At least 6,000 LPs from the last 60 years are piled up in Cheb Gero’s Paris apartment—who’s real name is Gery: Algerian rai, barimba from Benin, Jewish gems—whatever was played on the southern side of the globe at any given time finally ends up in Gero’s hands.
Gero has been running the label Akuphone since 2015. The label releases music that comes from here, there and everywhere. Or rather, came from. Mostly it’s records or cassettes that never made it across national borders. And then suddenly they’re spinning on turntables on, let’s say, rooftops in Neukölln. Gero has almost 100 releases on Akuphone. Recently there have been several world tours, from musical ethnography seminars to contemporary electronic sounds.
Throat singing from Cambodia
There’s a good reason why Cheb Gero’s bio says »Record Dealer«. In the 2000s he worked in a record store in Paris and, as he puts it, »completed his musical education«. When Gero switched to label life and began working with Chinese folk music, he soon moved on to Gregorian chants, Sinhala pop and Cambodian throat singing. At first, this may seem like a random exodus into a dusty collection of exotic world music, but there is a clear direction.
»I want to place musical genres in their historical and political context«, says Gero. »Obviously, the music is right in the foreground, but we can only really understand what it’s all
about when we are familiar with the conditions under which it was created.« That’s why Gero works like an archaeologist—only instead of digging through layers of stone, he scours the flea markets of the French capital. In the end, he brings his new find back to his apartment. And then he uses it for a mix, like the one based exclusively on Turkish cassettes.
