AFRO BOY: ROMARE

Romare, Black Acre Records’ auditory anthropologist,  jukes off our pickled cerebrum with his cross-culturally conceptual EP, Meditations on Afrocentrism. This Parisian sample-sleuth spent the past year exploring the link between African and African-American cultures by collecting snippets from culturally relevant recordings and packaging them into a gurn-friendly format.

I Wanna Go (Turn Back) tucks a collection of African percussion, soul samples and speech soundbites into footwork’s rug-cutting structure while the rest of the EP blends a similar collage with house, hip-hop and R&B-tinged post-dubstep in an attempt to forge new forms through sampling. It works. You can’t buy it on iTunes – allegedly, because Apple’s legion of flying Mac monkeys, couldn’t slip it into a well-greased pigeonhole.

After the Beastie Boys’ (R.I.P MCA) groundbreaking sample orgy Paul’s Boutique represented the end of free-for-all sampling and the beginning of the copyright stranglehold,  is colonising dusty African crate relics anthropological… or just logical?

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