| If you believe in fate, you'd hardly come up with anyone more likely to kick off "sounds: afropean-a-licious" than Femi Kuti. Son of the late, great, legendary Afro-beat founder Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Femi finds himself constantly jet-setting between Nigeria's capital of Lagos and the European sound metropolises of London and Paris to enthral audiences with his fusion of R'n'B, Afro-beat, hip-hop and electronic music - a sound decisively influencing the shape of Black Music over the last few years. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Femi Kuti simply cuts across musical boundaries, moving easily from jamming with Masters At Work, Ashley Beedle or Chateau Flight, to joining UK hip-hopper Ty or Rai superstar Rachid Taha. P18
The early 1990s saw the Mano Negra adventure come to an end - but in a similar way to singer Manu Chao, band keyboarder Tom Darnal also found the closing door opened up the prospect of turning his own musical ideas into a reality. His P18 project gave him the chance to merge the hard electronic beats typical for his hometown of Paris with the incomparable energy generated by a live Cuban band. Darnal's able support team includes Laurent Collart, sound engineer for no less a figure than French techno guru Laurent Garnier. The band is named after Paris's 18th arrondissement - the liveliest and most exciting district in the city. Blacktronica
Black Music - hardly any other label over the last years has had such an impact on both the charts and on-going debate in the music scene. And, according to members of the London-based Blacktronica crew around DJ, poet and activist Charlie Dark, that's just why the term has become so totally empty. After the commercial success of his Attica Blues project, Charlie Dark decided to put chart aligned work to one side, focusing instead on evolving a radical new definition of the spectrum of styles comprising Black Music - describing the key points of reference in his musical universe as ranging "from Coltrane to Carl Craig".
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