Faluma.com – Berlin’s specialist on Soca & Calypso – deeply rooted in the Caribbean carnivals.We are a music label, distribution, store and cultural network.
Often enough soon after the festival days the music disappears much to fast and music piracy makes it even harder for the artists to live off the fruits of their creativity.
Faluma’s ambition is to support the artists by presenting to an international audience this music, that was always quite hard to get hold of, partly because of missing distribution and marketing channels and partly due to the seasonal and ephemeral character of typical carnival tunes.
The company was named after a song by Square One (from Barbados) – Faluma (Ding Ding Ding).
Faluma History
It all began with the Faluma Online Shop founded in 2003 by Martin Stahl aka Marflix, Johannes Kueckens aka Doob (Constant Pressure Supasoca) and Julia Deimann to present and push the music which was hardly available in Europe. Martin and Johannes have been (and still are) DJs who where searching for their music for years untill they decided to import them by their own and help it distribute to other DJs and music lovers.
The Faluma Online Shop was born!
The shop offers a wide selection in the field of Soca and Calypso Vinyl, CDs, DVDs, mixtapes, books and accessoires and lots of classics and rare collectibles from diverse Caribbean islands. If you are searching for music from Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Grenada, St. Vincent, Antigua and other Caribbean islands – Faluma.com is your place to be.
Beside Soca and Calypso Faluma also offers some very special Reggae, Mento, Reggaeton, Parang and Zouk albums.
Faluma soon also started to operate as a label and pressed some beautiful soca vinyls that were sold out in no time and are now hard to get collectors items.
Over the years the market changed a lot and and the label Faluma Digital was founded to release and distribute soca MP3s. Faluma Digital presented the first ever MP3-only soca album and made available the backcatalogue of some of the greatest bands from the West Indies as well as the latest albums of well-known or upcoming artists. (Learn how it works).
In 2008 Faluma joined forces with the Trinidad & Tobago Entertainment Company (short: T&T Ent), a state agency under the Ministry of Trade and Industry of Trinidad and Tobago. The aim of this cooperation is to pave the way for a greater international attention for and easier access to the beautiful and diverse musical traditions and achievements of Trinidad and Tobago.The shared vision is to digitally release music of all facettes from Trinidad and Tobago and market it online. Since T&T Ent is rooted in the local music business as well as in cultural and governmental institutions and Faluma is already offering a wide selection of soca and clypso on the net for many years and distributes it to all major MP3 platforms, the cooperation is just a logical step in promoting the musical culture of Trinidad and Tobago throughout the world. The cooperation ended in 2014.
Faluma Africa, another Faluma sub-label, was founded 2010 in cooperation with he non-govermental organization AfricAvenir.
Faluma’s Martin started in 2010 with friends the music blog TropicalBass.com which is now an important voice for the lively World Bass scene. Since Faluma is providing the technical infrastructure for the music blog, is was only a logic step to found a music label TropicalBass.
Faluma Team
Martin Stahl – CEO, A & R
Julia Deimann – Label Management
Martin’s life is fully dedicated his big love: music. Beside Faluma he’s DJ and producer and he is writing for the music blog TropicalBass.com. In his “other life” he works as Product Manager at the local startup nu3.
Julia is a real label pro – running a label like Faluma and also working full-time for the London/Berlin-based label BBE Music. In her rare spare time she writes for the food blog “Nimmersatt in Berlin“.
Pic: Saïra Koolman