Podcast: Listen to the Label Vol.13 – Les Disques Bongo Joe (August 2020)

In our new podcast series, we’ve chosen to focus on who provide us with the precious “raw material” for our listenings and features: quality new music!

We are talking about those heroes who decided to launch, nurture and cultivate a record label (better if with an ‘independent’ in front of it). As the title suggests, Listen to the Label is our way to pay them a well-deserved tribute, disclosing and recognizing their invaluable work and letting them introduce it with words and tunes.

Not that it happens too often that we musically travel to Switzerland. So, for the 13th episode of Listen to the Label, we are more than thrilled to introduce you to an up-and-coming project born and bred in Geneva which is having a considerable impact on the world-music world.

We are talking about Les Disques du Bongo Joe, an adventure set in motion back in 2013, when Cyril Yeterian inaugurated a record shop with café and live music spot in the heart of the Swiss city. Two years later, Cyril (who’s also a musician and member of bands like Mama Rosin, Broadway Lafayette and Cyril Cyril) decided to launch a record label as well as to explore “contemporary underground worlds to dig out instruments, voices and machines.”

From the first releases exposing exotic traditions (from South-Western Indian Ocean sega music to Afro-Colombian and Anatolian psych-rock) as well as the Swiss alternative soundscape (with acts like Augenwasser and Hyperculte), Bongo Joe Records has grown up in one of the freshest music realities in Europe, releasing more than 50 albums covering and narrating the four corners of the music world.

A few weeks ago, we reached Cyril in Geneva (by phone) and had a nice chat about his label, and music inspirations, but also more critical subjects like the perks and perils of being an independent label, the saturation of the record revival market and more momentous topics like the Black Lives Matter movement and its relevance in the music world.

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