During last month’s Olympics I had the good fortune to be introduced to Matt Yanchyshyn, a visiting IT manager for Associated Press (AP).
Roughly four years ago while living in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, Matt started blogging about the music he came across during his travels in the region. It was part of the first wave of audioblogs and “certainly the first to deal with African music” says Matt.
As his life and career has sent him to more and more exotic places, the focus of Benn Loxo Du Taccu – which means “One hand can’t clap” in Wolof – has developed to accommodate music from all around the world, with a journal giving background, anecdotes and context for the obscure, free MP3s (for a limited time) attached to the end of each post. A fantastic example of well communicated individual passion finding an equally passionate audience through the internet village. Musical discovery at its best.
After four years and 500 posts Benn Loxo has gone on to earn a devout following, some top notch coverage in the likes of Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Village Voice, Boston Globe and Rolling Stone as well support from uber-cool hip-hop label Quannum Projects who, after spotting the site, offered to support it financially. Matt was also hired to write Benn Loxo style articles for MTV music blog URGE as well as any number of other world music related writing jobs. Pretty much living the blogger’s/music fan’s dream.
I first bumped into Matt at a Beijing live gig/recording session for my company‘s in-house record label, MicroMu (which is in development stages at the moment. I will cover MicroMu in more depth on this blog once the label is a bit more established. I don’t want to count chickens but it is looking really exciting at the moment). We got along like a house on fire and he got pretty enthused with what we are up to, enough to “blog the shit“ out of our artists.
Beyond wanting to turn you on to a genuinely wonderful music discovery service, I also realised that, as MicroMu is laid out in blog format, this gave me a prime opportunity to write a hilariously titled blog post. Double whammy.
To anyone interested, I highly recommend checking out these Benn Loxo posts, complete with extraordinary comments, here, here, here and here, to see what kind of passion Matt generates in his audience. Also definitely worth a read is this article written about Matt himself. If I ever had anything like this written about me I would die a happy man.
© Ed Peto 2008
Hi, Thank you for telling us about this Benn Loxo. I am looking it throught it now. By the way I like your new blog. It is really cool! Bye
Posted by Robin Wang on September 11th, 2008.
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