Soundway レコード& CD

Review: The debut album from Bahraini-born, British-based musical duo Dar Disku is a celebration of their Arabic heritage and multicultural influences that melds golden age West Asian and North African sounds with a contemporary dancefloor focus. The eight-track record hears the duo traverse their West Asian and North African origins and bring them back to their current place of residence, crossing from disco to Rai, from piano house to Turkish psychedelia, and all manner of other cross-Med import-exports. From the degage Turkish psych prog-house builder 'Sabir' with Billur Battal, to the penultimate piano-breaks rattler 'Galbi', this is a chilled and wavering dance release primed for bridging international gaps.

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: 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: 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.