Can you tell us how things started with Glitterbeat?
The Walkabouts were signed to Sub Pop, the distribution and promotion wing of Sub Pop in Europe was this company in central Germany, they had released records as Glitterhouse but by the time we started working with them they were basically Sub Pop Europe. After few years they reclaimed their Glitterhouse name and repositionated themselves as a singer-songwriter kind of Americana label. After a number of years The Walkabouts startet to slow down with what they were doing and sometime, around the mid 2000, I started to get increasingly disillusoned with indie and singer-songwriter music. Things weren´t moving me as much, maybe it was an overexposion, I was too long in the business. I was a little bit in a crisis as listener and also as an artist. So, in 2006 I decided to go to Mali, its music I had known for long time. I can´t say that I had a deep knowledge of the tradition but there was something about it that was pulling me there. I traveled around for one month in West Africa completely without plan, without any goals or ideas, simply as a listener and a fan. Of course it basically changed my own whole life, everything went in a completelly different direction after that trip. I returned in 2008 with Dirtmusic, this group I have with Hugo Race -ex Bad Seeds- to play in the desert at this festival called Festival in the Desert. I had visited it in 2006 but I really didn´t have an idea to come back to play till I started to play with Dirtmusic. We had a blues element, it seemed something that would fit in. We went there with Peter Weber, the owner of Glitterhouse and co-owner with me of Glitterbeat, and at just at the beginning of this african journey -in about one hour of being at the festival- we heard this interesting sound coming from a tent that was next door to us -we everybody sleeped in this tents- and this was Tamikrest. We went over with our guitars and we essentially spent the next three days jamming with them. We played on stage with them, they played during our show, we played during their show. It became really quickly some kind of collaborative spirit. One year later, we decided to return to Mali to record with Tamikrest and this became the collaborative project “BKO” which came out under the Dirtmusic name. Few months later I went back to Mali to record Tamikrest´s first album.
This was the beginning of all this west african collaborations, for few years I kept going back as a producer. I was producing records for Lobi Traoré, Ben Zabo, a couple of records with Tamikrest, and these records were coming out on Glitterhouse till 2011, when with decided that maybe there would be a better way to release this music. So the beginning of the label was really Tamikrest, this gave as the courage to branch off into this idea. We had no idea were we would end up with this, we were thinking very small and very focused. We said “Let´s create a label that we can find some other artists that might also have a supportive artistic vision to what Tamikrest have” Pretty much that simple. For the first year we released records by Samba Trourè, Dirtmusic, the Lobi Traoré live record and the Tamikrest record.
With your successive releases in a way you went deeper and deeper into that kind of sound, right?
I think that is true. In 2006 when I went there, I didn´t go there because I was an ethnomusicologist that was interested in the music of Mali. I had an emotional relationship to the music but beside that, I had no idea about the traditions, about all the different ethnic groups and what kind of music that they play. The longer we do this, the more understanding we have, the more options we see, the more musicians we meet and the more types of music we hear. In Mali I´ve been a dozen of times at this point, of course the perspective becomes much different.
Talking about malian music, what do you think about the work of Damon Albarn with his project Africa Express?
Well, Damon Albarn was one of the people that started to open doors to Mali music with his record “Mali Music” actually. What he has done is very important. What make us loosely related is, that the most important thing for us is that we don´t look at this music as “dead music”. We look at it as a very contemporary sound that comes from a place that simply is not London or Rome or Paris, this are contemporary artists making contemporary music. African music in the urban areas is very very contemporary. You have hip hop, you have electronic dance music. It´s not traditional music only made with traditional instruments, it has not been for forty years already. You can go back to Fela Kuti, even before him. This is not a new story, this interconversation between western music and african music. It´s been for a long long time a conversation that works two ways. What things like Africa Express and Glitterbeat are representing is that this is not a search for things that are exotic and far away. I see this music as very close. And I also think that this kind of collaborative things have a place. With Dirtmusic we made three records in Mali, the last couple of records we did as complete collaborative in the sense that we didn´t have songs, we went there with nothing to work, face to face with the local musicians, trying to develop our own collective sound.
To my ears what certain malian groups like Tamikrest are playing is basically rock music, played from another perspective, expression of another culture but very much in the same tradition.
What you say is not incorrect but I always try to be careful with this. It´s easy for us to impose our musical framework on this music to try to understand it and I´m the first to do this, we all do this. In Tamikrest´s case it´s extremelly appropriate what you said, because they actually listen to rock music. Tuareg music, starting with Tinariwen, was rock based music. It wasn´t rock based music by accident, it was because they were listening to Santana and the Rolling Stones. What Tamikrest mostly listen is rock music, very little are they listening to african music. It was the case when I first met them and it´s still the case seven years later. Where this kind of ways of thinking are not appropriated is, for example, with artists like Bassekou Kouyate, who I also produced. He´s a very famous malian musician master of the Ngoni, he also worked with Demon Albarn from the beginning. Very often you read in the press that they call him “the Hendrix of the Ngoni”, to me this is irrelevant in the sense that he´s not influenced by Hendrix, he pratically never heard Hendrix. The rock music tradition doesn´t mean much to him, so using this kind of framework to understand it´s kind of lazy, we aren´t digging deep enough.
I guess that this kind of semplifications are a typical media thing. The same goes with the tag “world music”, that for years I tried not to use but -for lack of a better word- I had to.
It´a a big dilemma. We never use “world music” in any of our literature. We never have from the beginning but day to day, for label work, I have to use it. I need to use it in this business context, but it´s the wrong way to look at this music from our perspective, because it looks at this “great other”. Urban music, anywhere on the world now, is part of the global conversation. With the new technologies we jumped far ahead, that´s why we have to do better about putting this stuff in a framework that is more accurate in describing it. It´s not music from “the other”, they are looking to us as much as we are looking down there. The eyes are going both ways, constantly. It s becoming less and less important to call it something or else but we still struggle with this. I deal with it everyday. I don´t know in the lifetime of Glitterbeat, whether we´ll ever get to the point where this conversation makes more sense, but certanlly what we are doing -what Africa Express and a lot of other great labels are doing- is getting up in the morning and try to make a change in this musical conversation.
You don´t just release music by african artists, but also by artists from other parts of the world. When and how did you start to look around the globe searching for musicians to include in your roster?
The original label motto was “Vibrant music from Africa and beyond”. What we had at that point was not even pan-african music but basically malian music, anyway what we´ve seen happening expecially in Africa with Tuareg music, was happening in other places with other kinds of music. We were looking at this in a very global perspective. We just opened our ears looking for bands that just excited us. The first question we ask ourself is if we love it, if this is something that we would love to put on our stereos. We approach it from a fans perspective. We knew from the beginning that we were going to open our ears to see what happens in other places. This is much easier to do now, the label got bigger and people now come to us with ideas and proposals. And they come from all over the world.
This brings us to one of your last releases, “Delone” by Sacri Cuori. How did you meet them and decided to release their record?
I´ve known Antonio Gramentieri for many years. I´ve played his festival Strada Blu with Steve Wynn some years back, I knew the first couple of Sacri Cuori records and I liked them. They had more of this american kind of feeling to them. He approached me saying that he had this new record and that he really felt it was a Glitterbeat record. I was like “Wow! That´s interesting” but he explained to me what he was trying to do with this new album and started sending me tracks and so I became very convinced about it. It´s a record that fits very well into what we are trying to say at Glitterbeat. He has this traditional bases and he was interested in referencing the more distinctive italian motives in pop music, while everywhere in Europe the modern pop references to the usual english and american ones. He did it in a very clever way, it´s a very deep record not just a record that has a surface charm to it. It´s really catchy pop songs but, taken as whole it´s a journey into some kind of alternative musical-historical universe. It´s a fascinating album and we are very proud that we released it. It´s up there with some of my favourite Glitterbeat releases.
To my ears it doesn´t seem out of place at all into the Glitterbeat roster, it surelly adds something to the big puzzle that´s the music your label releases.
If you look at bands like Tamikrest, Noura Mint Seymali or Aziza Brahim and at the relationship they have with the traditional music they come from, it´s much the same relationship that Sacri Cuori has with the italian music. They are contemporary people that listen to a broad amount of music and they are incorporating out of that what they´re finding useful, interesting, what they belive that they can bring into the future,
Last question, what´s your plans for 2016 on Glitterbeat?
We will be extremelly busy. Tamikrest and Noura Mint Seymali will release their records in the second half of the year. In February Aziza Brahim´s second record for us is coming out, lot´s of second records, which is exciting. In March we´ll release the second volume of the series Hidden Musics, that we startet with the “Hanoi Masters”, this time it will be a really amazing collection of malian field recordings, the best I ever heard. There´s a very strong cultural statement being made by it, because a lot of this music now is rapidly desappearing. Bamako is one of the fastest growing urban areas at the moment, because of drought and political pressures in the north people are coming in the city rapidly. This village traditions are under threat, this could one of the last looks at this music. In four or five years from now could be a much different picture. We´ll also release a record in May by a band called M.A.K.U. Soundsystem, from Colombia but they live in New York. Really electric, danceable and political. In June we´ll release an album by the Afro Haitian Experimental Orchestra, a project headed by Tony Allen, a collaboration between him and some hatian musicians, something hard to describe, a quite experimental sound.
