a full color 20-pages booklet