Nyege Nyege Tapes Uganda Vinyl & CDs

Review: Brittany's Julien Hairon spent some ten years travelling the world gathering sonic artefacts from field recordings to obscure cassettes before arriving at the point of his musical project, Judgitzu. It's not often a Western artist appears on Nyege Nyege Tapes, but Hairon's extended time spent in Tanzania was influential, where the sound of singeli got under his skin and now manifests in his visceral productions. The relentless 175+ bpms of the pioneers like Sisso, Jay Mitta and Duke are very apparent on this wild ride of a record, where avant-garde sonic approaches collide with the energetic eruptions of East Africa's most forward thinking producers.

Review: Lisbon has a lot to answer for in electronic music. Not just a great city to party in (and we mean great), the Portuguese capital has, for a very long time now, been responsible for some of the most cutting edge beats and pieces being made in Europe as a whole. More impressive still, it has managed to build this reputation due to the predominance of location-specific noises. The country's colonialist history means the population is hugely diverse, resulting in a real cultural melting pot, and tunes are a major outlet through which people can express their identity.
A place packed with characters as big as the impact of their respective sounds, Teteu, AKA Normal Nada the Krakmaxter, AKA Qraqmaxter,AKA CiclOFF, AKA Erre Mente, certainly accounts for a good number of those personalities on monikers alone. And, as Tribal Progressive Heavy Metal shows, his tunes are also hard not to notice. At once harsh and yet also delicate, or at least spatial, we run from a plain evil gabber-chip music-fairground ride oddity ('Alive'), to dubby proggy techno ('Da Gamer'), off-kilter pianos and UK funky drums ('Batida 2 Dance'), and snare-bass minimalism ('Nai Na Chi (Na China)'), among other adventures.