Ata Kak

Ata Kak is the Ghanaian musician Yaw Atta-Owusu, who recorded the cassette Obaa Sima in Kumasi, rapping in Twi over drum-machine highlife and boogie tracks he produced largely on his own. The tape was self-released and sold almost nothing, and for years afterward Atta-Owusu lived off-grid in his hometown with no sense that the recording had gone anywhere at all.

A copy reached Brian Shimkovitz, who posted it on his Awesome Tapes From Africa blog. It built a following gradually over several years before Shimkovitz tracked Atta-Owusu down in Kumasi and the label reissued the album in 2015, decades after it was first made.

That reissue turned a nearly forgotten cassette into a starting point for international touring, giving Atta-Owusu his first shows outside Ghana long after the music itself was recorded. He now performs the material to audiences who first heard it through the internet rather than the original tape.

The music itself is fast, lo-fi and relentlessly upbeat, mixing Ghanaian highlife with early-1990s dance beats and hip-hop, all carried by swift Twi rapping, layered vocal hooks and cheap keyboard textures.