root salad Eddie Frankel
Discover some music from out there, start label to turn your friends on to it. Ian Anderson hears the sound of wheels being welcomely reinvented.
A
few month’s back, a CDR turned up from a PR company, announcing a new label, Dream Beach, being launched by Moshi
Moshi – the hot UK indie label who are the home to Blok Party, Friendly Fires, Florence & The Machine and the like. Ah, but what’s this? It’s a single of a band from Kenya called Nguuni Lovers Lovers, led by Alex Kasau, and on sticking it in the player it turns out to be a fabulously raw blast of stripped down, speeded up benga, yanking the nostalgia cells right back to the ’80s and records by Shirati Jazz and the Kilimambogo Brothers.
The press release went on to
announce that it was the brainchild of the leader of a young London indie/punk band who wants to open their audience up to non-Western music. Memories of the early days and motivations of a previous gener- ation of labels like GlobeStyle and Disc Afrique swim back. The wheel, it seems, has fully turned and been reinvented. Great! So we swiftly invited the bloke behind it, Eddie Frankel, around to the fRoots hovel for a natter and a curry. Was he aware of those spiritual ancestors?
“Not massively. I came to this because of growing up in the punk music that hap- pened in the late ’90s and early 2000s, bands like Converge, Dillinger Escape Plan – really full-on American hardcore bands. I got into them through finding an early ’80s American band called Minor Threat, who couldn’t find anybody to release their records so they set up their own label Dischord Records. So I came to releasing music with that DIY attitude.”
“I’ve grown up internationally. I’m English but I didn’t move to England until I was 18. I was born in Africa, in Kenya, although my parents were living in Ethiopia at the time. My father was a hotel manager who managed the Addis Ababa Hilton, and the house band were The Wal- lias so the first records I remember grow- ing up with, apart from my father’s Stravinsky records, were Ethiopian jazz. And then I lived in Pakistan and places like that, so weird, different music has never been that weird or different to me.”
“This is a total challenge, but I also think that with the internet and everything being so easy to find, it’s not hard. Every band who is the slightest influenced by African music helps open it up. Obviously Vampire Weekend and Animal Collective have lots of African influence: today I was listening to tUnE-yArDs and there was this really benga-ish rhythm at one point. I was just thinking that we’re at a point in indie music where people are really receptive to music from other places.”
There’s one specific link between
Vampire Weekend and Eddie’s band the Fair Ohs: Paul Simon’s Graceland. “Every- one of my age, their parents bought that record and played it constantly. It was a uniting factor for my band – we started out just playing straight hardcore punk and were getting really bored with doing it. So we were talking about what we all grew up liking. I’d been playing African guitar stuff at home a lot and said ‘how about Paul Simon?’ and everybody went ‘yeah, my dad played that constantly’ and it was this uniting thing.”
In the press release with the single, there was a comment about it not being seen as “a cheesy ‘world music’ cliché…”
“What I want to do with this is release it to people who listen to indie and punk bands, so realistically I’m not worried about upsetting people who like world music. But at the same time I don’t mean it in a critical sense – I love world music or I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing, but it’s badly marketed, especially to people of my age. I missed Orchestre Poly-Rythmo’s first UK gig because I had no idea it was hap- pening: it wasn’t in any of the magazines that I read or the websites that I look at. It wasn’t marketed at me but I love them, I’ve got all the records. And when I did see them at the Barbican, it was such an alien environment. That was one of the main things that made me want to do Dream Beach, seeing them at the Barbican and realising this wasn’t aimed at me at all.”
“I’d love
to get Nguuni Lovers Lovers over and it would obvi- ously be great for their
career to play at somewhere like the Barbi- can, but I’d also like to see them play at places like Bar- den’s Boudoir, an East Lon- don DIY venue, and places that I play in. It’s raw, powerful music and the biggest com- pliment I’ve had for it was that there are two bands doing really well at the
moment and one night the singer from one and the bassist from the other came up and said ‘I’ve heard your record – it’s so good!’ They would never listen to African music. They needed some idiot like me who loves Kenyan guitar music to go ‘look, there’s music from elsewhere that’s really good!’. They’re the kind of people who turn off Jools Holland when it gets to the world music section because they say ‘it isn’t for me’.”
“None of my friends would ever go to T
Womad. For a start I have no idea when it is – no magazine I look at would ever say ‘go to Womad’. It’s just not their tribe. But hopefully Dream Beach can act as a little bridge between the two worlds.”
he Nguuni Lovers Lovers single was released in May as a run of 7" vinyl and quickly sold out. “There’s not a single one of my friends or people I know on the music scene buy CDs,” says Eddie. “Releasing on vinyl is about having something nice to own, and there are collectable aspects if you’re only doing 500 7"s. We wouldn’t pay for downloads as you’re not actually getting anything but we do buy vinyl. My dream is to release African music in the same way as an indie or punk band would do it, and have it accepted in the same way.”
Eddie’s enthusiasm is infectious. We’d be ill-advised to ignore his viewpoint.
You can hear the Nguuni Lovers Lovers at
soundcloud.com/dreambeachrecords F
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