Obaa Sima

There is no bigger surprise internet music success story than that of Ata Kak. The Ghanaian rapper-singer released a tape quietly in 1994 only to be rediscovered online in 2006 as the pre-streaming blog-fueled online music collector movement was in full swing. The wildly addictive confluence of lo-fi house with earnestly-rendered, full-throated Burger Highlife captured the hearts of music heads around the globe in the mid-2000s. With the help of his London-based band Ata Kak played shows worldwide and graced enormous stages performing to thousands of fans. The seven songs on Obaa Sima have delighted and confounded listeners since it appeared as the inaugural post on the Awesome Tapes From Africa blog. A well-documented years-long search for the singer concluded with a reissue in 2015. Despite painstaking work by ATFA's longtime mastering engineer collaborator Jessica Thompson, the audio source was not of superior fidelity. The original DAT tape was moldy and disintegrating. Now, after years of searching for the highest quality source cassette, Ata Kak is making available the Obaa Sima Anniversary Remaster. We can finally hear the now-legendary left-field dance floor classic in glistening-clear audio for the first time. The original Obaa Sima reissue has shipped more than 10,000 LPs and the cassette has been downloaded from the original blog post hundreds of thousands of times. Ata Kak played intensely-energetic shows at clubs and festivals all over on the strength of this classic recording. The deluxe edition of the new remaster includes a splatter-colored LP and a DVD documentary with previously unreleased footage.