SRR #3: Eyes on the Center
Central Asian disco, Iraqi classical, and dispatches from roughly every corner of the African continent
This newsletter now sends out posts on first Fridays and second Sundays. When I made that schedule, I hadn’t considered that those two days sometimes occur in the same week. It turns out this is one of those weeks, so this month’s Scene Report Report is coming out quite hot on the heels of the monthly feature. As a result, it’s a bit shorter than past SRRs, but it does come with something extra: scroll to the bottom and you’ll see a custom playlist of artists featured in each of the articles.
The songs appear on the playlist in the same order that their respective articles appear below. Most are a typical song, although the second-to-last is a full Boiler Room set (it’s worth it, I swear!) and the last is the actual video that the scene report appears in. Think of it as a tiny trailer for each piece, or a sneak peak to help you choose which scene to read into if you’re short on time.
The Scene Report Report:
Issue #3
Bandcamp’s Joseph Francis takes a tour through the rapidly-expanding batida sub-genre that’s been simmering in Portugal’s Angolan communities for over two decades now.
Tiléwa Kazeem writes up a profile of Nigeria’s Afro-Adura (“trench music”) genre, highlighting the role of faith in the face of economic hardship and radical inequality.
Sometimes all it takes is a good compilation album to jump-start a scene report, and Ostinato Records’ stellar new anthology of Central Asian disco seems like such an occasion. Covering the record for DJ Mag, Olivia Cheves provides some context on the history and hardships that shaped this surprisingly vibrant corner of the Soviet Union in the 1970s/80s.
Another backwards-looking scene report triggered by a compilation album, this one by Jacques Denis in Pan-African Music on the 70s “zamrock” scene that Analog Africa recently catalogued in their Roots Rocking Zimbabwe album.
There’s a bit of an “old man yelling at clouds’ vibe in this Shafaq News discussion on the decline of Iraq’s music scene (or, more specifically, the Iraqi classical scene), but the challenges it calls out are legitimate and the composers it centers almost certainly don’t get as much attention as they deserve.
Pan-African Music again, this time with Kalanzi Kajubi taking a more techno-optimist look at how Ethiopian Azmariwoč are incorporating house and electronic influences into their regional brands of politically-focused folk music.
Amapiano coverage is nothing new at this point, but the video format in this World of Africa report helps literally show the importance that dance (and social media) has played in the genre’s rise. Although if you’re in a better position to read instead (or if you find the video host’s monotone a bit too grating), there’s also a text version available.
And as promised, this month’s SRR playlist is available here, courtesy of YouTube (the only platform I’m aware of that hosted music from all of the above)
