Since 2016, Ostinato Records have showcased music from African cultures less heard on the international musical scene: Releases have presented music from Cabo Verde, Somalia, Sudan, Senegal, Djibouti, and South Africa, as well as Haiti. As of November 2023, the label’s catalog consists of fifteen albums and two 45 RPM singles. The concept of the archive-diving, rare-groove-finding, compilation-curating record label isn’t a new one. Albums showing a breadth of crackly, vintage funk, jazz, and disco-influenced recordings from Latin America, Africa, and Asia (dug out, we imagine, from dusty, long-forgotten boxes in far-flung marketplaces) have already been popular for more than two decades, some even taking on a life of their own and spawning whole musical subcultures. But Ostinato wanted to do things differently.
In an essay published amid the global Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, label head Vik Sohonie (Reference Sohonie2020a) proclaimed Ostinato to be “proudly a Black and Brown owned and operated label.” This, and the associated mindset that “we don’t operate from a place of guilt, but solidarity and equality,” has led Ostinato to develop its own model of working ethics and means that the label’s albums raise interesting points of archival practice, musical production, and cultural mediation, as well as being useful tools to explore the roles of record label and producer. On top of all that—or, perhaps, because of it—their records are never anything less than stellar in terms of the scope and quality of the music they contain.
While their first releases gained some critical attention, it was Ostinato’s third—the 2017 compilation Sweet as Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa—that really blew up, leading to their first Grammy nomination, in the Best Historical Album category. The album presents Somali popular music recorded between the 1960s and 2000s. The tracks within are, of course, sheer bangers. The grooves reference reggae, disco, and filmi music while never leaving the Horn of Africa’s distinctive sphere of influence; synthesizers are near omnipresent, slicing between electric guitars, kaban (Somali oud), and some of the most achingly funky basslines you could ever hope for; and over it all, the most beloved singers of various generations solidify the music’s inherent Somalinimo with passionately delivered, traditionally anchored poetry of love. The music in this album had been preserved by the Red Sea Foundation, whose 10,000-strong tape archive includes material rescued by employees of Radio Hargeisa when Somalia’s Siad Barre bombed the Somaliland capital in 1988—those tapes had to be very literally dug up to find their place back on the airwaves.
A common thread in Ostinato’s output is its beautifully detailed album liner notes that tell the stories of the music and its makers from various perspectives. Sweet as Broken Dates includes recollections of musical and cultural life in 1970s Mogadishu; academic discussions of the music of Somaliland and Djibouti; a Q&A with human rights lawyer and music blogger Max’ed Cumar “Sanaag”; and detailed interviews with various artists and band members featured in the recordings. Particularly interesting is a set of notes in the back of the booklet, which deal with the intricacies of gaining licencing permission within a culture whose conceptions of copyright, contract, and credit do not align with—and occasionally directly contradict—Global North concepts on which the global music industry is founded. How does a record label secure internationally accepted legal permission where signed contracts are distrusted but a sincerely given verbal agreement is binding? The “Ostinato model” of ethical licensing, royalty, and digitization for archival projects has been well documented by Sohonie in an essay accompanying a release by Iftin Band (Sohonie Reference Sohonie2022) and a panel organized by the University of Cambridge (CRASSH Cambridge 2021).
Ostinato followed the success of Sweet as Broken Dates with archival albums of Sudanese, Cabo Verdean, and Senegalese music, before returning to Somali music in 2020 and 2021 with two albums made in collaboration with Radiodiffusion-Télévision de Djibouti (RTD), the Djiboutian national broadcaster. The first of the two, The Dancing Devils of Djibouti by Groupe RTD, was Ostinato’s first release of wholly new recordings made specifically for the label. Groupe RTD are the broadcaster’s official band and the country’s national ceremonial outfit, whose duties are to “perform for presidential and national events and welcome foreign dignitaries” (Sohonie Reference Sohonie2020b). The second album, Djibouti Archives, Vol. 1: Super Somali Sounds from the Gulf of Tadjoura, is an archive release of tracks by 4 Mars, a forty-strong pop group formed and owned by Djibouti’s ruling party, the RPP; all the recordings on this album were mostly digitized directly from the RTD archives. Although the material for both albums was made at different times (2019 and 1982–1994, respectively), their sounds are similar, highlighting the label’s message behind the releases: This is cosmopolitan pop rooted in the musicians’ Somali heritage but with global influences that show the potential of Djibouti, a small country so entwined with the international community.
At the heart of Ostinato’s dedication to equity and anticolonialist praxis is that no music or culture leaves its source. This is true both physically, in that archival materials are always digitized on-site and always remain in the custody of the home archive, and legally, in that all rights are retained by the original holders—the musicians and composers, or else (in the case of RTD) the official patrons. Part of Ostinato’s agreement with RTD was that the digitizing equipment imported especially for the archival project also be left in the ownership of the broadcaster, thus enabling a continuing effort of archival preservation to be conducted at RTD’s own will, without the need for paternal supervision from foreign organizations. From the label’s perspective, these agreements, made over three years of negotiation, allow the Djiboutian people to be the sole caretakers of their own musical heritage, and allowed Ostinato to become the first label to be given access to RTD’s archive. The two resulting albums were the first of Djiboutian music to be released by a foreign organization.
In a 2018 interview, Sohonie stated his philosophy for approaching new projects: “I look for defining political and cultural events in history, like immigration waves, civil wars.… Stories that need to be told, as they’ve been denied because of prejudices and editorial choices of powerful Western media.…Whenever there’s a great human story to be told, there’s usually great music behind it” (Sousa Reference Sousa2018). This guiding principle is especially evident in Ostinato’s 2022 album Beja Power! Electric Soul & Brass from Sudan’s Red Sea Coast by Noori and His Dorpa Band. The artists represent the Beja people—a culture group from the Red Sea city of Port Sudan in the country’s northwest. The Beja are not only internationally underrepresented but also nationally marginalized, making up only around 5 percent of the country’s total population.
Noori plays a unique instrument of his own design. Or rather, two instruments combined: From the body and neck of an electric guitar protrudes a tambour, a five-stringed plucked lyre of the sort found across East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The guitar’s neck takes the place of one of the tambour’s arms. Although Noori rarely (if ever) performs its dual identities simultaneously, the instrument is a striking visual symbol of musical fusion, representing Noori and his music’s traditionally rooted and globally conscious outlook. The music presented here is all instrumental, fronted by Noori’s tambo-guitar and the saxophone of Naji Mahmoud Dean Jabar, with electric guitar, bass, bongos, and congas to round off the sextet. The pentatonic scales that thread through the whole album connect the music intimately with the Red Sea circulations, clearly Sudanese while bringing to mind Ethiopian, Somali, and Yemeni music; connotations of Tuareg and other trans-Saharan musical cultures; and the global influences of blues and the vibes of laid-back jazz. The combination is beautiful, understated, and utterly beguiling.
The liner notes to Beja Power! underline the purpose with which Noori creates his music, “driven by a passionate cause to keep Beja music alive and fresh.” A necessary goal, given the oppressive political climate created by former president Omar al-Bashir, who sought to erase Beja culture. “Little has changed,” we are told, since Bashir’s removal in 2019. It would seem that, with this album, Noori and Ostinato have somewhat succeeded in their goals. A recent personal encounter with the album came while visiting the October 2023 exhibition Identity, Belonging & Change: A Historical Portrait of Everyday Life in Sudan, held in Oxford by the Oxford University Africa Society. Alongside photographs, artwork, and stories of Sudanese life in and outside the country, the exhibition’s soundscape consisted of Beja Power! played on a loop, the sounds of the Beja people coming to stand for the life of Sudan as a whole, an integral part of the national identity to be celebrated as part of the country’s “everyday life.”
The most recent of Ostinato’s four albums exploring Sudanese music, the 2023 record Synthesized Sudan: Astro-Nubian Electronic Jaglara Dance Sounds from the Fashaga Underground by Jantra, breaks new ground in the realm of archival releases. This music is jaglara, a style of Jantra’s own invention that has grown from his legendary street parties. These see Jantra and his customized Yamaha keyboard conducting all-night musical sessions with hours-long, entirely improvised streams of fantastical musical consciousness. Synthesized Sudan was recorded entirely live at Jantra’s parties. But it doesn’t sound like those parties (although it might capture a slice of their aural atmosphere). The sounds that we hear are a convergence of old cassettes and digital recordings made by Jantra, and audio and MIDI recordings made by Ostinato. Janto Djassi Koité, Ostinato’s producer, took all these sources and layered, remixed, and recreated them, transforming the unending sound-flows into an album of ten discrete dance tracks, average length three-and-a-half minutes.
Live albums are always listened at a remove: The sound is only one aspect of the whole sensorium of the live performance—there is no visual impact, no movement or lights, no feel of body heat, no smell of sweat—and even that is often heavily mediated in the studio postrecording. Archive albums, too, are always listened at a remove: The context of the original recordings is already past and can only ever be remembered (if the listener experienced it at all) but not reexperienced; the album recontextualizes the music as “vintage” or “field recordings,” a memory. Synthesized Sudan drops the pretence inherent in such labels and creates something new, which is at once both and neither. It’s live and it’s archive, but it is music that had never been experienced before, and it doesn’t sound the same as any of the forebears from which it was sculpted.
Like every album in Ostinato’s catalog, Synthesized Sudan is intimately tied to time and place. Its sounds are so unique, from Jantra’s keyboard (Japanese-made but Omdurman-tuned, discarding the restrictive 12-Tone Equal Temperament to fit that specifically Sudanese aesthetic), to the influences from his home region of al-Fashaga on the Eritrean border, to the international production provided by Koité and his own Senegalese-German perspective. This album couldn’t have been made anywhere or anywhen else. Jantra and his jaglara deserve to be regarded within the emerging canon of boundary-pushing African synth music.
Ostinato Records have hit upon something special. The company’s pioneering, antiimperialist working practices and ethics regarding archival and newly recorded work; their position as a proudly Black- and Brown-run business with intimate ties to the Global South; and their ear for the stories and music of the world’s underrepresented and misrepresented peoples—these all set them apart. And their results vindicate them: fifteen albums from seven countries in eight years, each a testament to Ostinato’s forward-thinking storytelling and supreme musical taste. There is no other major player in the international music market working as Ostinato are today, and certainly none that are pushing so strongly and effectively against prevailing stereotypes in an overwhelmingly negative news cycle. Positive practices, equitable relationships, and good music are changing the story.
