Sloba

New release from the Beautiful Swimmers coming soon, followed by a new Protect-U 12". Check out the Future Times blog for more information (see blogroll>>>>)

Happy Birthday Bill x

Mike @ Together We Kill took the following photo's at the opening:

http://togetherwekill90291.blogspot.com/2010/09/reserved-for-mr-bill-murray.html

Holy fucking shit Batman!

How did I not know anything about this?????!!!!!!!!

www.thesupernoblebrothersmovie.com/

Party People Unreal

People's Potential Unlimited. Where to start? Well, it's a record label thats the brainchild of Andrew Morgan, owner of the Earcave record store based in Washington that sells music online (www.earcave.com) Of course it's not just any music, often it's quite obscure funk, soul and disco from back in the day. It started in 2007 when Andrew was working with Wilbert Harris (of TMS), trying to souce more copies of a 45" by the group TMS - none could be found so they chose to reissue it and People's Potential Unlimited (PPU) was born.



I came across the label as I was fiending after rare disco shizzle and was following up some leads relating to Ebony Cuts, a now defunkt radio show run by Gloria and Cubeism, disco nerds of the highest order. Their archives are still online, to be found at www.ebonycuts.com - so I came across this little 45" called Be You by Henri Rich with an edit on the B-side by Cubeism and I thought I should check it out. I gave it a listen, but didn't really get down with it - the same way I couldn't get down with the "Le Cop" - Le Roc/Law and Order. Both supposed to be sought after, rare, valuable and above all really good disco plates, but no matter how much I tried to persuade myself it was still a no... (Of course the collector in me still picks up a copy "for the archives"). The Henri Rich was a new reissue on People's Potential Unlimited and although I wasn't down with "Be You", the label looked interesting, from the graphics, to Cubeism's involvement, to the reported calibre of the material released and lined up for release, and due to the type of people who were getting excited about it (the hardcore disco collector fraternity).

I gotta admit, I was kinda slow on the label at first and didn't pay it the attention it deserved. First off I discovered the Earcave website and started to marvel at some of the very expensive wonders I'd never heard of in record form - it was like an aladdin's cave to the uninitiated. I couldn't afford much (any) of what was on offer, until I saw a promo for a PPU release for sale. It sounded weird, clunky, percussive, electronic and was just the sort of thing I imagined a DJ hero of mine Walter Gibbons might be into. It was a PROMO and it was in my price range! The record was Crunch - Funky Beat/Cruise. That was it, I was addicted, slowly going through the PPU back catalogue, picking up all that had been released thus far. Often I dithered over a release, unsure if I actually liked it or if I was just being a completionist, such as with Sir Bentley - Street Shuffle which took me over a year of debating with myself before I bought it, and often, as with this tune I soon realised that those which I questioned often turned out to be those that I loved the most.

Anyway, please go to your local record store and buy PPU releases. You can also buy the vinyl online at http://ppu.bigcartel.com/  and don't worry, there's even a CD of these amazing records, the People's Potential Family Album there too for the non-believers!

Here's a selection of my highlights from the label:

The Pinch - Shot Out
Lovely 12" sounding just like a Prelude records 80's dub mix (funnily enough with Andrew knowing his shit, there's a dub mix on the B-side). It's side one that kills it with me though, plenty of room to breath, spacey, heavy heavy drum attacks, utterly familiar sounding, yet fresh even now. A one record party all to itself, massive!

Glass Pyramid Band - Country Cowboy
Wrong, just wrong, on so many levels. I can't stand records like this, from the way it starts, it just doesn't sound right, it's awkward, it sounds off-key. BUT, it makes me smile. It makes me sing along. It makes me wiggle my hips. It's totally got that WTF? factor. A Country Cowboy who turns it out, he turns the fuckin' city out!

The Midnight Express Show Band - Danger Zone Demo

This was the big one, Danger Zone blew up big time. Charting, getting spins from the In crowd, the blogs were all over it, the record shops loved it, it was a killer record. It sounded big, big horns, big vocals, house tempo, it ticked all the boxes. And yet it was another one I dithered over. In fact it wasn't until I picked up the Tri-Fire Vol 1 compilation that PPU put out that I heard this, the Danger Zone Demo. It was 1 min 18s. That was it. But what a ride! I seriously prefer this short demo to the full version, it's raw, it builds and it is soooo funky. Watch out for the Tri-Fire 45" coming soon...

Minority Band - Live
Deep, hypnotic, repetitive semi-instrumental. Just some guys jamming, but really hard. It just works that bassline for what seems like hours, building, never letting go. B-side to "Tasty Tune", the septet performed locally from New York to Neptune City in the late 70s and recorded only one LP on JSR records entitled "Journey To The Shore". Widely unknown and hyper-collectible, these recordings fetch those 4 figures...

Loni Gamble Band & Lisa Warrington - I Like The Way You Do It
Utterly disco, this has everything, great, driving, tune, killer vocals (sounding wonky as hell - even Andrew says "It's ALL about the vocal"), mad pianos, breakdowns a plenty and that ubiquitous 'unclassics' factor. Newest addition to the PPU family, promo's out now, my new favourite!

On my way home...

Cycling home down Newmarket Road in Cambridge, I nearly didn't notice this new rather public art exhibition. No-one else seemed to be paying any attention until I hopped off my bike, started dodging traffic running up and down the road taking pictures, then people seemed to start to realise and they started coming out of shops to take a look. Funny what we see when we open our eyes, this lot seemed to just go up overnight onto their nice big canvas... I'm sure "RVB" would approve!

 

Chez Le Funk

Steve Blackwax and I played some records at our monthly party "Chez Le Funk"; we all love lists right, so here's some records I played in no particular order:

Hamilton Bohannon - Cut Loose (Mercury)
Liquid Liquid - Optimo (MoWax)
Jason Lev & Payzant - Outerspace Circus (Edit) (Truth Is Light)
No Smoke - Koro Koro (Warriors Dance)
Rocking Horse - Love Do Me Right (Rub 'N' Tug's Rocking Arse Re-Edit) (Eskimo)
Kool & The Gang - This Is You, This Is Me (polydor)
Manu Dibango - Oboso (Atlantic)
Talking Heads - I Zimbra (bootleg)
The Jackson 5 - Dancing Machine (Henrik Schwarz Remix) (Motown)
!!! - Must Be The Moon (Justin Vandervolgen's "He's Kinda Rhythm, I'm More Like Lead Guitar" Remix) (Warp)
Bobby Bowens & Shades Of Magic - Gonna Love Somebody (Truth Is Light)
Mark E - Ray Gun (Merc)
Runaway - Brookyln Club Jam (Rekids)
Force Of Nature - Straight To The Brain (Mule Musiq)
Ten City - That's The Way Love Is (Ibadan)
The Jackson 5 - Living Together (Julian Love 'Real Good Time' Edit) (Blackdisco)

"...and there were people dancing, and everything! "

Truth Is Light

Okay, so here it is. Jason Lev first surfaced on my radar back in the early 2000's, when Steve at Blackwax records hipped me to a mix series he'd found on deephousepage.com That series was called 'Sounds of Gold' and was a collection of some of the rarer and less played cuts from the Paradise Garage era disco scene. As I was just discovering The Loft, the Garage, The Gallery and the fact that disco was actually very cool, I was only just scratching the surface with the more mainstream hits, Philly Int, Salsoul, West End, Prelude, so the cuts on Sounds Of Gold, just blew my mind - this was serious heat from even a seasoned diggers point of view. Jason Lev was a name I'd not heard and the mixing was tight, so tight in fact I was thinking that it was computer aided or at least edited later.

So I was rocking these mixes for a minute and FFWD a year or two and Niki, Steve (Blackwax) and myself were down at a club called Plastic People in London when Theo Parrish dropped a heavy edit of Unity by Tony Aiken & Future 2000 (or so Niki told me, of course I'd not entered my P&P freak-out stage yet so I didn't know the record in question). After some heavy googling, turns out the cut was on some obscure label called 'Truth Is Light' and was edited by Mike Cole and Mark Grusane of Mr Peabody Records in Chicago. Finding a copy was not easy as it was on a seriously limited distro and everywhere had sold out. Luckily managed to find a copy on GEMM for cost price from some little dude's shop in deepest France, and he had another release on the label too (also at cost) so I picked them up. A couple of other deep spinners I knew (Ramar from Voices being one) had a copy, so I thought it's be a bit special. Both 12"s were seriously deep, heavy edits of crazy disco - right up my strasse!

Don't hear much more for a couple of years, I'm smugly watching the 12"s get more sought after, and then BANG, all of a sudden Andrew at Earcave (www.earcave.com) has 4 new records on Truth Is Light, again, all K.I.L.L.E.R. no-one's ever heard of tunes, edited for dancefloor devastation by label head Jason Lev and various other serious cats. Phew!

And the goodies just keep coming, now Jason has just set up a website for the label and is releasing a new series of 7"s all of which sound superb - the first is already out and can be ordered from his site. Also included on the site are the excellent 'Sounds Of Gold' mix series with the artwork and (almost - everyone's got secrets) complete tracklistings. Must also mention that 2 new 12"s are also fresh new out and available from Phonica here in the UK. Go Truth Is Light!

www.truthislightrecords.com

how we do...

Inspiration for this blog comes from the following:

Joel Martin

Tom Noble

Beat Electric

Mike Selsks

We're a group who call the disco village 'home'. This blog is primarily a place for us to blog all the things we love; fashion, music, food, art, friends. It's not regular, it is random, we're not trying to be cool, in fact we're not trying at all - it's for us, not for you (but you can take a peek if you're nice!)