Opika Pende: Africa at 78 RPM

"...an anthology that features 100 recordings of African music from 1909 to the mid-1960s."

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Atlanta's Dust-to-Digital offers an assortment of releases that's very diverse. Including songs from the Civil War, Tuvan throat singing, Cambodian rock and roll, and one of the oldest recordings of the human voice, from 1860.

Also worth noting, for our purposes, African music. One of the most impressive of these releases is Opika Pende: Africa at 78rpm, billed as "an anthology that features 100 recordings of African music from 1909 to the mid-1960s." Most of these recordings are being reissued in this package for the first time.

Check it out here and here's a 2011 profile from the Los Angeles Times.

And since reading about music is like eating a menu, listen here, here, here and to the emebedded track below.

From Jonathan Ward, who assembled the collection:

I have created this compilation with one simple goal in mind: to showcase a diverse amount of long-forgotten music from Africa that transports me as a listener. It is one person’s offering of music that is wholly unavailable except in its original elusive and fragile format. While it is not definitive, nor am I attempting to construct or invent a narrative, there are important connections to be made. Around one musical corner is another corner, and another. Within these 100 tracks, traditional music stands side by side with popular music as traditional culture coexists with so-called modernity. As a non-African, I offer this set as an example of the riches that lay in waiting when considering the tens of thousands of phenomenal African 78 rpm discs that were issued, played, dispersed, and in large part, forgotten.