In the mid-1980s, if you were in Mogadishu on a Saturday night, you went to the Jubba Hotel. The house band was Dur-Dur — a group of childhood friends led by drummer Adan Handal and bandleader Isse Dahir Qassim, who had met playing in military bands and school competitions and decided they could do something better. They could. Dur-Dur’s sound merged Somali folk melodies with funk, disco, reggae, and soul, played with a rhythmic precision and melodic warmth that filled hotel ballrooms and wedding halls across the city. Their early cassette releases, Volumes 1 and 2, spread across Somalia the way music travelled in the 1980s: hand to hand, tape to tape, copied and recopied until the sound degraded and the label fell off.
Volumes 3 and 4, recorded in 1988 and 1989, captured the band at their peak and in the middle of crisis. Between the two sessions, singer Shimaali Ahmed Shimaali was badly injured in a car accident and left to join a rival band. During the making of Volume 4, founding bandleader Isse Dahir Qassim was killed in an electrical accident at a theatre soundcheck. The country itself was fragmenting — the Somali Civil War would begin in earnest in 1991, scattering the population and destroying much of the cultural infrastructure that had made Mogadishu one of East Africa’s most vibrant music cities. The Jubba Hotel closed. The bands dispersed. The tapes ended up in boxes, in exile, in silence.
Samy Ben Redjeb found them. Ben Redjeb is a Tunisian-German record collector and the founder of Analog Africa, a Frankfurt-based reissue label that has spent twenty years tracking down, restoring, and releasing African and Latin American music from the 1960s through the 1990s. His method is forensic: years of research, contacts cultivated across continents, interviews with surviving band members, tape transfers from cassettes that have been sitting in cupboards for decades. The Dur-Dur Volumes 1 and 2 compilation came out on Analog Africa in 2018. Volumes 3 and 4, released on September 18th as a double vinyl with gatefold sleeve, photographs, and liner notes assembled from interviews by Faduma Muse, completes the archive.
The music on Volumes 3 and 4 is extraordinary — eighteen tracks of hypnotic basslines, propulsive percussion, swirling keyboards, and vocals that move between Somali chant and soul crooning with a fluidity that makes the genre labels feel inadequate. Volume 4, the session made after Qassim’s death, is the more adventurous of the two: electronic percussion, reggae-inflected grooves, drum textures that sound like nothing else in the Analog Africa catalogue. The band was grieving and experimenting at the same time, and you can hear both impulses in every track.
But the record’s significance extends beyond the music. The reissue industry has become one of the primary mechanisms through which African musical heritage is preserved, documented, and made available to new audiences. Labels like Analog Africa, Awesome Tapes from Africa, Strut, and Soundway have done the archival and curatorial work that many African national institutions lack the funding or infrastructure to do themselves. That work is essential, and it raises a question that every reissue carries inside it: who owns the story? Ben Redjeb is not Somali. He is a collector who fell in love with the music and dedicated decades to preserving it. The liner notes are written with care and sourced from interviews with surviving members. The royalties, according to the label, go to the band. But the institutional home for this music — the label, the pressing plant, the distribution network, the audience — is in Europe. The music was made in Mogadishu. It is heard in Berlin and London and Brooklyn.
This is not a criticism. It is a description of how cultural preservation works when the originating country has been through thirty years of conflict. Someone has to do the digging. Someone has to press the vinyl. Someone has to write the liner notes. Analog Africa does this work with more rigour and respect than most. But the Dur-Dur reissue also makes visible a structural reality: that much of Africa’s twentieth-century musical heritage is preserved, catalogued, and sold from outside the continent. The tapes survived Mogadishu. Whether the infrastructure to keep them in Mogadishu could have survived too, under different political circumstances, is a question the music keeps asking every time you press play.
The List
- Dur-Dur Band: Volume 3 (1988) & Volume 4 (1989) — Out now on Analog Africa. Eighteen tracks of Somali funk, disco, soul, and reggae from Mogadishu's golden era, restored from original cassettes. The most important African music reissue of the year. Listen immediately.
- Design Week South Africa — Johannesburg edition runs 8–11 October. Curated, multidisciplinary design activations across the city — the Cape Town edition follows 22–25 October. South Africa's design sector in its strongest institutional moment.
- Frieze Sculpture — Free outdoor exhibition in the English Gardens, Regent's Park, London. Running through 1 November. Eleven international artists, curated by Fatoş Üstek. The best free art in London this month, no ticket required.
- MASP: Histórias Latino-Americanas — Still running at MASP, São Paulo, through 31 January 2027. 148 artists, 20 countries, five floors. Colonialism, quilombos, modernity, utopia. If you missed our coverage in Issue 37, the show is still there and still essential.
- Shabazz Palaces: It's a Style Sport — Out October 23. Ishmael Butler's experimental hip-hop project from Seattle, who have been quietly making some of the most inventive music in American rap for over a decade. Pre-order, mark the date.
What's Playing
Shabazz Palaces release It's a Style Sport on October 23rd, and the pre-release singles suggest Ishmael Butler is doing what he has always done — making hip-hop that sounds like it arrived from a parallel timeline. Butler, who rapped as Butterfly in Digable Planets in the early 1990s and reinvented himself as Shabazz Palaces in 2009, has spent the last fifteen years building a body of work that treats hip-hop as an experimental form with the same seriousness that jazz musicians in the 1960s treated improvisation. The beats are abstract, the lyrics are dense, the production is layered with electronic textures and field recordings that make the music feel three-dimensional. What keeps Shabazz Palaces from disappearing into art-rap obscurity is Butler's ear for rhythm — underneath the abstraction, the music moves. It's a Style Sport is the latest entry in a discography that rewards patience and repeated listening. Pre-order the vinyl.
The Calendar
New York
- Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You · Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum · Now open
- Fall gallery season · Chelsea, Lower East Side, Tribeca · In full swing
Atlanta
- The World(s) She Made: Kathleen Neal Cleaver · Auburn Avenue Research Library · Through January 2027
Los Angeles
- Lucas Museum of Narrative Art · Exposition Park · Now open · The biggest US museum opening of 2026
Toronto
- Post-TIFF · Distribution announcements arriving for Ben'Imana, Congo Boy, Baba Segi's Wives
- AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) · Ongoing exhibitions
São Paulo
- MASP: Histórias Latino-Americanas · Avenida Paulista · Through 31 January 2027 · 148 artists, 20 countries, five floors
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