Cassette tapes are back, as devotees of local labels like Help Yourself, Casino Trash, and Lost Sound Tapes can attest. In much of Africa, the cassette connoisseur Brian Shimkovitz is having the opposite problem.

“Tape shops don’t really exist anymore,” Shimkovitz told The Stranger over the phone from Brooklyn. That’s kind of an issue when your music project is called Awesome Tapes from Africa.

Still, the L.A.-based DJ and record label owner, who releases throwback and contemporary African music, then splits proceeds with the artists, persists. He culled tapes from warehouses of otherwise worthless goods on recent trips to Senegal, Ethiopia, and Ghana. In South Africa, he just missed the closure of a Tower Records equivalent, which dumped thousands of tapes on the curb when the chain shuttered.

Shimkovitz will be hauling a portion of his tape collection to town on Thursday, April 26 for a DJ gig at Kremwerk. He appears alongside Seattle’s cutting-edge experiment in what African music can sound like in America, Chimurenga Renaissance, the side project of Shabazz Palace’s Tendai “Baba” Maraire, the son of a Zimbabwean mbira master, and Hussein Kalonji, a first-generation Congolese-American and son of a soukouss-style guitar virtuoso. (KEXP’s Darek Mazzone, host of Wo’ Pop, rounds out the bill.)

Shimkovitz got into tapes in 2006 during a Fulbright scholarship to Ghana, when the then-aspiring ethnomusicologist was studying youth culture and the music industry through the lens of hiplife, a dance-friendly local flavor of hip-hop. Back then, they were the de facto music medium in West Africa. So like every music head in the mid-2000s, Shimkovitz started a blog, first the hiplife complex, and then Awesome Tapes, which ended up becoming a career.

Over a decade later, just like African technology leapfrogged past landlines and straight to mobile phones, a fervent tape culture has gone digital, with bluetooth file transfers—a culture Portland-based Sahel Sounds has admirably documented—replacing stalls selling tapes. “The physical movie and music marketplace has dwindled because of piracy and online streaming,” Shimkovitz said.

Despite the dwindling supply, Shimkovitz swears he’s not freaking out like a tape junkie facing withdrawal. “For me the tape has never been this type of rarity the way people treasure vinyl,” he said. “I’ve always thought of it as a mass-produced, democratic, easy-to-access-for-every-person cultural artifact.” Although tapes are scarcer, since they don’t fetch big bucks on the secondary market from collectors, he faces little competition and a low financial barrier to entry when it comes to salvaging what’s left before it ends up in a landfill.

“Im chasing what’s left,” Shimkovitz said. Although he has thousands of tapes, he insists, “I’m not a crazy insane collector. I’m not one of those people who’s fetishizing and searching more and more cassettes. If I can find them, I’m stoked. If I visit a country in Africa as a tourist, then I search for cassettes. But I’ve never gone just to dig for tapes.”

These days, Awesome Tapes from Africa is more focused on cultivating an artist roster than reviving old tapes. Shimkovitz has had a string of successes pushing new musicians, like Ghanaian marathon spinner DJ Katapila, and reviving the careers of one’s who had largely faded from memory, like Ethiopian jazz legend Hailu Mergia. The latter is booked to play Seattle later this year and Shimkovitz anticipates a big showing from the region’s 10,000-strong Ethiopian and Eritrean communities.

At Kremwerk, meanwhile, Shimkovitz’s cassette-only performance may be a technological debut for the club, which reportedly was still sourcing tape decks at press time. (Shimkovitz travels with his own as backup.) Whether in their original heyday or now during their indie revival, tapes were never a central medium in DJ culture, but Shimkovitz finds himself happily slotted in between synthesizer and drum machine heavy beats.

“When I play a techno rave in a warehouse, my set is a nice palate cleanser in between a whole bunch of heavy, minimalist, or tech-y kind of music,” he said. On Thursday, however, it will be the star of the show.