Flamingos

Found this little beautiful song a few minutes ago over on ACID TED. Slow grooving rhythmic Afrobeat at it's best from the new Mawa-EP. Enjoy.

Radio Free Zimbabwe

I spent many hours this weekend (only discontinuously by consider football) to upload a mix to mixcloud. There were many tutorials to read and to watch but I wasn't successful at all. On Sunday downloaded a DJ program to make a mix out of my selected files. After five hours of working with this program I stopped in the afternoon and go out for a beer with my mate. This song would be on my mix (if ever I can release it on mixcloud). Okapi Guitars are a Sydney based band with black and white members. They play a combination of Zimbabwe music with guitar styles from all over Africa. It from their 2004 release with the same title and this song is typical for their style. Using rich guitars with picked pattern of afrobeat. I have been reading some translations of their lyrics and I can say that their lyrics are marked very politically, because they sing about the ongoing disaster of Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

Okapi Guitars - Radio Free Zimbabwe

Sorrow Tears And Blood

In the early 80s me and a couple of friends were looking for new sounds and music we could play in our local pub. Some of them turned into some weired jazz and funk records others into punk. In my local record store they had a great selection of world music. There I found the 1977 record from Fela Kuti. Never heard about that so called Afrobeat before but I was fascinated about the groove that was in their songs.

Fela Kuti was also a politically activist. About his career you can read a lot in Wikipedia. His musical influence for the African is immense - also to some DJ's who remixed his songs or sampled parts of them. He died in 1997 at the age of 59.

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Fela Kuti - Sorrow Tears & Blood