Tuareg guitar from Northern Mali by Kidal's hometown band. A different side of desert blues with high energy gritty guitar sessions that are popular favorites. Recorded at a local studio in 2008 during the last uprising, the music is very poignant as the North has again fallen into rebellion and the band is scattered in exile. The title translates as "Peace". Includes detailed liner notes in Tifinagh.

Ebo Taylor “Twer Nyame” is being reissued on vinyl by Comet Records, pressed on high quality vinyl, with label designs and artwork as per the original release.

Originally released in 1978 on Philips-West African-Records. Classic highlife sounds; uptempo grooves, vocals, tons of percussion, guitar, horns and organ lines. Featuring

the stand-out ‘Atwer Abroba’.



Ebo Taylor is one of Ghana's finest producer/arrangers.

Taylor was heavily influential in the unique sound that emerged from the country in the 70's; a combination of traditional Ghanaian with Afro-beat, jazz, and funk rhythms.



He worked with bands including Stargazers Band, Broadway Dance Band, Black Star Highlife Band (with Teddy Osei and Sol Amarfio who later joined Osibisa), Apagya Show Band and fellow musicians C.K.Mann, Gyedu-Blay Ambolley and the legendary Pat Thomas.

Mozambican live artist and producer Nandele kicks off Human Endeavour’s 2024 release schedule with ‘Maputo’, a musical ode to the city he calls home.



As a key figure in the capital’s electronic music scene, Nandele has earned a reputation for producing hypnotic analogue beats shaped by his wide-ranging tastes; spells in grunge bands, boom bap crews and hip hop collectives, and releases for Tresor, Cotch International and Already Dead Tapes, are just a few footnotes in a nearly 25-year long career.



Plans for a full body of work for Ransom Note’s sub-label have been in motion for some time - Nandele’s track ‘Incomati’ opened the label’s first ever release in 2022 - so this EP marks an important chapter in Human Endeavour’s journey.



Across the EPs six tracks Nandele weaves field recordings captured around Maputo with tense rhythms; at times they crawl and slither, at others they rumble and clatter.



Both ‘Sou Plastiko (Meu Lugar)’ and ‘Chapa 100’ are prime examples. Dripping with suspense, their rhythmic skeletons have been fleshed out with tripped-out synth lines, eerie, textural sounds and sharp, crisp percussion.



‘Nau603’, ‘Makonde’ and ‘Arquivo 16’ are equally trance-inducing but the tempo is raised. There’s frenetic beats and squelchy 303s; fizzing static and harsh, industrial sound design - all signifiers of Nandele’s imaginative sonic world.



‘News Day’ showcases another side of his production prowess; not only is he a master of beats but of synthesis too, as this beautiful, shimmering beatless composition proves.



“Maputo is my birth place and the project is an ode to the city also known as "Cidade das Acácias", and MPT for short. The capital is such a vibrant city, rich in culture, and all ethnicities of the country live in this amazing place.



“It's the people that make this place a wonderful place to live: the markets; the vendors on the streets; the Txova pushed around during the day with their different chants about the food or supplies that they are selling; the semi collective transportation called "Chapa Cem" with the "cobrador" saying the routes in a very peculiar tune. There is Music everywhere... that's Maputo!”: Nandele.

"This is an album that captures not just the product of exile, but a moment of relocation." - Adriane Pontecorvo, Pop Matters



"Summoning traditional Ethiopian melodies from the newest instruments within reach (synthesizers, drum machines, electric guitars), Admas specialized in paradox, generating exquisite new grooves that felt high-tech and low-budget, worldly and local, futuristic and nostalgic, funky and delicate." - Chris Richards, Washington Post



"...the great Jon Pareles recently turned me on to Admas, a band of Ethiopian expats in Washington, D.C., whose 1984 album “Sons of Ethiopia” is a rare and coveted find in the world that JP inhabits. Frederiksberg Records released a remastered version of the record late last month; ...It’s like instrumental go-go meets Ethiopian synth: excellent cooking music, in other words." - Sam Sifton, New York Times



"Asked why Sons of Ethiopia is finding new audiences all these years later, Aklilu speculates, modestly, that homebound music fans are starved for new recordings. Or maybe, it’s suggested to him, the album is simply good music? 'It is good music!' he says. 'I really think so. We put all of our hearts in it.'” - Rob Brunner, The Washingtonian



"Seven songs long, Sons of Ethiopia took the trio’s Ethio jazz/Ethiopian pop foundations and expanded them to include the drum machines and sleek synths of electro and the vibrant rhythms of reggae, samba, and highlife. The results were a perfect representation of their cultural connectivity. “It’s a global thing man,” Aklilu says. “It’s not even an Ethiopian thing. We were in the city, and the global thing was going on.” - Martyn Pepperell, Bandcamp Daily







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Sons of Ethiopia is a fascinating piece of the Ethiopian musical puzzle. Emerging from the community of Ethiopian exiles who had been scattered to the winds by the brutality of the Derg – the military dictatorship that had deposed Haile Selassie – the album was the sound of a new generation. The members of Admas were not musicians from the so-called ‘golden age’: they were children of the terror and propaganda of the Derg time – an era of state-sponsored neighbourhood bands and a propaganda-tinged traditional music scene, where the weekends were sound-tracked by the remaining hotel groups of a bygone Imperial world.



An instrumental album, rich with global influences, Sons of Ethiopia is one of the few Ethiopian recordings to have been produced outside Ethiopia in the early 1980s. As such, it is a key document of the Washington DC exile scene. The core members of Admas – Tewodros ‘Teddy’ Aklilu, Henock Temesgen, and Abegasu Shiota – had previously played in a group called Gasha, one of the few Ethiopian bands working regularly in DC during the early 1980s. Admas was born from Gasha, as an outlet for their more experimental instincts. Though they played as a backing group for singers (including Aster Aweke), the music on Sons of Ethiopia was never performed live.



Exiled in DC, far from the stifling propaganda and state terror of Derg-ruled Ethiopia, Admas took Ethiopian popular music into wholly new territory. Sons of Ethiopia is infused with broader musical influences than any other Ethiopian recording of the time. Having established a residency at the Red Sea restaurant in the early 1980s, the Admas players were steeped in the polyglot musical culture of the American capital. The diverse sonic influences of the city filter into the music, making the album a radically modern work of Ethiopian fusion. Mulatu, Girma Beyene and their peers in 1960s Addis Ababa had created an Ethiopian pop sound by using rhythms from Latin music, soul and jazz. Admas threw their net wider still, adding highlife, electro, go-go, samba, and roots reggae to the mix.



Sons of Ethiopia is the only recording of its time to capture young Ethiopian musicians in the US, cutting loose on their own thing. It is the fresh sound of youth, freedom and imagination, which the band made for themselves and by themselves, owning every part of the process. But it is also a music of exile, made by players who performed week in week out for crowds of their fellow Ethiopians, many of whom had lost family and friends to the Derg, and had often fled to the US in fear for their lives. Sons of Ethiopia channels this loss, longing and hope, and it is imbued with the melancholy and nostalgia so typical of Ethiopian song. A joyful work of synthesis and experiment it may be, but its roots run deep.

Music from Saharan cellphones is a compilation of music collected from memory cards of cellular phones in the Saharan desert.



In much of West Africa, cellphones are are used as all purpose multimedia devices. In lieu of personal computers and high speed internet, the knockoff cellphones house portable music collections, playback songs on tinny built in speakers, and swap files in a very literal peer to peer Bluetooth wireless transfer.



The songs chosen for the compilation were some of the highlights -- music that is immensely popular on the unofficial mp3/cellphone network from Abidjan to Bamako to Algiers, but have limited or no commercial release. They're also songs that tend towards this new world of self production -- Fruity Loops, home studios, synthesizers, and Autotune.



In 2010, various versions of saharan cellphone music were released on cassette. Many of the songs were unlabeled, giving no insight to their mysterious origins. In the past year, the artists have been tracked down to collaborate on a commercial release. As such, 50% of the proceeds go directly to the artists.



The original cassette was also remixed and reinterpreted here:





chris

sahelsounds