awesome tapes

Part of the thrill of tooling around online is the ability — limited though it may be — to experience countries and cultures that are whole worlds away. I’ve got a bit of incurable wanderlust (despite the fact that I hate to fly), and I tend to spend hours on Flickr searching for photos tagged “Alaska” or “Tunisia” or “Bali” in the hopes that I can live vicariously through someone else’s summer vacation (for me, the emphasis on “wanderlust” is on the last syllable — i don’t get out of this country nearly as much as I should.) I get just as excited when I uncover a site that fuels my musical wanderlust, and my most recent fixation is a site called Awesome Tapes from Africa.

The name couldn’t be more self-explanatory. This site collects, uh, awesome tapes from Africa and encodes them, making digital some pretty obscure and pretty delightful finds. (eMusic does a pretty good job of this too; take a look through the fantastic holdings of Music Copyright Society of Kenya sometime).

Awesome tapes is pretty straightforward — just a few notes about an album’s origins, then it’s straight to the music. Each entry is preceded by a rough .jpeg of the cassette insert, the proud unfussiness of which are a kind of testament to each cassette’s obscurity. These aren’t just weird fetish objects though — by and large the albums are fantastic (the offering by Alhaji K. Frimpong is the kind of smoky Ethio-jazz folks like Mahmoud Ahmed excel at.) There’s much more music here than I could ever hope to fully consume, but the consistency and diligence of Awesome Tapes makes each and every album seem thoroughly unmissable.