Black Magic Woman

Last weekend Istanbul's alternative music magazine Bant hosted Amsterdam's award-winning Red Light Radio for a 6-hour live broadcast of "Turkish Jams" featuring several local acts including the likes of Farfara, Islandman, Lara Di Lara, Gevende, Ağaçkakan, The Ringo Jets, Kim Ki O, Reverie Falls On All, Pitohui, Ah! Kosmos, Palmiyeler, Can Güngör, Gaye Su Akyol, Bubituzak and the everpresent Baba Zula as well as their respective selections. Tune in via [...]

Berlin-based DJ, producer and Man Recordings label-head Daniel Haaksman, a well-known devotee to the global dance floor scene with a penchant for fresh urban bass sounds from baile funk to afro house (which he also presents via his regular Luso FM radio show on Funkhaus Europa), recently released a brilliant sonic essay, paying tribute to Malcolm McLaren’s iconic 1983 “Duck Rock” album.

McLaren, known to have championed British youth culture, fashion [...]

Returning from a recent trip to Cuba, DJ/Producer/Beat-Digger extraordinaire GUTS serves up a two-hour free download vinyl mixtape of vintage pearls from the island, as part of his "Pura" series.

While you're at it, you might also want to check out his previous mix of 1970's Colombian grooves and fusion music, a mix of afro beat, funk, cumbia, haitian compa, disco and tropical music, which should also still be available via the Parisian Heavenly Sweetness [...]

Frente Cumbiero mastermind Mario Galeano, whom you may also be familiar with from his Ondátropica collaboration alongside Will Holland (aka Quantic), spearheads this latest treasure of the Colombian experimental scene, going by the snappy name of Los Pirañas. The trio comprising Galeano on bass, Eblis Alvarez on electronic guitar, computer & synths as well as Pedro Ojedo on percussion released their highly recommendable quirky 'Tropical Noise' album entitled [...]

If you've been following our journal from the start you will remember our previous enthusiastic post about Congolese supergroup Mbongwana Star, pushing forth their breathtakingly vibrant debut album "From Kinshasa" and their special electronic blend of space dub, afro-punk, club sounds.

Well, they are back with a wickedly trippy video to their album track "Nganshé", which draws you in like a bad dream: A voodoo-step version of Kraftwerk’s “The Model”, [...]

Choosing silence as the best response to what he considers the Austrian government's failure to handle the current migrant situation and improve the catastrophic conditions in Traiskirchen, Vienna's largest refugee camp, artist Raoul Haspel recently launched his powerful minute of silence "Schweigeminute", which has now topped the iTunes and Amazon charts in Austria.

With over 4,000 orders and counting the single can now be downloaded for 0.99 euros [...]

While browsing Okayafrica’s latest recommendations we came across a rare gem from pre-war 70's and 80's Somalia: Entitled “Au Revoir, Mogadishu Volume 1 - Songs From Before The War” this tape, compiled by Berlin-based cassette label Caykh Recordings and Jakarta Records blends “traditional Somali folk music, infused with Western funk, rock and reggae” as well as a pinch of “Indian, Arabic and African” flavours. The mix includes selections from acts [...]

A few weeks ago CassandraDaily, a daily trends newsletter released an email featuring a selection of apps that seek to forge closer relationships between musicians and their audiences, which we would like to share with you:

Take Fansino for example, developed by two Israeli entrepreneurs, the app lets musicians monitor who is listening to their songs in real-time, which is something streaming services currently don’t offer. Artists can thus reach out to fans [...]

Ever since the great Mulatu Astatqe’s work featured on the soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 film “Broken Flowers”, vintage Ethiopian sounds have slowly but surely made their way back into the collective consciousness of a wider public: Sounds stemming from the flourishing Ethiopian popular music scene and its vibrant, “swinging” Addis Ababa capital from the 1960’s to the mid-1970s, before the country fell victim to a harsh military regime and [...]

Drawing frequent comparisons with a certain Tom Waits, the charismatic Alain Croubalian founded his band The Dead Brothers back in 1999, while based in Geneva, as a sort of musico-intellectual outlet allowing him and his fellow nomadic companions to continuously smile death in the face. In an often dramatic mise-en-scène, centred in the circus of life, the self-proclaimed funerary band stages an intense yet intriguing blend of folk, country, blues and punk [...]

How to describe the prolific Tel Aviv four-piece Boom Pam? Well, for starters, how about in their own words: “Our mix really describes Tel Aviv ... a place where people from all over the world meet. This sound is a sharp cocktail of all the different styles that collide here. And we try to bring them all together.”

Listening to Boom Pam is a proper musical epiphany. Their creative output is not easily categorised. But why should it? Instead of attempting [...]

Launched back in 1999 by ?uestlove, famed drummer of The Roots and musical connoisseur in a league of his own, the Okayplayer webzine has been one of the go-to sites for urban music afficionados from across the globe for quite some time now. Running alongside its Okayfuture associate, which in turn specializes on new electronic as well as hiphop- and soul-influenced bass music, Okayplayer is now expanding its groundbreaking reach:

The newest addition to the [...]