RUDIMENTAL, MACHINEDRUM, MY NU LENG AND MORE REMIX AFRICAN MUSIC FOR CHARITY

A new charity project has launched called Beating Heart, which commissions remixes of material taken from the largest collection of African music in the world in an initiative to help the communities where it was originally recorded.

The archive of the International Library of African Music (ILAM) was made available for the first time for the project, which has seen remixes by artists including Rudimental, Machinedrum, Luke Vibert, Throwing Shade and My Nu Leng, who all gave their time for free.

The resultant album, ‘Beating Heart – Malawi’, is released on Friday June 3rd and is the first of 18 works that will each focus on music from a separate African nation. Music raised from the project will go directly towards a new development model called ‘Garden to Mouth’, which aims to provide sustainable nutrition and income to communities there.

A special concert in honour of the initiative’s launch took place at Lake Malawi National Park in April, where contributors including Rudimental, My Nu Leng and Kidnap Kid came together to perform the tracks live for the first time.

Speaking about the project, Rudimental said, “Working with these amazing samples, playing with them and putting them into a modern day context just shows how relevant they still are, even though they were recorded such a long time ago.”

You can listen to snippets of ‘Malawi Originals’ via the Beating Heart SoundCloud below and pre-order the album on their website.

Rob McCallum is DJ Mag’s digital news writer. Follow him on Twitter here.