James Acaster’s mixtape

Another chance to hear the exclusive mixtape that Celebrity Traitors star James Acaster made for Late Junction back in 2023. 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 in 2020, 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, Verity Sharp shares an intimate, stripped-down approach to Malian praise songs from Namian Sidibé and improvised music made on two garden hoses played simultaneously by Stockholm's Johan Arrias.

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