James Acaster’s mixtape

Verity Sharp shares a mixtape from stand-up comedian, record producer and head honcho behind the 40-strong international music collective Temps, James Acaster. As a child, Acaster grew up “obsessed with wanting to record an album one day” before pursuing a career as a stand-up comedian. The opportunity to revisit that desire arose during the first UK lockdown, when he found himself sitting on a wealth of drum tracks recorded on his childhood kit, material initially conceived as being part of a would-be mockumentary about a naive comedian-turned-musician. Stuck at home, the project morphed, and Acaster enlisted the help of some of his favourite artists - including drummer Seb Rochford and vocalists Xenia Rubinos and Quelle Chris - to realise the record. The resulting album, PARTY GATOR PURGATORY (named after a human-sized toy alligator that Acaster won at a county fair when he was 7), disregards genres in favour of experimentalism, packing all his favourite sounds into a singular melting pot of ideas. For his Late Junction mixtape, James Acaster picks out tracks from the likes of Brazilian vocalist Elza Soares, American singer-songwriter and guitarist Marnie Stern and experimental hip hop trio The Sooper Swag Project.

Elsewhere in the show, an intimate, stripped-down approach to Malian praise songs from Namian Sidibé and a piece by Guatemalan avant-garde composer Joaquín Orellana created using his Útiles Sonoros, a series of custom-built instruments that sit somewhere between sculpture and sound installation.

Produced by Gabriel Francis
A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3