Forget about Halloween. Please stand and join us in celebration of Ecuador's 'Día del Escudo Nacional', honouring the Andean nation's official emblem, or coat of arms, a day the country has been celebrating since 1900. It depicts several national treasures, such as the volcanic Chimborazo mountain, the grand condor and, of course, the golden sun, a nod to the sun god Inti, believed to be the ancestor of the Incas. We're sure there's more details that deserve [...]

Lagos Thugs. Let that ruminate before you jump to conclusions. What may sound slightly menacing at first is actually the name of a rising new afrobeat project. Hailing from the most populous city in Nigeria, this sensational twelve-piece is the latest proponent of a genre born from the legacy of Fela Kuti and his drummer Tony Allen and is currently blazing a trail of its own. The group just unveiled its four-track debut album earlier this month with a vinyl [...]

No idea what was going on in the '80s, but certain albums tell a fantastic tale of a time quite unlike any other, where going against the stream was considered good etiquette and electronic experimentation paved the way to new forms of musical production. It was in that era that Turkish bassist Bahtiyar Taş self-produced an exceptionally bizarre DIY solo album offering a glimpse of his parallel universe. We first stumbled upon the much needed reissue of this [...]

Anybody here scared of heights? Not ones to suffer from vertigo ourselves, we still might not be the first to volunteer to partake in some acrobatic tightrope act in lofty heights. Casting their musical line, one end fastened to the summit of Rio de Janeiro's Mount Corcovado with its mighty Christ the Redeemer statue, the other end tied to Berlin's iconic Fernsehturm, Brazilian flutist Mariana Zwarg (the goddaughter of a certain Hermeto Pascoal) and Berlin [...]

Riding the recent wave of top-tier reissues, today we bring you this ace compilation of early Ariwa Sounds dub and lovers rock recordings by the iconic Guayanese-born British dub music producer and sound engineer Neil Fraser, better known as Mad Professor. Originally released in 1984 on his own Ariwa Sounds imprint, these are some of his earliest works recorded between 1979 and 1981. This collection in particular, came to the ears of London-based reissue label [...]

Want some records? Then you're going to have to dig, dig and dig some more and hope that luck turns your way. German imprint and online record dealer Want Some Records did just that. Label head Dennis Krailing, an avid aficionado of African music, couldn't believe his eyes or ears, when the elusive original "Mapendo" by The Mighty Cavaliers arrived at his doorstep directly from Kenya. Originally released in 1977, this particular record remains "shrouded in [...]

"Diré" is a town on the left bank of the Niger river in the 333 Saints of Timbuktu region of northern Mali. It is there that the legendary Malian singer-songwriter, guitarist and master of the kamalen n'goni Idrissa Soumaoro met his wife and where his late first daughter was born. It also happens to be the title to his long-awaited and recently released third full-length that has been a long time in the making, maybe even a lifetime. Initiated by Marc-Antoine [...]

There is a particular beauty inherent to the distinct stylings of the Congolese guitar, the boleros, rumbas, soukous and similar 'slow music' styles which, despite their laid-back form, have a certain swing to them that is undeniably infectious. When we saw that Brighton's Hive Mind Records was about to drop a release simply titled "Congo Guitar", we had a feeling we were in for a treat. And, having previously familiarised ourselves with the genre via a handful [...]

But why marzipan? The title to the first contemporary full-length on Habibi Funk, released two months ago to the day, is enough to spark our curiosity. Sweet indulgence...that must be it. Soft, sugary, rich, filling, the taste of honey and almonds, a wonderful amuse bouche. Release number 023 brings us to Lebanon, where multi-instrumental producer extraordinaire Charif Megarbane (Cosmic Analog Ensemble, the Free Association Syndicate, Monumental Detail) has [...]

Fans of Ethiopian grooves and those to be best listen up: Today, we bring you an absolute "gem of a record," originally released in 1976 on Kaifa Records and now reissued in full for the first time by Brooklyn-based imprint Mississippi Records. You might call it "a lost classic of the Ethiopian Golden Age," but more importantly it is a testament to two leading voices of the era. Fittingly titled "Beauties", this ten-track collection sees two of Addis Ababa's [...]

"Let's sing a song," is the translated meaning of "Upopo Sanke", the second album of Ainu artist Umeko Ando (1932-2004). The Ainu, in case you didn't know (because neither did we), are an indigenous people of Japan, the earliest of the northern island of Hokkaido, "whose lands once spanned from northern Honshu [on the Japanese mainland] north to Sakhalin and the Kuril islands [now a disputed part of the Russian Federation]" (read more here). And Umeko Ando is [...]

We don't need no e-du-ca-tion! Um, wait, that didn't come out the way it was supposed to. What we meant to say was that education and Western education in particular as well as the way that a certain view on history is taught by those with a well-known colonial past, is and has been insufficient to say the least. Or as the release notes to Chicago-based producer/beatmaker Lapgan's latest sonic epic state: "Western education is often a sanitised account of [...]