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Music

A Zamrock Revival

Allow Toronto's Invisible City Editions to introduce you to some of the finest South Africa psychedelia you've never heard of.

In music and elsewhere, people gravitate towards underdog stories. They help us feel good, their stories often offering redemptive value from years of obscurity or destitution. Stephen Encinas was a producer in Trinidad that crafted the 1979 track "Disco Illusion", an intended commentary on the euphoria of the disco era and a hastily recorded follow-up to his debut 45. Emanuel Jagari Chanda was the lead singer for WITCH (We Intend To Cause Havoc), one of the leading lights in the Zamrock, a movement that flourished in seventies Zambia. However, "Disco Illusion" was greatly overshadowed by its predecessor "Rock a Bye Baby Love" – listed as one of Trinidad’s greatest pop songs - and duly faded into obscurity outside of the attention of Trini music connoisseurs. And while Chanda had a successful career fronting WITCH, Zambia’s political status as a one party-state and surrounding social ongoings took its toll. Nowadays Chanda works as a gemstone miner and many of his contemporaries are dead from the AIDS epidemic of the Eighties. Today, Chanda and synth player Patrick Mwondela are the only living members of WITCH and two of the few living beings remaining from the once dominant Zamrock scene.

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Then, as if out of the blue, both Encinas and Chanda’s stories found their feet with the help of music fans Brandon Hocura and Gary Abugan, aka Invisible City Editions, a DJ duo and record label based out of Toronto. Their tastes lie in wildly underappreciated music outside of the United States, tracks that showcase a different narrative of modern music history, and began with a repressing of Italodisco pioneer Beppe Loda’s 1986 work on cassette. The Toronto-based Hocura and Abugan have steadily been reissuing some of the best old-school disco, dance and rock that you never knew about. This March brings around a reissue of WITCH’s final release, 1984’s Kuomboka, a record that meshed Zamrock with the sounds dominating American FM Radio. You can hear the percolating funk of Prince, the vast perfectionism of Fleetwood Mac and the showmanship of Michael Jackson.

So, ahead of the reissues of Kuomboka and 1980's Movin’ On, I exchanged emails with Hocura and Abugan about Toronto's clubbing scene, changing the musical canon and playing in a high-school band with Caribou.

YNTHT: So how did you guys first cross paths?

Brandon Hocura: Dan Snaith [of Caribou fame] introduced Gary and I - I was in a highschool band in with Dan. He told me about this guy who drove the Junior Boys’ van and said I had to meet him because we had similar musical tastes. I went to dinner with Dan in Toronto, met Gary and the seeds of Invisible City were sown.

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Was ICE a vehicle for DJing or for releasing records?

Gary Abugan: Our mission from the beginning was to save money from DJing and put it into a label. We were finding so many amazing records, we thought we should release them.

Has Toronto's club scene changed over the years?

GA: I was lucky to have a friend in high school that drove us to parties in the 80s and 90s. You could only hear this music on mixtapes your friends brought from NYC/Detroit or in the club. You HAD to go out to hear new music. We went out and absorbed everything we could. Sadly now, all the spaces are gone and warehouses are chopped up into condos. The only place to hear IT was at the club so it forced people to go out and be more social. Now, people want to take pictures to post on social media instead of just dancing, so lots of energy is wasted and the flow is broken. What makes it worse is that DJs play the same tired playlists and there seems to be little sense of adventure. People hung out more back then, the crazy mix of people from all over made it more fun.

Was Toronto's Caribbean community your introduction to Trinidadian music?

BH: Absolutely. We are very lucky to have a strong Caribbean community here and it is practically unavoidable to come across Soca when digging in Toronto. At first Soca was a four-letter word for diggers here, but with patience and open ears we started finding Soca that opened up the incredible world of Trinidadian music. Another benefit of the Caribbean community here is having roti after a dig - pretty much the perfect food to recharge and reflect on your finds.

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Where does the passion for digging come from?

GA: My passion comes from the great experiences I had dancing when I was younger. You want something different, something you’ve never heard, something that sounds like a mistake, but wait, it’s working and wait did that just happen? A lot of the DJs we love do exactly the same thing: they find and present music in a way that’s raw and exciting. The first time I heard Faust was at 4:00 am while listening to Brave New Waves on CBC while I was driving. I had to pull over. Brandon is the same way, we both hear sounds in very similar ways. Whoa what’s that? What was that? pull over pull over!

Did you also feel like there is a neglected lineage of dance music from places like the Caribbean and Southern Africa?

BH: Certainly there are rich traditions of dance music from all over the world that are sadly under-appreciated internationally. We are mainly interested in musical trajectories that are unexpected: what is it about Libya in the late 70s that resonated with reggae? It’s truly fascinating how reggae in Libyan music sounds the way it does.

When did you decide to make the shift into pressing vinyl?

GA: Our friend found Michael Boothman and told him we were interested in reissuing his record 'Touch'. We saved enough for one of us to fly down and meet him and press a record. At the time, another big label made him an offer. He decided to go with us since we were a smaller company just starting up and he had a good feeling about us. We owe Michael everything!

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BH: The process of obsessively traveling, digging and finding artists for us reverses the typical top-down structure of commercial music. Rather than passively sitting in front of our computers, we’d rather get sweaty and dusty trying to find music. There is a lot of work involved in finding these records, but it’s work that we love, probably to the detriment of our health and sanity. Ultimately, speaking with artists we’re so passionate about makes it all worthwhile.

When did you hear about WITCH?

GA: My friend had a college radio show in 2003 and told me the DJ before him played an insane African disco song called “I’m Coming Back”. I was immediately obsessed.

What fascinates you about WITCH?

BH: WITCH are fascinating to us because they exemplify the unique history of Zambian popular music. Rather than Afro-funk, Zambian musicians were obsessed with psychedelic rock. WITCH wore this influence on their sleeves, but the two LPs that we’re releasing are dialed into American FM radio. These albums don’t sound distinctly American or African, but transcend their influences into something unique. Their personal history also reflects the larger sociopolitcal problems facing Zambia in the Seventies and Eighties. Despite this Patrick Mwondela is one of the most optimistic and inspiring people we’ve ever had the pleasure to work with.

What other reissues are in the pipeline for Invisible City in the coming year?

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BH: We’ve got more Trinidadian releases coming later this year, and we’re also reissuing a series of 45s from Libyan artist Ahmed Fakroun. We are releasing our first Canadian release, a 12” from a Haitian-Canadian artist and are planning a compilation of music by Toronto-based Caribbean artists - but it might not be out until 2015.

GA: Brandon and I are also huge movie nuts. We are currently developing a few great film projects.

Is there a feeling of wanting to address the musical canon with ICE?

GA: We definitely want to redress this canon and open it up to music that has been overlooked because of geographic circumstances or lack of distribution. What interests us is music that has a myriad of influences and styles, things that don’t normally fit together but still work as a song that you’ll want to hear over and over again.

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