Introduction

In August of 2005, by the month 20 years ago, I moved to West Africa and embarked on a 3 year long series of record digging road trips along the Gulf of Guinea. My experiences were first chronicled on the Voodoo Funk blog, which I took offline in 2016, to retire from dj-ing, discontinue my record label and fulfill my childhood dreams of living in Mexico and writing books, both at the same time.

In order to finance this biggest adventure so far, I slowly sold off my record collection, the humble remnants of which I’m going to post here on instagram, intercepted by some chapters from my first manuscript titled “Bushtaxi to Freetown”. The text will be published here on blogspot, for old times sake and to make it easier on the eye.

The question I’ve always been asked is; how in the hell does a guy from a tiny Black Forest village end up digging for records in Africa? To answer this, I wrote a way too long prologue, no publisher would ever print un-cut. That’s why I’ll post it here, on the very bottom of the page entirety. As a friend once said “context is everything”, which rings particularly true, when it comes to strangers in far away lands. Even though it is driven by their pursuit, this manuscript isn’t just about records. The discs pressed from polyvinyl chloride merely provide the fossil fuel they were derived from, to propel the reader along for a wild and curvy ride.

https://.instagram.com/bushtaxi_to_freetown/