Made a trip to Oakland's Contact Records a couple of weeks back while the wife was getting her eyebrows done. Tiny ass shop near MacArthur BART, but absolutely fukkn rammed with gems. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount (and quality) of punk bangers in a store whose focus is concentrated a little deeper and a little further back. I snagged a few slabs, was introduced to Catherine Ribeiro (thank you), and impulsively grabbed two cassette volumes of African guitar music on my way to the register. It was a good trip. The two tapes are a booted version of Mississippi's brilliant but prohibitively expensive 5xLP box set and the title pretty much sums it up. Artists from Kenya, Sierra Leon, Congo, Zaire, Uganda and Zambia fill almost 90 minutes with sounds that are so clearly from another world. Early blues roots ooze through some of the tracks, tribal mesmerism, subdued psychedelic freakouts...just pure and beautiful sounds. Perfect lazy listening - and yeah, Volume 2 will be up here eventually.
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Mega post and thank you for the tip on Contact Records, we're headed to see friends in Berkeley soon and I wasn't aware of it. Much thanks for the African guitar post; Tinariwen is a long time favorite of mine, as you can hear the entire African side of the rock'n roll equation in their music, usually in every song: from the original African drum through Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Magic Sam, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. It's all there.
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