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1. Vis-A-Vis “The Best of Vis-A-Vis in Congo Style”
2. Molchat Doma “Etazhi”
3. Manzanita y Su Conjunto “Trujillo — Perú 1971-1974”

Bandcamp is an online music platform used largely by independent artists and record labels to stream songs and sell merchandise. It’s also a vibrant virtual community teeming with interesting sounds just waiting to be discovered. Each week, I’ll highlight three releases available on the site that are well worth your time and attention. If you find something you dig, please consider supporting the artist with a purchase.

Vis-A-Vis, “The Best of Vis-A-Vis in Congo Style”

In the 1970s, Vis-A-Vis released a truckload of music that married their trademark sound — the upbeat style known as Ghanaian highlife — with funk and jazz, synths, Afrobeat and beyond. On their 1976 album, they incorporated Congolese rumba, which had spread throughout Africa thanks to its familiar-feeling Cuban-derived rhythms. The result of this cultural collision is a dizzying, highly danceable eddy of guitars, bass lines, vocals, horns and keyboards that feels like it never ends. Which is good, because you won’t want it to!

Molchat Doma, “Etazhi”

I guess a song on this album is huge on TikTok. I don’t know. I’m not on TikTok. But I am on Bandcamp, where I added “Etazhi” to my wishlist a while back because I liked the band name and the cover, both of which give off some nice, chilly, post-industrial Eastern Bloc vibes. And the music delivers! Molchat Doma is a Belarusian trio that makes cool, gloomy synth music that’s perfect listening for an overcast winter day spent inside, reading about the Cold War on Wikipedia.

Manzanita y Su Conjunto,

“Trujillo — Perú 1971-1974”

After stops in West Africa and Eastern Europe above, our travels take us to the Peruvian capital of Lima, where dynamic musician Manzanita — real name: Berardo Hernández — spent the early 1970s electrifying the country’s most popular music: psychedelic cumbia. Manzanita’s style was derived from the diversity of his hometown, Trujillo, where people of Spanish, African and indigenous descent made music together. This compilation from the Analog Africa label collects some of his band’s best recordings, which sizzle with hypnotic rhythms, heady funk and guitar work that’s somehow both crisp as an apple and fuzzy as a peach at the same time.