Premiere: Orchestre G.M.I. - Africa - Analog Africa

Music

Analog Africa are set to release their 19th compilation- Senegal 70 – Sonic Gems & Previously Unreleased Recordings from the 70's. Drawn from rare and unheard recordings made in capital city Dakar's fertile 60s – 70s period, the comp touches on the sounds of high life, funk, and mbalax. Analog Africa boss Samy Ben Redjeb had the following to say about the creation of the compilation –

“I was working as a diving instructor in Senegal in 1994 and I fell in love with the country, the music, the fishing, the beauty of its people. When the diving club I was working for decided to send me to Greece I quit to be able to stay in the country and applied for a job as a DJ in a hotel in Mbour, about 60 miles South of Dakar."

"At that time only chart music was being played in the hotel’s nightclub but I convinced the owner to let me try and organise an African night once a week. The hotel had very little African music, so the owner gave me some money and I went to Dakar to look for records. My African night became a hit, not only with the tourists but also with local people."

"Spurred on by the success, I decided to push it a bit further and was spending each one of my days off in Dakar searching for records to play at my night. That’s how my whole vinyl obsession started. At that time the record digging craze that we are experiencing today was almost non-existent in Africa and as a result records could still easily be found in Dakar.”

Alongside the records Redjeb has licensed from his days digging in Senegal ( which make up 7 tracks of the total 12), Senegal 70 features a handful of unreleased cuts sourced from reel to reel tape, never before released – as the label explain,

"It all started in 2009 when Adamantios Kafetzis from Teranga Beat, the current leading label for Senegalese music, travelled from Greece to Senegal with a brand new tape machine that he used to digitise the musical treasures he had discovered in Thiès, Senegal’s third largest city. These treasures took the form of reel tapes, and had been recorded by sound engineer Moussa Diallo, who had spent the previous four decades immortalising, onto magnetic tape, the bands that would perform in his club, the legendary Sangomar. An astonishing three hundred Senegalese songs – all never before released – had been discovered by Adamantios Kafetzis."

We're lucky enough to be premiering one of those tracks today, the killer groove of Africa by Orchestre G.M.I (Groupement Mobil D'Intervention) – a fusion of funk and high life, it's as sure a party starter as we've heard all week – all the more incredible as it's remained virtually unheard for around 50 years.