PRESALE - Expected Soon

Tracklist:

Cheb Bakr - Allom

Group Hewaya - Irja

Shahd - Erhal Keef Alshams Tgheeb

Ahmed Ben Ali - Jara

The White Bird Band - Ya Ummi

Khaled Al Melody - Jani Bigool

Fathi Aldiyqz & Sons of Africa Band - Palestine Is My Homeland

Libya Music Band - Kol Al Mawaeed

Stars of Africa - Baed Al Farha

Khaled Al Reigh - Zannik

Khaled Al Zlitni - Jiti Yam Eloyoun Buhoor

Murad Najah - Hubbi Leeki

City Lights Band - Kul Ghrub

Adil Al Ramli - Mawoud

The Hope Duo - La Tgheeb Anni Wala Youm

The album is dedicated to the cassette tape scene in Libya from the late 80s to early 2000s, from disco to reggae to pop. All songs previously unreleased outside of Libya and not available on any digital.

This compilation isn't a sweeping history of Libyan music — it's a personal journey into the sounds we fell in love with while digging through tapes, conversations, and stories across Libya and beyond. Rather than spotlighting the country's most famous musical exports, the compilation highlights a mix of overlooked gems and local classics from the cassette era: artists whose work thrived despite political limitations and scarce international exposure. The music featured here blends reggae rhythms, synthy disco grooves, gritty pop, house, and funk, a vibrant collision of genres that reflects Libya's unique sonic landscape from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Many of these recordings were recovered from the TK7 cassette factory in Sousse, Tunisia, a now-demolished site that once played a quiet but vital role in distributing and manufacturing Libyan music.

Other tracks were digitised in a Cairo hotel room in 2021, where we transferred nearly 100 tapes over three days, on-site using a high-grade cassette deck brought into Egypt with us… During this era, Independent artists relied on makeshift home studios or travelled abroad to record in Tunisia and Egypt, gradually building their own infrastructures for creativity. By the 90s and early 2000s, as access to digital equipment increased, a few of the artists began setting up their own studios — a shift that gave rise to a more self-sufficient recording culture across the country. The resulting sounds are anything but homogeneous. They reflect Libya's geographic and cultural crossroads: North African rhythms meet Arab melodies and deep African roots.

Reggae, in particular, took on a local Libyan flavour — not just musically, through the slowed-down cadence of traditional shaabi beats, but socially, as a vehicle for expressing identity and pride. What ties all the artists on this comp together is a boundary-pushing approach to genre and style: recorded in small studios, exchanged by hand, and shaped by a cross-pollination of influences, from Benghazi to Tripoli and beyond... All profits are being split 50:50 between us in the artists/ licensors and ownership remains with the creators; we only licensed the music.