You may have noticed a new logo lurking around Africa is a Country headquarters. When Sean put out the call for a design upgrade last year, I immediately thought of Diego Guttierez, an amazing graphic designer I’ve had the luck to work closely with in recent months. I met Diego a couple years ago when […]
Blitz the Ambassador is throwing a block party in Brooklyn this Saturday. Les Nubians are singing, Rimarkable and myself are DJing, and Restless City is screening. MoCADA is the host and co-sponsor.
Africa is a Country has been a fan of Ghanaian-Swiss audio experimentalist Oy’s live performances for a while. Tom’s posting of Hallelujah was my own introduction to her strange but mesmerizing audio-visual creations:
The new “Africa Rising” narrative propagated largely by a globally-connected middle and upper class diaspora, often obscures the grittier stories of the African immigrant experience. This is partly due to an instinct among African immigrants to want to counter the history of one-dimensional and negative portrayals of both Africa and immigrants in the mainstream Western media. While […]
This Saturday I’ll be djing between acts at The Apollo Theater’s Africa Now! Concert. Yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with the Apollo’s director about the different African crowds in New York (last year they had Tiken Jah Fakoly to an enthusiastic crowd of Francophone African Harlemites), got a tour of the building, rubbed the […]
It’s quite a weekend for New York’s prodigal child. Hip-Hop, that burst of youthful energy that was put out into the universe 30 plus years ago is coming back home from several places at once. It’s arriving at a time when Rap music, in its birthplace, confusingly straddles the realms of hyper-capitalism, political activism, youth expression, marginalized’s […]
I have been a little silent lately here on AIAC. I’m gonna start posting more, although perhaps in briefer form (do visit duttyartz.com to see some of what I’ve been up to recently). For now I leave you with the White Mandingos:
Well, the snowstorm in Boston will be shortening the length of the conference, and the performance by Debo Band has been cancelled. However, Harvard’s Africa Remix Conference will be on and live today, Friday, February 8th.
Every few years my mode of music discovery changes. I went from browsing the racks of my local corporate music chain as a teenager, to digging for hours in the back rooms of second hand record shops, to scouring obscure blogs and doing random YouTube searches. This year marked another change in my listening habits […]
Earlier this month, I had the rare opportunity to throw on some of my favorite Kuduro tracks at full volume in back to back succession as part of the first Os Kuduristas showcase at the iBomba party at Bembe in Brooklyn. (Listen and Download: Chief Boima Live @iBomba (ft. MC Fogo de Deus) Brooklyn NY, […]
