Orlando Julius and the Afro Sounders

by Orlando Julius and the Afro Sounders

There really have been a lot of reissues of 'lost' African recordings from the late sixties to early seventies, and it's a trend I hope to see continuing into the future, as there is some very good stuff being recovered and released to a much wider audience.

Orlando Julius and the Afro Sounders's eponymous release from 1973 is a good example of this.  The album was originally released by Phillips just as they were preparing to leave the continent, and so it received barely any promotion or distribution.  Band leader Orlando Julius himself barely remembered it when he was approached by Voodoo Funk about the reissue.

It's an enjoyable afro disc, made up of six tracks for a total playing time of just under thirty-five minutes.  The songs are either instrumental or sung mostly in Yoruba, and are largely allegorical in nature (I only know this because of the liner notes written by Julius himself).  It's a nice example of the time period and a good album to kick back to.

Psycho African Beat

by The Psychedelic Aliens

As I've been learning more about African music, one website that has helped me in this journey has been Voodoo Funk, home to one of the original people to travel to Africa to do some crate digging.

From the site has come this re-release of songs by The Psychedelic Aliens, a Ghanaian Afro-rock group that released three EPs between 1968 and 1971.  The disc is a short 24 minutes in length, comprised of eight tracks, but it is a pretty upbeat, swinging collection of music.  As bandleader Carl Ricky Telfer recalls in the liner notes he wrote, "The Aliens was the first Ghanaian band to merge Western rock, pop and soul music with African rhythms and paved the way for other bands to follow."

This album, packaged bizarrely with a book and strange, chunky black cd-holder, is an essential step in understanding African music.