A strange and obscure private press LP from Plymouth consisting mostly of music for children to ponce around to in “movement and dance” sessions at primary school. Quite trippy. Found in my favourite second hand record shop 15 years or so ago for a couple of quid.
Lovely cover versions of Daydreaming and Ain’t No Sunshine, and the original rare groove funk banger “Red, Black and Green”. I found this in a second hand book shop in Donegal in a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. Who knows how it got there.
I don’t know how you guys remember all the small details about where and when you got certain records. Maybe it’s something to do with my memory issues…
I went through a phase where I picked up anything that fitted that early 80s disco sound that many consider cheesy but I like how many producers felt liberated by the way disco had started to fall out of the mainstream and head back underground. You’ll Never Know is the big tune but there’s a couple of FK contributions on there and you can tell because they sound great up loud. Check the percussion break in the second half of I’m Totally Yours for this.
Got this much more recently after hearing a recommendation and not believing it could be true. But yes, Silver Gun is a dark and wondrous thing. Not the best pressing though - sadly often the case for Portuguese pressings from that era. I live in Portugal so I take a punt on them from time to time, as they tend to be much cheaper than “imports”.
O.C. – Time’s Up (1994, Vinyl) - Discogs
This one actually has a bit of a story. Around 2001 i spent a lot of time on a UK hip hop forum (UKHH i think?), this was pre Discogs so not easy to find whatever old records you want. I posted a wants list and someone got in touch saying they had 2 copies of this OC record and offered to sell me both for a good price. Anyway, they sent the records, and through that we got chatting about other stuff including weed which was my number 1 hobby at the time (or a close second to hip hop nerding). The guy had been given a load of nice weed from a friend and offered to send some up (we only really got dodgy soap bar in Aberdeen at the time so this was super exicting). A very un-stealth jiffy bag was posted through the letter box a few days later. My Mum picked it up, caught a whiff and went totally ape shit. Once she had calmed down, i explained the magnitude of how good this was, and convinced her to let me keep it.
The power of a good music forum Really need to track that guy down and say thanks. What a G!
I have that Hi Gloss record and I think it’s amazing, but to me the best tune by far is “I Want Your Love To Last”. That is one hell of a party starter - in my experience it always gets people moving.
The only Fall record in my collection, I picked this up from the local indie/alternative record store when I was 16 - the same place where I bought all the Velvet Underground, Jesus and Mary Chain, Stooges, and Television records I own. “Slang King” is one of my favourite Fall tracks.
Windham Hill has a reputation for putting out cheesy bargain bin New Age records, but I’m yet to come across a release of theirs that I don’t like - this being no exception. Picked this one up for a quid at a boot sale a couple of years back and often play the beautiful “Synopsis” in mixes/sets.
Nice jazzy Italian disco track that I picked up on a trip to Naples a few years back. Have never played it out as the BPM fluctuates so much in the intro it’s a nightmare to mix with…
https://www.discogs.com/release/5983095-Allah-Las-Worship-The-Sun
Allah Las. Worship the Sun.
Indie that Test Pressing would approve of. 2nd album from Allah Las and equally as impressive as their debut. Sun Soaked Raw West Coast Indie Pop absolutely sublime.
Also the guys behind Reverberation Radio Podcasts/Mixtapes check these out if you haven’t already
a great record - “double dare” might be the best YLT song ever. “nowhere near” is also in the running. another one of those records i needed in the early 90’s to counterbalance all the other electronic or drum machine music i was buying. i’m not a big guitar guy but guitar rock is deep in my DNA - it’s hard to be my age, from my area and not have an affection for a good rock band.
were the late 90’s peak compilation times? BBE always came with the quality and were sort of “buy on sight” because if if you knew a bunch of songs on them, you’d also find a few you didn’t know. keb darge and dj shadow did the compiling. around this time i wasn’t playing a lot of funk or soul, but spending a twenty on a comp like this was a no-brainer, you’d be happy you had it forever.
i don’t remember this record very well, but i did play it. seems to me that one side of it was chiller mid-tempo? i’d have to dig it out and give it another listen. see, that’s a good thing about random roulette - sometimes you land on something that would have otherwise gone forgotten.
fucking love this record, both sides. probably in the collections of about 75% of the registered users on this forum. there should be a thread about this record and the records that sound like this. clonky stompers?
meat beat manifesto at the height of their remixing power. probably one of about 3 shamen tracks i feel like i could still get away with playing. also, the pressing on this is bonkers - so loud, the bass so clean. people probably hated when i played this because i always waited for the fake ending.
i didn’t buy a ton of djax records - they could be a little frenetic and squawky. i do like some good acid though, and this is a good one. certainly slower than most of the djax records! feel free to ignore the track titles, i remember this as being a little smoother and chiller than what the track titles might imply.
van hunt deserved better. maybe juuuust a little late to the neo soul party, it felt like his first couple of records were good enough to completely blow up, but never got the full traction they needed. he worked some good people (and also lenny kravitz), but never made it up to a-list status. i’ll save my sympathy for him - he’s been in a relationship with halle berry for the last few years, and that seems like a decent way to live. pretty much all of these tracks would get play from me in bar and hotel lounge gigs. haven’t listened to them in a long time, and maybe now i will.
i doubt i played this out, unless i played it on the groovetech shows. i liked a lot of these records but either there wasn’t much of a minimal scene around here, or i wasn’t looped in. bought a lot of playhouse records though!
Razor n Tape’s edit series has always been solid but they really hit their stride around the time this one was released. “Down on Bitter End” got a LOT of play by yours truly at a monthly residency I had back then. Lovely record, this.
One if my all time favorite records, for real. There is so much to be said about this, from some of Keith Jarrett’s most inspired writing, to Sam Brown being a criminally underrated guitar player. It used to be the case that you could find this record easily in the dollar bins in the US, and if that’s still going on, it’s the deal of the century. Last track features Jarrett on the Soprano Sax, very funky, and he’s also playing the Rhodes which he hated, which is a pity because when he did play it it was always great (see: his stint with Miles Davis and his duet record with Jack DeJohnette)
i have twenty minutes before i need to feed the dog, so let’s see if i can select three discogs randoms AND… maybe listen to them before the hound really starts putting on the pressure.
fuckin’ love this record, and kind of obsessed with this sound right now. 1989 big budget/big studio classy house. to you guys this might have been pop but to me, at the time, it sounded super classy, genuinely grown & sexy before that was ever a term. i felt like an adult buying these records (even though i was a kid, and also buying the super proto-rave hoover R&S records at the same time). i got a couple of funny side gigs playing weird back rooms for over-perfumed “classy” lady restaurateurs, none of which ever brought in more then 40 people nor lasted longer than a month - but i felt like a full grownup, playing in button-downs rather than cartoon t-shirts. (i still wear the cartoon t-shirts)
i’m not gonna pull this one out and play it because i have it committed to memory. first place i heard it? fullllly high at flammable in seattle, and doc martin played it off a CDR (which, at the time was techno sorcery). of course it was the king britt mix. a friend of mine - who worked at the same record store as me, and was on the same pills - slid up next to me and was like “doooood - we gotta get this”. white labels showed up at the store a week or two later and we flew through copies of this, bootlegs of this, and any mixtape that had it on it.
embarrassingly, i don’t think i can put hands on this one. no idea where it would be. but - purchased for the awesome “ink man” by kevin harrison. i grew up with a kid named kevin harrison, but i’ll bet we all did, gotta be one of the more common white kid names out there. the kevin i knew made me a mixtape with the psychedelic furs “here come cowboys” on it, which i thought was kind of a banger but also kind of stupid. i was 12, it makes sense.
Electronic disco from '84 that i’ve just pulled out for the first time in ages and liking it. Bit high energy/ Italo in feel, falsetto vocal. I remember buying it 20 odd years ago from a particular dealer at a record fair. Can also recall picking up these at the same time (as you do with these things). Bit of a Garage theme.
Airstrip One. 90’s bargain bin find (still is), based on the cover. Jangly, funky New Wave thats making me think Talkings Heads/Franz Ferdinand. Funny bit is i only just discovered that Airstrip One became Escape from New York!! ( minus 100 digging points for not paying attention!)
Bought from Rival Records, Plymouth.
Would have been bought on a Thursday which was payday.
Every Thursdays I’d take the brown envelope containing my wages, if I remember right it was £27.50. Finish work at 5, it was a 15 min walk to to the record shop and Id usually buy three 12’s. Then on to the bus for the 30-40 min ride home, reading the sleeves of my new purchases and hoping the punts worked out well (overall it was a bit hit and miss).
There was no listening deck in the shop so my purchases were usually based on James Hamilton reviews in RM or straight up punts, this was one of my most memorable punts from that period.
It was unlike any record I had in my collection (this was April 1990), I remember being fascinated by the drum programming, still sounds really good to me now.
Loved this record, I can remember buying it in vinyl exchange in Manchester the first month I started university, October 1990. I remember reading about it when it came out but the record shops in Leeds didn’t have any copies, so was really chuffed to find it in Manchester a few months later.
Also a very long record that i always want to hear all of - with a Dramatic opening, a hypnotic groove, a slow down and speed up again bit and some fantastic vocals. Its this kind of thing i think of when i hear people use that old cliche of a record being a journey.
https://www.discogs.com/release/1422390-GZA-Genius-Knock-Knock
it sort of goes without saying that GZA/the genius is a supremely talented MC. never too much, never over the top. i could probably live without this single, but i got it as a promo way back when and i hang on to the wu-adjacent stuff.
https://www.discogs.com/release/7293-Blakkat-The-Barrio-Bros-Understanding
to be honest, i can’t remember much about this record. 2001 was a time for west coast house, there was so much good stuff and there was such an appetite for that sound. i could probably drop a chill $100 on that week’s new releases and slay a set at flammable easy. maybe i’ll pull this one out later for a revisit.
https://www.discogs.com/release/37471-The-Gherkin-Jerks-1990
what a blessing it is to have lived and loved music in the same era that larry heard did/does. i wish my copy sounded better - but like a lot of my favorite disco records, the wear and the sizzle makes it sound more authentic.
https://www.discogs.com/release/81243-Dubtribe-Sound-System-Mother-Earth-Remixes
another one of those that was probably played everywhere, but if you really wanted the ultimo “mother earth” experience, you needed to hear it played four times in a night in some weird warehouse, parking garage, or 10 miles deep on a logging road in a national forest.
Fila was big for me in the 90s (and still!). In the FB days it was cool to message with him. I improvised some violin stuff to put on a track for Hemidemisemiquaver - in the end it got cut but it was fun to (almost) collab with a hero. Top guy.
Really need to track that guy down and say thanks. What a G!
minus 100 digging points for not paying attention!)
