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3 2 SXS W O R L D | M A R C H 1 5 , 2 0 1 8 | SXSW.COM New Project Captures Pulse of Africa's Beating Heart By Linda Laban Around the time that John and Alan Lomax were recording and preserving folk music in the Americas, Englishman Hugh Tracey was recording and archiving much of that music's very roots in Africa. Between the 1920s and the 1970s, Tracey recorded around 250 tribal groups. In 1954, he founded the International Library of African Music (ILAM) in Grahamstown, South Africa. Sixty years later, another Englishman, musician Chris Pedley, discovered Tracey's work after seeing a photograph in his future wife's home. At the time, he didn't know what to think, but he now knows it captured an Mbuti pygmy tribe in the Congo crowded around a speaker. "I was intrigued; I thought 'What is going on here?'" recalls Pedley. "My wife Lisa said, 'Oh, my great uncle was an explorer in Africa who recorded music'." Fascinated, Pedley was soon off to Africa with the idea of making a docu- mentary on Tracey's work: "I went out to the archives to meet Hugh Tracey's son [Andrew], who told me everything about his adventures and the different musics Hugh had been captivated by." On that trip, while at Malawi's Lake of Stars Festival, Pedley met Olly Wood, co-founder of Black Butter Records. Several passionate conversations later, the pair formed the idea of bringing Tracey's recordings into the electronic era via remixing, and the Beating Heart project was born. So far, two albums — South Africa and Malawi — have been released. A third, Tanzania, is due later this year. All use European and African producers who fuse digital sounds and electronic tweaks with the mesmerizing primor- dial beats and melodies, turning the African roots of modern music into music for the future. "Sampling is a big part of dance music, so why not engage youth culture and electronic music culture with something unique and organic, and draw people's attention to the roots of what they're hearing?" Pedley asks rhetorically. Beating Heart "Why not engage youth culture and electronic music culture with something unique and organic?"

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