In 1994 Ghanaian musician, Ata Kak released his first record Obaa Sima when he was living in Canada.
He sold only a handful of copies and Ata Kak retired from music a disappointed man.
Then in 2002 an American student called Brian Shimkovitz stopped at a stall selling cassette tapes in Cape Coast in Ghana and made a chance discovery.
Shimkovitz started a blog called The Hiplife Complex after spending three years researching one of Ghana’s youngest (and most youthful) musical styles and movements.
Brian Shimkovitz wrote about on a blog and brought the music to a whole new audience and Ata Kak is now touring the world playing his music.
It’s amazing, i like what am doing. This is what i intended to do way back in 1992 and so now am living it and am okay with it, Ata Kak stated.
Recorded at his Ontario home in a self-constructed studio at the turn of the 1990s, Obaa Sima taps into the various musical styles that Atta-Owusu himself was so enthralled by and which helped him strengthen his own chops: reggae and dancehall, Ghanaian highlife and American soul and disco.
Ata Kak is a Ghanaian highlife singer gone horribly right, Ata Kak is a visionary. He spits serious rhymes, waxes romantic, and issues lo-fi digital quick-shrieks.
