Could Radar Records do no wrong? Key-Matic's Breakin' In Space was by far the labels biggest 'hit', and the record holds a place in the pantheon of early electro master pieces. It has all the right ingredients, tastefully done vocoder (I'm by no means a vocoder collector/fan/nerd), non lame old school raps about space, dubbed out synths and cosmic overtones.

There are even a few young, future celebrities on this cut. The saxophone was done by Najee, who went on to rival Kenny G for a while as smooth jazz radio sax top dog, and we also have some scratches from Wizard K-Jee, a.k.a Keith Shocklee, future Bomb Squad member and the discoverer of Chuck D.

Here are all the cuts from the record.

Key-Matic – Breakin' In Space (Vocal)
Key-Matic – Breakin' In Space (Instrumental)
Key-Matic – Breakin' In Space (Lunar Beats i)
Key-Matic – Breakin' In Space (Lunar Beats ii)

Like many record collectors it has always been a dream of mine to press something on wax. I have always wanted to contribute to the world of the black crack by putting something in print for anyone to enjoy rather than just repping older hard to find records.
A couple years ago I became good friends with a local collector Tim who during an extended car ride to a record lead told me about his activity playing in several bands growing up in Oakland in the 1980s. After some pestering on my part Tim reluctantly dug up boxes of cassette recordings from this era. I think he was content leaving them as skeletons in the closet but I managed to convince him people still enjoy drum machine soul. Tim got on craigslist and tracked down the same model Tascam Porta-one four track machine we needed to play back the tapes.


Tim played regularly with a band known as Davinity during this time and recorded hours of material from bedroom demos to proper studio tracks. Recording quality is dodgy at times but fortunately they insisted on using only hi bias tapes and generally hit them with a good level. After sharing some of our finds with Sean from Sweater Funk and Andrew at PPU we decided to take the plunge and let some of this see the light of day 20+ years after it was recorded.


So far we have two 45s available featuring our favorite tracks from the Davinity cassette archives. A huge thank you goes to Andrew from PPU who was the inspiration for this project and provided a great deal of help in the process. Peoples Potential is also distributing the records worldwide.


We are very excited to start releasing music for y'all, look for more in the future including a debut from Beat Electric Records in 2012.

download lo-rez samples here
RYSQUE 001 Pierre - Cherri Snow b/w Veronica - So In Love
RYSQUE 003 Tim Tucker - C'Kret b/w Davinity - Fishnets

records available for purchase from EARCAVE (Washington DC), Rush Hour (Europe), and many other fine vendors. or you can email me directly at rysquerecs AT gmail.

We haven't put up any straight up hardcore disco in a long time so here you go. It is impossible to put these joints on and not want to invite all the foos in the neighborhood over for a dance party; unless you live where I live, then again, OK it's a bad idea altogether. Just convince BT to throw a matinee party at his house in LA and go hang out in his heated pool.

This Mandrill Jam reminds me or a mix between Tempest Trio's Do You Like The Way That It Feels and a song by Imagination. Sorry for the parts where it is clipping near the end, I am trying to dial in my new rig.

This early Tee Scott remix shows his knack for turning a straight forward disco hit into a dance floor classic with long drawn-out breaks with empty quiet backgrounds contrasting the disco anthem choruses.

Mandrill - Dance Of Love
First Choice - Love Thang (Tee Scott Remix)

Beatelectic is starting to look a little dated, we gave it a revamp a couple of years back, but the fact is it's a blogspot page, and in this day and age thats the equivalent of having your website up on geocities, with animated gifs of grim reaper skulls puking fire and popup ad's for cheap hotel rooms. All the new blogs I go to with the decent new electronic music on look like they were made by a team of trendy engineers with degrees in graphic design, then I come back to beatelectric and we look like shit. In reality I suppose to have had a blog this long hosted by google with direct mp3 links to unlicensed music is somewhat of a miracle, most got taken down due to copyright infringement complaints long ago, but I think its really a testament to the unpopularity of the under the radar dusty commercial failures that we post. And with that in mind, I'm about to post some private press Hi Nrg...

My apartment is on the corner of Castro and Market St in San Francisco, which has been the heart of the gay community here for decades, and as such when I go digging around my local thrift stores and yard sales I come up with endless San Francisco scene high energy and uptempo, euro disco. Not my genres of choice or expertise, but each to their own. A block either side of where I live were the homes of Megatone records, Moby Dick records, Hot Tracks records, some other labels and plenty of record stores specializing in dance music popular in the gay clubs at the time. Now and again, when searching around the 'hood something locally made that's a little outside of the norm shows up.

Sonny Padilla Jr.'s self released 1985 single is marked as coming out on Uno Records, the address of which is a few doors down the street from me, an old apartment complex, and probably the address of Sonny's living room office. It turns out that this record is actually well known and quite sort after on the digging circuit, fetching a couple of hundred bucks in mint condition, due to it's heavy utilization of the vocoder on the A side's It's Your Body, and as a rarity it makes it on to a lot of vocoder nerd's wants list. I actually prefer the instrumental of the B side, 'Talk To Me!', which doesn't appear to be on the internet anywhere.

In the sleeve notes Sonny states that the record was made at The Automatt, a well known studio which is now a parking lot on Fulsom St, the photo in this post was taken from the main room's mixing console. Sonny lived in San Francisco and worked in the music industry throughout his life before passing away in 2007, an obituary to him can be found here:

http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-11-30/news/17270905_1_memorial-tribute-naras-tv

Sonny Padilla Jr. - It's Your Body!
Sonny Padilla Jr. - It's Your Body! (Instrumental)
Sonny Padilla Jr. - Talk To Me!
Sonny Padilla Jr. - Talk To Me! (Instrumental)