Awesome Tapes from Africa’s new label

Awesome Tapes from Africa is, as the name suggests, a literally awesome blog that shares cassette rips of African and Middle Eastern music that have been procured from dusty shacks and music stalls across the African continent. Having run the blog since 2006, when most people were still struggling to understand what the platform was Brian Shimkovitz has followed his path with an almost missionary zeal, and shared countless tapes of music that you would have no other way of hearing short of traveling to the place of origin and buying a copy of the tape yourself. Now Shimkovitz is starting a label, to give release some of the music that has according to him “made doing this blog so easy”. He will also be sharing 50% of the profits with the artists which is we would guess a better cut than most artists regardless of their location receive.

You can download a track from the first album – Mali’s Nâ Hawa Doumbia and her album La Grande Cantatrice Malienne Vol 3 which was originally released in 1983 over at Altered Zones.

Published August 01, 2011.