Brian Shimkovitz on Awesome Tapes From Africa

Ahead of his appearance at Summerhall this August as part of the Nothing Ever Happens Here series, we speak to Brian Shimkovitz about his Awesome Tapes From Africa

Feature by Claire Francis | 02 Aug 2017

Brian Shimkovitz is a DJ with a difference. Not only does the LA-based selector (who also splits his time between NYC and Hamburg) specialise in niche music from the African continent, but he also delivers his sets via an unlikely format – the humble cassette tape. “I don’t think that there are too many DJs in the world that are doing that,” Shimkovitz agrees. “It’s a thing that kind of just happened, because people started asking me to DJ when I was doing the blog, and it just never even crossed my mind not to play with tapes.”

Shimkovitz is the man behind Awesome Tapes From Africa – a DJ moniker, music website, and record label that brings the diverse sounds of African countries to the ears of music lovers around the globe. The unique project began over ten years ago, when Shimkovitz was a student in Ghana and became captivated by the cassette culture of the country. He later returned to the region on a government research grant, and as he explains, “I brought back a lot of tapes [from that trip], and moved to New York after a while, and just kind of started it as a hobby, and as a way to show people what African music sounds like.”

Shimkovitz’s description is a modest one. Take one look at his Awesome Tapes From Africa website and you’ll see thousands of unearthed records, catalogued meticulously by decade (from the 1970s to 2000s) and geographical location. Each listing appears with a scanned image of the original cassette cover artwork, and Shimkovitz also provides a few concise lines of context and background to each tape. It’s a music-obsessive’s treasure trove, and one that is even more impressive given that, when Shimkovitz started his project in 2006, there was nothing else on the internet quite like it.

“At that time, there weren’t as many Africa-based music streaming sites,” he agrees. “Now there are a lot more, for every country, so you can actually find so much more music online [now] than you could back then.”

As well as opening up the sounds of West Africa to a global audience, the obvious thing that stands out about Awesome Tapes From Africa is the atypical music format. When CDs began to capture the market in developed countries in the early 90s, cassettes faded into the background, but Shimkovitz reveals that “between 2002 to 2008 or 2009, in most countries that I’ve been to around Africa, cassettes were still being produced during those years.

“I was collecting tapes because tapes were the big thing, the main thing, if you were trying to check out as much music as possible,” he says. Ironically, he notes that “now more recently when I go there, in Ethiopia, Senegal, South Africa, places like that, you can’t really find tapes unless you really look for them,” describing how the tapes have now acquired a kind of rare collectors status once reserved for obscure vinyl.

The Awesome Tapes From Africa blog became so successful at introducing the music of these countries to new and eager audiences that in 2011, Shimkovitz launched the Awesome Tapes From Africa record label, which reissues tapes from his repository in vinyl and CD format. It’s further homage to the tangible quality of analogue recording, Shimkovitz concurs, citing the current vinyl and cassette resurgence as further proof of a consumer appetite for material objects.

He muses, “I think part of it is that people like the physical [aspect of tapes], because the CD and the MP3 got us away from that tangible medium. Even mainstream artists are starting to press tapes, just as another thing to sell – so it’s a bit capitalistic, in a way,” he adds with a laugh. “But it never went away – with noise music and certain underground music, the tape never went away.”

Cassette tapes are also ingrained in Shimkovitz’s early musical influences. “When I started going to raves in the mid-90s, it was all tapes. I grew up in Chicago, and people were making beat tapes with hip-hop producers, and then I grew up listening to The Grateful Dead, and that was all tape-trading of their live shows. So the tape thing was never too foreign to me, just because of my age, and the stuff that I was into growing up.”

The tape may not be foreign to Shimkovitz, but for many selectors, DJing a set entirely via cassette would present a daunting challenge. “You kind of have to fast forward and rewind a whole bunch of times,” he says of the technical aspect of tape DJing. “You find the beginning of the song, which takes some time – you have to focus, you can’t be hanging out and talking and drinking and stuff. It takes a few go-arounds to find matching tempos, the way that you would with vinyl or a CDJ, but it’s just a weirder mechanism. It’s less minute, it’s more difficult to deal with, but I’ve gotten used to it just from years of doing it.”

It sounds like an acquired skill, we offer, and he laughs. “I wasn’t so good at it at first – before I knew how to match beats on cassettes, I just found ways to make it not sound too bad,” he admits. “I’m not someone who dreamed of being a DJ all day when I was a kid. It just kind of happened, very organically.”

And what about that most dreaded cassette fate; the moment where ribbons of tape are suddenly chewed up by the deck? “Usually I’m watching out and I’m careful about that!” he responds. “There’s times where a cassette can go into the machine and it’s a little bit messed up in there, and you don’t see it because it’s dark, or the machine might be old and it might have some dust… I try to use my own tape decks most of the time on tour; I used to just kind of rely on whatever people could give me because I didn’t want to be picky, but I’ve gotten pickier,” he laughs, “so I usually bring my own stuff.”

As for his ‘record bag’, Shimkovitz estimates that his collection is now numbering upwards of 5,000 tapes. “I used to say 4,000 but I was saying that for like a really long time,” he laughs, “I’ve gotten a lot more tapes since then, so I would say more like 5,000. People kind of hit me up sometimes and sell me tapes, or give me tapes as gifts, I get a lot of random people emailing me.”

Going back to Shimkovitz’s work as a label owner, ethics is one thing that he agrees comes up often in conversation. Before you pass him off as a white, American male profiting from the music of underprivileged, black artists, consider that before reissuing any record, he works tirelessly to track down each artist and ensure they are properly recognised and remunerated for their work. “I have to get the rights to reissue the records; I have to actually track [the artist] down before I can start the project. So at any given time I have ten or twenty things that I’m working on where I’m trying to find somebody – through journalists, or through community organisations overseas, and then also through good old-fashioned Google stalking.”

When we suggest that this process, at least, has surely gotten easier due to the constantly expanding amount of information available online, he says, “that’s a good call – yeah, it has gotten a lot easier, because when I first started the blog, I noticed that for a lot of the artists, you couldn’t actually find any information about them online. Now fast-forward ten years and there’s quite a lot more hits coming up. But there were quite a few artists and records that I would search and you would get zero Google results, which is a really fascinating thing.”

In addition to reissuing the work of artists on the label, Shimkovitz also plays a hands-on part in connecting them with booking agents and helping them obtain visas to play shows. “The most rewarding thing for me in life these days – the thing that I’m most focused on – is helping maintain the touring lives of the artists on the label,” he says in a heartfelt tone.

“Being someone who’s lived in West Africa, and also travelled in other parts in West Africa, I have a lot of friends there, and there’s obviously a tonne of poverty and a lack of resources. Any time that you can connect directly with a family and help bring foreign exchange into their zone and they can do stuff with it, that’s just a huge thing. By putting out the records, reissuing the records and getting the artists on tour, that’s providing in some cases quite significant income.” With that ethos in mind, Shimkovitz’s tapes from Africa seem very awesome indeed. 


Awesome Tapes From Africa plays Summerhall, Edinburgh, 10 Aug; The Berkeley Suite, Glasgow, 11 Aug

http://www.awesometapes.com/