locate some of the artists and to communicate with them,” says Shimkovitz. “It’s definitely going to limit the types of things I’m going to be able to release.”

That’s an ethos that distinguishes Awesome Tapes From Africa from ethnomusicological magpies Sublime Frequencies, who have sometimes treated their releases of music from North Africa, the Middle East and Asia as field recordings. “They’re an inspiration in general and I think what they’re doing is super-forward-thinking,” says Shimkovitz. “But the direction I’m going is a little bit different. I’m not doing compilations, I’m using original album art – and I’m definitely not going to release anything without contacting the artist first. Even though I’m giving away music online, I feel like the promotional energy behind it makes it well worthwhile. It’s been wonderful to watch some of these artists who not many people know about literally become internetfamous just because I’ve posted them on the website.”

Indeed, as well as 50 per cent of all royalties, Shimkovitz hopes to provide further career boosts for the artists he releases – much as Sublime Frequencies have done for Omar Souleyman and Group Doueh. “My ultimate goal is to get the artists that I’m working with the opportunity to perform abroad,” he concludes. “I’m DJing at all these festivals – why can’t they come and play? It would be much more interesting.”  awesometapes.com Daniel Spicer

MSPS New Music Festival All hands to the pump

The McNeill Street Pumping Station served the city of Shreveport in Louisiana for nearly 100 years, one of the last steam-powered facilities in the country before it was decommissioned in 1980. This space is slowly being transformed into a historical museum salvaging the 19th century technologies that brought filtered and chlorinated water to Shreveport earlier than many other American municipalities. This month, the Station will host the first MSPS New Music Festival. An intriguing mix of international headliners will mingle with frenzied improvisors, sound ecologists and local experimentalists for one night of performances and installations located throughout the Pumping Station’s expansive architecture. Co-curators Robert Greenwood and Robert Peterson have ambitious plans to interweave the rich history of this space with a range of iron-and-concrete sonics.

“The primary impetus for this festival was the Pumping Station itself,” Greenwood explains. “We had the idea that this would be an amazing place to explore sonically. There is a wealth of interesting locations throughout the site for installations. One of the key sites we’ll activate is the sprawling lawn set between empty but massive concrete water-retention tanks. The tanks themselves will be used for an installation.”

“It’s intriguing to me to think of history in terms of fluid series of actions in relation to concrete place,” Peterson continues. “Non-objective music is good for this. It allows you to be as connected to their patterns and rhythms as you’d like.”

While Shreveport may not be known as a locus of experimental media, Greenwood and Peterson belong to a community that’s not untypical of the South. Aesthetic miscreants, outsider artists and autonomous punks congregate in ad hoc performance spaces and experimental film co-ops. Greenwood posits, “There are very few artists in this region who are making a living from experiments and exercises in aesthetic communication. But there are countless house shows and suburban bedrooms in this region filled with people venturing into new mediums.”

In bringing the likes of Tim Hecker, Lawrence English, Mark Fell, Simon Whetham and Yannick Franck to Louisiana, the MSPS strives to be a site of cultural exchange. As Peterson states, “I wanted this experience to be about connecting people using site and sound, space and time. Cultural production often highlights hierarchical thinking and aesthetic engineering. There is quite a lot of importation and exportation of culture currently in the world that is hierarchical and hegemonistic. Bringing the fire of modernity to the cave dwellers, so to speak. To me that is disgusting, even if it is unintended. My hope is that both communities, the local and the international, will realise that this is an amazing opportunity to relate to each other, exchange ideas and learn from one another in a beautiful space for a short time.”

British sound artists Paul Purgas and Shelley Parker will present a synthesis of field recording from the outlying area, plus hypnotic electronics; and Eli Keszler will reprise his Cold Pin installation of mechanically driven piano wires strung along the station’s network of pipes, water tanks and metal chambers. Peterson then asks, “What will the fricative, the glitchy, the noisy, the washy, the minimal and the monolithic sounds tell us about the spaces we inhabit? Could this significantly change the way we perceive space? Then the conversation turns into one of sensory perception, informing the eyes using the ears and so on. To me this is the real value of events of this nature: the audience has a range of entry points by which they can access what’s going on around them.”  MSPS New Music Festival, McNeill Street Pumping Station, Shreveport, Louisiana, 14 October: see Out There. mspsnmf.com Jim Haynes

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