African Disco Special (Rinse FM, February 2019)

Not actually African, of course — Horse Meat Disco are white Brits — and that in itself can be considered iffy. But I unabashedly love this two-hour continental traipse, much of which is of fairly recent vintage, availability-wise. A number of the selections come from recent reissues, including tracks from William Onyeabor (on Luaka Bop, David Byrne’s label), Ata Kak, Umoja (both from Awesome Tapes From Africa), Teaspoon & the Waves and Niama Makalou et African Soul Band (both on Sofrito Super Singles). The most striking previously unfamiliar number, Bindinga’s “Disco Connection,” comes off a compilation released by Odion Livingstone, a Lagos-based reissue label following in the footsteps of labels like the just-named and Strut, which distributes Odion Livingstone in the UK. Selections like these point to the rather large amount of Africana that has come into the UK (and U.S.) club world over the 2010s. Horse Meat Disco’s set works simply as an endlessly entertaining primer of that area of activity.

Horse Meat Disco is a London quartet, with the four members often dividing the work up — cofounder James Hillard played this edition of their weekly two-hour slot by himself. (They’ve had a weekly two-hour slot on the London pirate-turned-legit online dance station Rinse FM for about seven years now.) One reason it works so well is that it is a Horse Meat Disco set first — one that focuses on a specific subset of their library. They even cheat a little, dropping Talking Heads’ “I Zimbra” around minute seventy-seven — musically pseudo-Afro, with words from the Berlin Dada poet Hugo Ball. Alongside its follow-up, Hugh Masakela’s none-more-NYC-’84 twelve-inch hit, “Don’t Go Lose It Baby,” it sounds completely of a piece with all these records that are far less familiar but share a similarly rangy eclecticism. Many tracks feature boingy synthesizers or slap-happy hi-hats. Once those might have seemed like mere cash-ins. Now their genuine cheer holds sway. So do their grooves, which Hillard lines up like a pool shark.