slow

It's summer, I have a job, I'm trying to write, I'm not getting much done, and it shows here. Sorry to anyone wondering what's up. There will be a post later this week for certain, probably Friday. Sorry for the slowness, but life happens.

hors d'oeuvres, anyone?

You've never heard of The Hors D'oeuvres? Well, neither have I. I was shopping at Square Records in Akron a few years ago and saw a few copies of this peculiar single for sale. The shoppe owner informed me someone had asked if he could sell some deadstock of this peculiar 7" that had been sitting in his home for decades. The owner obliged and I bought one, as I can't say no the weirdness.

The "songs" sound a bit like Pere Ubu and Devo spit in each other's faces and recorded the events, so don't expect anything "traditional". The a-side is The Marvin in Outer Space and the b-side is I'm Turning into a Fly. Expect weird, in case you didn't get the subtext, and enjoy!

shake down

I know, I know, I'm really slow. Life happens, right? So here's a little post, just a "version" of one of my favorite tracks from the early 2000s that hasn't gotten a reissue despite it being hinted as coming several times over the last few years. This is the Morgan Geist Version of The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers. As much as I love the original version, I was on a mission to hunt down an original 12" with this version. So enjoy this for right now and I'll be back this weekend or early next week at the latest. And thanks for your patience. Enjoy.

in advance of June 7th, why not an early present?

If you know me, you know whose birthday it is this Friday. It'll be three years since his passing. I'm still working on my book, of which he plays a major role, and I'm hoping to have a rough assembly done by the end of this month or early into July. Needless to say, his music is very important to me.

A year ago, a group of collectors named the Coco Bros assembled and mastered a compilation of mostly excellent quality unreleased tracks. They didn't end up sharing it widely because the bootleg community had been under threat by the estate of the artist I'm talking about today. In that year, nothing major has happened in the bootlegging community, and since all of these tracks were circulating before and are only collected in here to facilitate an introduction to this material, they gave me permission to share it. These are the MP3s, though a lossless version if also available.

To reiterate my point from the last paragraph, none of these tracks are exclusives. If you're already a die-hard fan, you've probably heard all of them. If not, I'm sure you'll find plenty to explore. Let me know if you have any questions. Enjoy.

we're not dead yet

Despite a lack of activity this past month, we do persist. We will return to a more irregularly scheduled program this June. Thank you for your patience.

WTF IS THIS?, Vol. 1

The other day, I heard a peculiar song, which made me think of another peculiar song, which made me long for the days when I might've found myself introduced to other peculiar songs. I don't hear many peculiar songs via traditional channels anymore, so I made a mixtape for my enjoyment and I'm sharing it with you. I hope you enjoy it. The tracklist is available on the Mixcloud page for this mix.

can u relate? no, really, can u?

It was probably about seven or eight years ago that I started hunting down all the versions of DJ Mink's Hey! Hey! Can U Relate. There was only one single release, and that's the version most people are concerned with, but there was more than that! Before being issued on a fledgling Warp Records as their fourth single, promos were pressed and distributed for potential releases on the FON and Ozone labels. The FON 12", or at least my copy, has peculiar issues, namely the beginning of each side starting a second or two into the song. Bad mastering and cutting? Some copies don't have that issue, so who really knows, but it has the acapella and an unreleased remix. The Ozone white label has four unique versions of Relate, including the remix from the FON 12" and ANOTHER unreleased remix! Now, neither of these remixes are the cream of the crop, being more minimal takes on the original, but they're nice to have all the same. Apart from the acapella version, all of the other mixes were eventually released, though there was still another unreleased 12", a Warp remix issue with the catalog number WAP 4R that got to the test pressing phase. Interestingly, that version contained the Deep Space Mix, which appeared on Warp's Pioneers of the Hypnotic Groove compilation (albeit uncredited as such), one of the unreleased remixes, and the Sunshine Dub Instrumental which appeared on the standard 12" Warp issued. What makes this stranger is that the B-Side of the 4R test pressing uses the same plate for the mastering of the retail B-Side, though they scratched out the R from the catalog number. I'd love to know exactly what changed between each of these releases, and what might have originally been intended for the Warp retail B-Side, but that information will probably never become available. That said, I'm posting one of the unreleased remixes for your listening pleasure. Again, it's not essential, but it's nice to have, and I still love this song so much. It's just fun in a way that a lot of hip-hop isn't anymore. I can imagine rocking this at a roller-skating rink and it going over fabulously. So go rock the Funky Mix of DJ Mink's Hey! Hey! Can U Relate and maybe break out some roller skates if the weather is okay where you are.

hearing voices

Sorry I haven't posted for a bit, life catches up with you sometimes and then you're trying to fend it off. That said, not much of a story behind today's post other than the well-known dub Erol Alkan did for Bloc Party's She's Hearing Voices wasn't the only version he did. A white-label 12" was issued with the dub and a full vocal version, which is excellent! No clue why the label didn't try and give this version a bigger release, as I think it's superior to the dub. I mean, it's Erol Alkan, the dub version is great, but when I hear a remix, I want a vocal version and then a dub version. You could argue that a lot of Alkan's remixes/reworks/edits are more about the instrumentals than the vocals, which is especially true with things like his Franz Ferdinand rework, but this version is so strong, there's really no valid reason to bury it on a limited release white-label 12". So, from my own copy, here's a rip of Bloc Party's She's Hearing Voices (Erol Alkan's Calling Your Name).

a poem about neil young vomiting

If that title isn't a hint, well, uh, sorry. If you did get the hint, you are now rewarded with a few Soul Coughing obscurities. The first are two tracks from the Ruby Vroom sessions back in 1994, and the second a rather obscure mix of Super Bon Bon from the one and only Tchad Blake. I've shared versions of the Ruby Vroom tracks elsewhere before, so maybe you've heard them, but probably not. As for Super Bon Bon, almost definitely not.

The quick and dirty of it is, a friend and I were involved in trying to get a Soul Coughing archival release project off the ground a few years ago, but issues with a specific member of the band put those goals on ice for the time being. We were far from ready for prime time, but we'd gotten new transfers of a bunch of live shows (some already in circulation but still significant upgrades), and a lot of unreleased or rare material. I'm not supposed to release any of it, which is a shame, but my friend and I agreed to release some of these Ruby Vroom rough mixes once or twice. Since then, I've re-done my initial transfer of the RV tape and put my own mastering touches on the tracks, and I think they came out pretty good for my thoroughly uneducated ass. The first is an extended version of Bus to Beelzebub, with an unused intro and an unfaded outro. The second is the first of two takes of Disseminated that were recorded during the RV sessions, though the song was re-recorded for Irresistible Bliss, so this version is completely unreleased. And finally, the version of Super Bon Bon seems to have been released on a Japanese issue of IB, though all I have to go on that is a vague reference on Discogs. It's super swampy and funky, though not dubby in the traditional, reggae sense. Still, calling it a "dub" version is probably the easiest description you could give it with some accuracy.

Click on the song titles in the last paragraph to check them out. Enjoy.

guess who?

Sorry, it's been a little while since my last post. Very busy this week with a funeral among other things.

If you followed my old site(s), you probably know I'm a big fan of cut-up hip-hop. In particular, I'm a devoted follower of Double Dee & Steinski (who have a wonderful Bandcamp page up that you should visit!) along with DJ Food/Strictly Kev, Coldcut, DJ Shadow and many more. I love the recontextualization of other people's work to make something new, so all the better known stuff, along with deep divers like John Oswald and Wobbly, tickle my fancy. That said, none of those guys are what got me interested in this kind of music. Oddly enough, it was the C&C Music Factory producers, David Cole and Robert Clivilles, and their work with Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. They issued the first taste of their collaboration in 1991 with Let the Beat Hit 'Em, an almost entirely sample-based hip-hop track meant for the club as much as "boomin' systems" that doubled as a tribute to fallen king of the tape edits, Chep Nunez. The rest of their collaboration didn't sound anything like this, going more in a street-driven dance vibe that fit their works in the early nineties, but I still enjoyed it all. Nothing beat Let the Beat Hit 'Em though! I bought the cassette maxi-single and bugged-out to the extended remix and instrumental/dub versions constantly until I upgraded to the CD version. It's still a favorite and sits snug on my phone for when I need it.

Let the Beat Hit 'Em seems to be a bit of strange beast outside of my youthful recollections. I remember first hearing it on the Open House Party radio show and seeing the video at least once on MTV, but it never seemed to get much mainstream focus. The b-side of the original single was the so-called "5 Minute House Version" which I thought was dumb and kinda boring as it was basically a completely new track that, apart from the name, featured nothing from the original and was barely a song. Apparently, a further remix of this version became popular in the clubs and overseas. That later remix definitely improved on it, but I still couldn't understand the popularity of this version over the hip-hop track.

Time moves on, C&C Music Factory became a mostly forgotten joke, and Lisa Lisa disappeared, probably not making much money for her label which resulted in her getting dropped. She put out something on an indie label, but I never got to check it out. Still, the BEAT maintained, and while I like all her earlier singles, Let the Beat Hit 'Em is my jam. So when I found a promo 12" on Discogs that was reported to have two otherwise unavailable versions of Let the Beat Hit 'Em, I was intrigued. This wasn't a test-pressing, acetate or internal-use cassette, it was an officially issued promotional 12" that named-checked C&C but didn't announce Lisa and company, listing only Guess Who? and not even the song's name. I eventually purchased a copy and found two significantly different versions of the song, both seemingly earlier mixes with a lot of samples that were dropped from the officially released versions. I posted them on my Soundcloud, figuring they were fair game since they had never been released outside of a non-commercial 12", only to get the first of a three strikes warning. I was done with uploading anything to Soundcloud after that and just sat on my goods. Well, now that I have another site, I figured this was as good a time as any to share this 12" with the world again. You can get them here and here. They're still pretty awesome 28 years later!

I tried reaching out to Robert Clivilles a few times to see if I could get any background on the song and maybe these mixes, but I never heard back. No surprise. Still, this is one of those records I'd love to know more about. In the early days of digital editing, they probably spent a whole day in the studio adjusting the pitch and key of the samples and trying to get things sounding right before assembling the basic track. I can only imagine how long something like that could take and how maddening it could be. So, if anyone knows Robert C or Lisa Lisa and can get me in touch with them, drop me a line, though I'm assuming these are stories I'll probably never hear. :(

Please forgive me for the slightly downer outro note there. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

what's in a name? and other questions we don't care about.

Among other things I'm into, I've gotten interested in ripping cassette tapes. Most of the time I feel people don't make very good rips of cassettes, whereas ripping vinyl is something of an art form. I'm pretty good at ripping vinyl, though I make no claim to being an expert. I have my method and it works for me. But when it comes to tapes, I think I've got this figured out pretty damn well. Because of that, I've looked around and hunted for bizarre cassettes that I might find interesting. Some of the things I've gotten are:

A pre-release version of Beck's Odelay with a slightly different title, some songs with significantly different titles (Devil's Haircut was apparently named Electric Music in the Summer People at one point, unless it was some kind of internal label mistake), and uncleared samples. Some of those tracks will end up here later on.

A collection of rough mixes from the sessions for Soul Coughing's first album, with every song but one included, and a number of unreleased pieces. (Thanks, Mat!)

Rather finished sounding demos for George Clinton's second album for Prince's Paisley Park label. These could've probably been released as a finished album, though the versions later released are mostly superior.

There are quite a few other oddities I've located here and there, but one that really stands out is a "pre-mastering" tape of Lauryn Hill's Miseducation album. It was apparently made for someone at a German branch of Sony and features most of the album, minus a song or two, with a song or two that didn't make the album in their place. None of the interludes are present and a number of the song titles are completely different. It's pretty cool, though none of those things are revelations. The only really big find is a notably different version of Every Ghetto, Every City. The vocals appear to be the finished performance, but the backing track is quite different, with a sample of Miss Lauryn dropping a quip being looped throughout the track. I don't think this has ever leaked, and I'm not big into holding onto things forever unless I've been asked to, so here's a little bit of joy for you to jam to as we approach the weekend. If anyone really cares about the rest of the tape, I'm sure I can make it available for you to check out. For now though, let's keep it to this one track, labeled Welcome Back on the j-card. Enjoy.