High Life Records

Est. 1975 · Kaneshie, Accra

High Life
Records.

An independent highlife and afro-jazz label — fifty years of dance-band horns, palm-wine guitar and one working turntable. Every sleeve you see below is generated by a single seeded algorithm; every groove you hear is synthesized live in your browser. Nothing plays until you press play.

Flip the crate How the turntable works

The label mark — drawn by the same sleeve algorithm as every release

The Crate

Six releases,
one seeded algorithm.

Flip through. Each sleeve below is drawn live by a single generative "Sleeve Engine": a diagonal gradient sweep, a sunburst of rhythmic rays, groove rings, and a ring of dots tracing that release's own highlife bell pattern — a different seed every time, the same math throughout. Press play on any sleeve to hear the turntable.

HLR-001 · 1976

Odo Sunyani

Nana Kwabena & the Odo Band

Dance-band highlife

The horn line that reopened Kaneshie market every Friday night.

HLR-002 · 2023

Anansi’s Radio

Efya Sarpong

Afro-jazz

A trickster tale sung over brushed cymbals and a wandering upright bass.

HLR-003 · 1979

Harbour Lights

The Sea Never Dry Orchestra

Big-band highlife

Fourteen musicians, one tugboat horn sample, zero rehearsals.

HLR-004 · 1981

Six Strings, One Cup

Kojo Brempong & the Palm-Wine Six

Guitar-band / palm-wine

Recorded on a veranda in Cape Coast between two rainstorms.

HLR-005 · 1983

Market Day Rhumba

Ama Serwaa

Rhumba-highlife

The B-side outsold the A-side within a week of pressing.

HLR-006 · 2025

Last Trotro to Kaneshie

The Junction Boys

Modern highlife revival

Three friends, a sampler, and a crate of their elders’ records.

The Turntable

Press play.
Nothing plays until you do.

Choose a sleeve from the crate above. The record slides onto the platter, the arm drops, and a short highlife-flavored loop is synthesized live with the Web Audio API — bell, bass, guitar and shaker, built from that release's own seed. Stop it any time.

Now on the platter

Select a sleeve from the crate to begin.

— Nothing loaded yet  

Sound is entirely opt-in — synthesized on your device with the Web Audio API, never autoplayed. With reduced motion enabled, the platter holds still but the audio still plays on request.

The Roster

Names, set the way
we’d set a sleeve.

Six acts, six catalog numbers — no photographs, just the names the way they'd appear stamped across an LP spine.

The Label

Fifty years
on one shelf.

High Life Records began in 1975 above a record shop on the Kaneshie road, founded by session bassist Kofi Ansah-Brew as a musicians' co-operative: a way for dance-band players tired of signing away their masters to press their own records and keep the publishing. The first pressing run was four hundred copies, hand-carried to radio stations in a trotro.

The label survived the 1980s the way most highlife imprints didn't — barely. When hiplife and imported disco emptied the dance halls, the catalog sat in tin trunks in a Kaneshie storeroom, flooded twice, dried out on a zinc roof both times. Ansah-Brew kept the masters anyway, on the theory that fashions return.

They did. In 2011 his granddaughter Abena Ansah-Brew, an audio engineer trained in Accra and London, took over the trunks and the name. High Life Records today is both a reissue house — remastering the 1970s and '80s catalog one seven-inch at a time — and an active label signing new bands who grew up on their grandparents' records. The turntable on this page plays synthesized approximations of that sound, built from the same rhythmic patterns the label has pressed since 1975.

High Life Records is a fictional label. Kofi and Abena Ansah-Brew, and every artist on this page, are invented for this portfolio piece. Read the design process.

Send us your demo

We listen to everything — dance-band, guitar-band, afro-jazz, or something with no name yet. Two songs, a short note, and a way to reach you.

Replies within three weeks. No submission fee, ever.