Entries associated with the tag "music blogs":

Local DJ and producer Brad Loving uses his Web site Bird and Whale as a clearinghouse for his own music and for mixes by friends and acquaintances he admires; thankfully, he has pretty good taste. Tuesday night Loving presents a night of DJs at Sonotheque, his third live event under the Bird and Whale banner.

The headliner is DJ Soulpusher, aka Frank Gossner (pictured, on the right), the guy behind the African-music blog Voodoo Funk. He recently returned from three years in West Africa, where he'd moved after his girlfriend landed a job in Guinea. Gossner was already a DJ specializing in funky 45s, and since he was feeling the urge to expand his musical horizons, Africa provided a perfect opportunity (though in the end he didn't expand them all that much). Gossner spent countless hours digging up obscure African funk records--the kind of music that labels like Soundway, Analog Africa, and Strut have been popularizing for the past few years--and used his blog to post hour-long mixes of his discoveries. Unsurprisingly given the medium, his choices aren't quite as carefully filtered for quality as the material those labels have been reissuing, but he posts so much great supplementary material--center-label scans, cover artwork, stories of his days in Africa--that sitting through the occasional dud is fairly painless.

Also spinning are two fine locals, Rob Sevier of the Numero Group (who has a good mix archived on the Bird and Whale site) and DJ Supreme Court.

Today's playlist:

Giane, Esta é Giane: A Voz Doçura (Chantecler)
Giuseppe Ielasi, August (12K)
Bobby Valentin, Bad Breath (Fania)
Cold Bleak Heat, Simitu (Family Vineyard)
Areski & Brigitte Fontaine, Fontaine 4 (Saravah)

Since every post this week has been about African music, I can’t think of a good reason to stop now--especially since so many other people write exclusively about white Americans with guitars.

Today, thanks to the excellent blog Matsuli, I discovered a recently launched blog from the Africa service of Voice of America, an operation that broadcasts all over the continent in English, French, Portuguese, Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo, Hausa, Swahili, Ndebele, Shona, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, and Somali. The music holdings of the Africa service include more than 10,000 reels of tape and several thousand more albums, 45s, cassettes, and CDs. Inspired by the music posted regularly on Matsuli, VOA producer Matthew LaVoie decided to share some of his organization's collection online, and the first three posts, dating back to last month, have all been incredible. I’m familiar with the Congolese group Orchestre Bantous, the subject of the December 27 entry, but not with most of the other bands LaVoie has posted--which include L'Harmonie Voltaique and Volta Jazz, both from Burkina Faso, and a handful of contemporary groups from the Ivory Coast represented by tracks from recent cassettes. LaVoie provides informative descriptions and the artwork from the original sources. Most of this stuff is either ultra rare or nearly impossible to find outside Africa, which makes the abundant surface noise and the occasional skip from the original 45s easy to overlook.

Today’s playlist:

Michaël Attias, Credo (Clean Feed)
Sofia Gubaidulina, Am Rande des Abgrunds, de Profundis, Quaternion, in Croce (Wergo)
Lucio Capece, Axel Dörner, and Robin Hayward, Kammerlärm (Azul Discográfica)
Spank Rock & Benny Blanco, Bangers and Cash (Downtown)