Label Focus – Africa Seven
All aboard – your chance to fly Africa Airways
WHAT’S THE NAME OF YOUR LABEL, AND WHO RUNS IT?
We are Africa Seven, it’s run by Rich and Marc and a few other crate diggers who pitch in with music suggestions and assist with some compilation curation.
WHEN & WHY DID THE LABEL START?
We launched the label in 2015 but had been doing a lot of behindthe-scenes work for a few years before that assisting with the digitisation of some old African catalogues. Basically, we thought some of it was just too good to not re-issue – dipping our toes in with the release of the first Africa Airways compilation we soon realised that our hunch was right!
GIVE US A BRIEF SUMMARY OF WHAT YOU’VE RELEASED SINCE THEN….
It was always our intention to do full re-issues on the label, and the compilation series was just a promotional piece to highlight certain albums we planned to re-issue in full. So we’ve re-issued a number of great albums from the likes of Jo Bisso, Jo Tongo, Pasteur Lappe, Manu Dibango, Ekambi Brillant, Jake Sollo, M’Bamnina, Sorry Bamba, Eko, Momo Joseph, and Tala AM… We also continue to release compilations and currently have six volumes of “Africa Airways”, started another compilation series which is more artist-focused (African Experimentals), have done two volumes of the “Mothers’ Garden” series and launched a vinyl-only edits arm (A7 Edits)!
WHAT QUALITIES ARE YOU LOOKING FOR IN THE MUSIC YOU RELEASE?
We don’t have any particular musical release agenda apart from, “is it of African origin? Does it have a beat? Do we like it?”
WHAT KIND OF VISUAL IDENTITY DOES THE LABEL HAVE (ARTWORK, VIDEOS ETC)?
When it comes to full re-issues, we are of the opinion that it should be as close to the original artwork as possible… a few logo changes, label copy updates, and a new barcode aside. With the compilations, we’ve gone for a quite distinct look. The “Africa Airways” compilations are all branded a certain way, the “African Experimentals” all have mirrored sleeves and the A7 Edits label is designed to look like a white label.
WHAT’S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST SELLING RELEASE TO DATE? TELL US A BIT ABOUT IT AND WHY YOU THINK IT WAS SO POPULAR.
Probably a toss-up between four of the compilations. I do vividly remember the Pasteur Lappe “African Experimentals” LP being particularly hot, we had to re-press this before it even came out… and I think it then sold out within a few weeks. It was one of those records that the minute you played it to somebody it ended up in their record bag. The streaming numbers on “Na Real Sekele Fo Ya” are also probably one of the highest on the label too. It’s going for a pretty penny on second-hand sites at the moment… so maybe it’s worth us pressing it again.
NAME ONE RELEASE THAT YOU THINK DESERVED TO GET MORE ATTENTION THAN IT DID
We’ve not really had any releases that haven’t been well received. Obviously, we love the albums we release and think more people should be listening to them, but we’re also realistic in that there is an awful lot of music in the world and not everyone likes the same things… that’s what makes it so special.
IF YOU COULD SIGN ANY ARTIST, ALIVE OR DEAD, WHO WOULD YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
That’s a tough one! We’d love to do lots of albums from a lot of great names… but a Fela re-issue would be amazing, or William Onyeabor, Hugh Masekela! Keep your ears pricked, you never know what might be on the horizon!
WHICH OTHER LABELS DO YOU ADMIRE AND WHY?
Loads of them! There are so many great labels doing great things… a few of our favourites (no offence to any we’ve missed off!) are Analog Africa, Mr Bongo, Mukatsuku, BBE.
WHAT CAN WE LOOK TO FROM YOUR LABEL NEXT?
We have a few new compilation bits in the pipeline, a psych album due in the next month or so plus Volume 2 of the Exotique series. We really need to pull our fingers out and finalise the next Airways release, and we have a couple of full re-issues that have been sat on the server for a while… vinyl pressing times, increases in manufacturing costs etc have meant we’ve not been quite as prolific as in the past.
Noah Sparkes