Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Solar Flight  



Richard Bush And Orbit appears to be a one off studio project, Richard Bush subsequently falling off the face of the earth, but co-producers Barry Yearwood and Warren Dorris getting a few more garage and freestyle releases under their belts before the 80's are up.

A lady drops science knowledge throughout the track, telling you about the circumference of a sphere, how to calculate the the longest edge of a triangle, and some other useful shit that doesn't really come up as often as it should in conscious funk lyrics. Although that being said, confusingly the record label is marked as being 33rpm but the record actually plays at 45rpm, so she obviously wasn't that clever.


Richard Bush And Orbit ‎– Solar Flight

Posted by Black Shag | 3 comments

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Scandalous  



This is from 1983 on Sue Records International and happens to be one of my favorite tracks of all time! Kaiya Matthews was one of the singers for the ADC Band, a mildy successful band from the early 70's early 80's. Kaiya went on to release a few more records in the late 80's on Northern Records but none of later tracks have the hood rat appeal of "Scandalous". The song is basically about Kaiya being into a party don who every other lady wants to get a piece of and not caring that he is getting his. The track title encapsulates the song perfectly, and in the words of Latarian Milton "it's fun to do bad things".

Kaiya-Scandalous

Posted by Cosmic Champagne | 3 comments

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Sunday, September 09, 2012

Digging The UK  


 I'm headed back to England next weekend, the trip was unexpected and sadly its not all fun, but I'm there for a couple of weeks and hoping to get some record shopping in, maybe a few days on the mainland too.

 The UK are competitive hunting grounds, with lots of domestic recordings as well as decades worth of imports, more DJ's, collectors and obsessives per capita than anywhere else, a nation of black music lovers and taste makers, every record store is expensive and the dealers educated and mercenary to the core. I'm no expert record buying there by any means, but I did grow up there before coming to the states and have a couple of theories. Firstly forget the big cities, you will find plenty of what you want but it will be hanging up in plastic on the wall waiting for a tourist such as yourself to come buy it for the top end of market rate, where is the sport in that? When I go I hit up the small coastal towns north of London, especially the dying and forgotten resort areas. Strange, grey, windswept, Victorian built colonies often in beautiful settings, but full of unwelcoming eccentrics. These places had their hey day in sixties, seventies and early eighties, in the era before cheap flight and package holidays to Southern Europe shrank their economies and turned them into seaside nursing homes. There would be small discos and nightclubs in the larger more popular beachtowns during the British northern soul and jazz funk eras, and I have found remnants from those collections from time to time.

 I was thinking about the last time I went, and pulled out this record that I bought at a village post office near Cromer, old ladies would line up to get their pension money or send a postcard, and by their feet were boxes and crates of records, taking up most of the floor space. I pulled out a minty copy of the spacey 'disco burner', Candido's Thousand Finger Man as well as a bunch of other brit funk, turns out the post master was a collector back in the day when the cliff top caravan parks were full of city dwellers on vacation and looking to party. A typically English digging experience if you get off the beaten track. This recording isn't from the copy I scored there, its actually a late nineties remaster from the original master tapes, I heard it and thought they did a great job so I'm using it instead..

Candido - Thousand Finger Man (12" version)

Posted by Black Shag | 5 comments

Monday, September 03, 2012

You Don't Know  


I wrote this post earlier this evening, it was originally supposed to be a cool, dub version of Serious Intention's garage hit You Don't Know. I cleaned the record because it was filthy, moved some sort of potted tree that had ended up infront of the recording rig, turned on the computer, I have this 8 year old Toshiba laptop connected to the MOTU recording interface that sits on a shelf and does nothing but rip records, but it takes half a lifetime to boot up.. I ripped the record, moved the plant back, transfered the wav over to another computer from the modern age to do a little post prod and convert it to mp3, tagged it, put it on the server, read a couple of biographies of the producer and wrote up some blurb on blogspot, chose a picture by trawling around some weird flickr groups, published the post, tweeted about it and linked it on facebook, then promptly tried to get on with my bleak existence. Ben txt's me 10 minutes later to tell me that he already posted the same track a few months back and that I should delete it and put up something else.

So I'm posting Sexy Dancer by Donald Bird..

Donald Byrd & 125th Street, N.Y.C. - Sexy Dancer

Posted by Black Shag | 4 comments