Los Pirañas

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 [...]

Minimalist American composer Terry Riley’s pioneering masterpiece “In C” celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. Initially created electronically, the work has since been performed and recorded by various outfits:

“I always welcome it when pieces change. The worst interpretations I’ve heard of In C mechanically try to copy the original performance. [...] Rules,” says Riley, “are not as important as results.”

Most recently, the Africa Express [...]

Things are definitely heating up in Jewish Monkeys territory as we unveil the brilliant artwork to their upcoming "Global Warming Tour", with live shows all across Germany from October 16th through November 8th. Exact dates and locations to be announced.

In the meantime, be sure to feast your eyes on these handsome m*therf*ckers lounging poolside, obviously ignorant of current global hardships as expressed in their album track "Caravan Petrol", featuring in the official lyric video below.

Prior to a gig at Tel Aviv's crazy underground venue Radio E.P.G.B in January 2014, the three Jewish Monkeys singers Jossi Reich, Ron Boiko and Gael Zaidner met with Dafna Arad of the Israeli daily Ha'aretz to share some insight on the band's evolution, from its modest beginnings to the point, where things started to get a bit more serious, with their then soon-to-be-released debut album "Mania Regressia". The piece really puts their individual motivation into [...]

In March 2014 the Jewish Monkeys were invited to play the International Klezmer Festival in the quaint North Bavarian town of Fürth. Once on stage they also performed one of their favourite non-album tracks "Titina", an upbeat tune taken from the Charlie Chaplin movie "Modern Times" and underlaid with an old Yiddish song. Adding their very own touch of punk to the mix, this rendition sure got the crowd going and chiming in with the "daidaidaidaidai" [...]