Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
It's Tuesday, that day of the week when new records drop. Of course these days those new releases are usually CDs or digital downloads — they're seldom vinyl records or tapes.
But there is one place where the cassette tape is still king: Africa.
Blogger Brian Shimkovitz created the blog Awesome Tapes From Africa as a way to bring to light the wealth of cassette-based music from Africa into the mainstream. By digitizing hundreds of obscure, never-before-heard tapes and posting them on his blog, he's bringing music some of us here in the U.S. may never have heard otherwise.
Shimkovitz joins the show to tell us about why he started this project, what attracted him to these obscure tapes and what he hopes the blog will do to