As you may have gathered already I’m crazy about Raw-Artes remixes. His style is unique and his angle is always interesting and grabs my attention from the get go.
I’ve followed his Bandcamp fanatically and much to my dismay I discovered a while back that it had gone the way of the dodo.
I reached out and talked to Raw-Artes about my grief and was delighted to learn that plan B had already been initiated: Patreon.
For a small amount of pocket dust and silver you can now subscribe and grab these little wonders in wave form on a monthly basis with different tiers to satisfy your audio needs.
Like this upcoming speciality: Paul Simon’s Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes.
Paul Simon wandered into South Africa in 1985 chasing a sound he couldn’t name yet — a rhythm tucked into a bootleg cassette, a pulse that felt like memory. Johannesburg opened itself to him in harmonies, in the warm mathematics of township jive, in musicians who carried whole histories inside their phrasing. Among them was Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose voices seemed to rise out of the floorboards and settle into the rafters.
Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes was never meant to be the centrepiece. It was a side-path, a drifting sketch built around a girl too rich to feel the ground beneath her feet and a boy who followed her anyway. But then they sang it together on Saturday Night Live — Simon and those impossibly gentle Zulu harmonies — and suddenly the track felt like a door opening. New York cold outside, studio lights burning, and voices from KwaZulu-Natal filling the room with a kind of hopeful gravity.
Raw-Artes keeps its South African heartbeat steady but lets Jamaica ghost through the mix — a bassline rolling in slow arcs, half helium drift, half ganja haze, everything floating just above the floorboards.
The groove feels lived-in, like it showed up wearing yesterday’s grin and never bothered to take it off. Brass flares in and out like sun on old tin roofs, percussion rattles with that loose-limbed township shuffle, and underneath it all is the soft crackle of a vinyl memory rescued from extinction. It’s a dub that exhales, stretches, and lets the world sway around it.
Don’t miss out. Go and subscribe post haste.
Links:
Don’t miss my review of his EP on Hot Digits either.
