Music Wire: News for the global urban generation

Although largely unknown to the general audience, African rap has lost one of its most important players. Mamadou Konte founded the Africa Fête festival in France in the late seventies, later bringing it to the US and Canada. He also set up a label in Senegal that was responsible for uncovering Positive Black Soul and […]

Apart from the Chehadé brothers, I had never really thought about Palestine as a source of music - and certainly not electronic music. Mea culpa. Checkpoint 303 are a Franco-Palestinian-Tunisian collective that create electronic music using field recordings of life in the occupied territories. Although not overtly political, the sounds they use are often of […]

We’re beginning to get a lot of press releases concerning summer festivals. One we thought we’d highlight is the annual Africa Fête show in Marseilles on June 30. First, because we’ve always wanted to visit the town and secondly as the event is quite cool. Headliners include Kristo Numpuby, Ashes to Machines, Oumar Kouyaté and […]

The bad news this week is that the Konono N°1 European tour has been hit by the visa blues. The group was due to fly to Europe via Switzerland but two members were refused as they didn’t have the requisite Schengen visas. These had been requested at the German embassy in Kinshasa but were […]