Vol. 4: Liwalo Na Liwe (2000)
6 tracks, 59 minutes
Awesome Tapes From Africa · YouTube
This is my first feature on here of an album sourced from an online blog. This one in particular is from one of the most well-known and best of them, Awesome Tapes From Africa. The guy who runs it, Brian Shimkovitz, is understandably putting much more time and effort into the record label of the same name nowadays, but the website is an amazing repository of music from all over the continent, almost all of it stuff you would never find outside of its home region. (I actually interviewed Brian for an article in Songlines Magazine last year, check it out on my other blog).
Jagwa Music play mchiriku, a style from Dar-es-Salam. It’s a super-fast clash of tinny, overdriven Casio keyboards and traditional drumming. The stylistic origins lie in Zanzibari taarab and Congolese rumba, maybe with hints of funk and reggae, but those are only particularly noticeable now and then – otherwise it is just unrelentingly frenetic, major-keyed, looping madness. Yep, it’s my love of ostinatos again: one tiny phrase on the keyboards repeated over and over and over for ages. Play this late at night, in a sweaty club and you could dance yourself into a purely natural ecstasy with this stuff. In a typical act of injustice, mchiriku is banned in its city of origin…not that it stops it from being popular of course; that sort of stuff never does.
As you would expect from an album sourced from Awesome Tapes from Africa, this is a locally-produced cassette, volume four of over a dozen. It’s not the greatest sound quality – it’s probably a copy of a copy of a copy and so on – so it’s kinda wavy and distorted now and again, but that all works with the DIY aesthetic. ATFA puts it brilliantly: ‘In its own way, this whole tape feels punk to me.’ The group made a worldwide release on Crammed Discs in 2012, Bongo Hotheads, but it just doesn’t have that rawness. The tracks are shorter, there’s less distortion, it’s not quite as fast…it just feels too clean. Better to stick to the tapes. Liwalo Na Liwe is obviously the one I’d recommend, and if you’re hooked, ATFA also has Vol. 5: Tumechoka Hoi to feast your ears on. Enjoy!
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