Story by: Peter Margasak
I’m inspired and excited by music fanatics with very precisely defined specialties, whether in a specific style or a single region—they constantly seem to uncover sounds utterly new to me. Over the past couple decades, Africa has been the favored territory for a slew of such intrepid sleuths, and we’ve enjoyed a bounty of musical blessings thanks to the likes of Brian Shimkovitz, the Evanston native who runs Awesome Tapes From Africa; Tunisian-German crate digger Samy Ben Redjeb, the mastermind of Analog Africa; and Portland obsessive Christopher Kirkley, who’s focused a crucial lens on contemporary modes of pop-music transmission in Saharan Africa through his Sahel Sounds imprint.
I don’t know the folks behind relatively new New York label Ostinato Records, but over the past year they’ve made my ears stand up and take notice. The label’s output has reached a new apotheosis with a compilation called Sweet as Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes From the Horn of Africa, which comes out on Friday. It compiles 15 tracks from the years 1969 through 2002.
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