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The headliner is DJ Soulpusher, aka Frank Gossner (pictured, on the right), the guy behind the African-music blog Voodoo Funk. He recently returned from three years in West Africa, where he’d moved after his girlfriend landed a job in Guinea. Gossner was already a DJ specializing in funky 45s, and since he was feeling the urge to expand his musical horizons, Africa provided a perfect opportunity (though in the end he didn’t expand them all that much). Gossner spent countless hours digging up obscure African funk records–the kind of music that labels like Soundway, Analog Africa, and Strut have been popularizing for the past few years–and used his blog to post hour-long mixes of his discoveries. Unsurprisingly given the medium, his choices aren’t quite as carefully filtered for quality as the material those labels have been reissuing, but he posts so much great supplementary material–center-label scans, cover artwork, stories of his days in Africa–that sitting through the occasional dud is fairly painless.
Today’s playlist:
