Back catalogue: Funk

Review: Soundway offer us a new compilation featuring 20 rare tracks from the currently much talked about world of Nigerian pop music; a zeitgeist of their early 1980s club culture. The country's economy was booming at the time and so was its recording industry. Strongly influenced by '70s disco and funk, this new generation were, as the liner notes explain "Eager to sound as American as possible with no hint of the fervour for afro-beat, afro-rock and afrocentric thinking that the 1970s had thrown up". The original albums that many of these singles came from go for exorbitant prices online, so here's a chance to snap up some of the periods finest music, remastered across three 12"s.

Review: Soundway Records deliver a new compilation, delving deep into the many obscure and experimental disco cuts laid to record in 70s and 80s Southeast Asia. Here Soundway's longtime general manager Alice Whittington (aka. DJ Norsicaa) steps into the limelight, embracing her Malaysian heritage and selecting music from her heavy collection of Asian records. Taking its namesake from the Indonesian phrase for "let's go to the disco", Ayo Ke Disco spans ten rare slices of disco-funk, psychedelic funk, synth, city pop and Hindustani-Arabic rhythms, all painstaking licensed from the local labels whose efforts still often persist some forty years on.

Review: The impeccable Soundway Records is back with another essential companion, this time in the form of Nigeria Special Volume 3: Electronic Innovation Meets Culture & Tradition 1978-93, which presents a collection of 19 tracks capturing the unique musical transformation in Nigeria during a pivotal era. This compilation reflects the fusion of drum machines, synthesisers and Western influences like pop, reggae, disco and soul, all blended with traditional Nigerian genres like highlife and juju. It represents a period of innovation where new technology was used to reimagine and refresh cultural sounds and what results is a bold new sounds that is going to be lapse dup by fans of names like Steve Monite and Charles Amoah.

Review: Having explored the rich heritage of Nigeria and Ghana with well researched vigour, Soundway turn to Kenya for their next adventure... A rare insight: while Lagos was churning out seminal Afrobeat compositions, Kenya took to western influences in a much subtler fashion. With heavy emphasis on the Kenyan benga and Afro-Cuban rumba there's a much deeper, local folk presentation and format throughout most of the selection. Complete with detailed notes and beautiful presentation (like all Soundway compendiums) this won't look out of place in any collection.

Review: New to Soundway Records comes this second edition of Ghana Special, a comprehensive compilation of '80s Ghanaian-diasporic highlife and its embrace of synthesiser and new wave elements. 20 years on from the first compilation in the series, which was released in 2009 and focused on modern and contemporary forms of highlife, this second volume focuses more on tracing the development of the sound as it took on increasingly synthetic forms. The scheme of things goes something like this: drum machines and synthesisers appeared alongside lilting guitar lines and punchy horns, and Ghanaian musicians began incorporating US disco and boogie, r&b, European new wave, and Caribbean zouk and soca into their music. A kind of socioeconomic history lesson conjoins this musicology: the eighties saw unrestricted migration policies in Western nations in the postcolonial era, which enabled new crossover industries to flourish. Thus the music you hear on this compilation was born, and thrived, and continues to thrive.