Fever pitch

Well, shit, I'm just excited as a mofo right now. Everything musical is sending me into a spin. After a certain Rhythm & Sound fan encouraged me to do some digging on the tracklists for their live sets, it slowly dawned on me that a huge inspiration for both their live sets and their productions is the period in reggae music where the analogue morphed into the digital. Prince Jammy was King Tubby's apprentice in the studio and it was he that built one of the first digital riddims which mashed up the dance across the world. Sleng Teng was the name of that riddim and it has been versioned at least 120 times since it's release. Tubby was so impressed with his prodigy's invention that he decided to build a digital riddim too - this being the Tempo riddim. Now here's the freaky shit, just as I'm educating myself about this music, this week, Mark Ainley from Honest Jon's and Mark Ernestus from Rhythm & Sound co-own a record label called Dug Out which decides to reissue a rare 'one riddim' album using none other than the Tempo riddim, vocalists including Sugar Minott and Willie Williams. In addition to this, my favourite Japanese dub speciallists (Dub Store Records) are reissuing a wealth of original King Jammy (the Prince was later crowned King!) 45's in beautiful limited runs of immaculate vinyl pressings with orginal artwork - from the early dancehall period charting the crossover from analogue to digital.

Sleng Teng



Tempo

But wait, there's more!

After a very long wait, finally the two new albums on the cult label Whatever We Want Records are dropping (and disappearing fast) in the UK. Ex-Cambridge lad Thomas Bullock (partner with DJ Harvey in the Map Of Africa project) and Eddie Ruscha (West Coast psychedelic maestro) are The Laughing Light of Plenty and the first single "The Rose" from their album was simply huge for us here at the Disco Village and around the world:



The self-titled album contains another killer in the form of "The Pulse" and a splattering of other tripped out cosmic space-folk-psyche-rock-disco... Intrigued?

http://www.juno.co.uk/ppps/products/417133-01.htm

The second LP from Whatever We Want is by UK artist Cherrystones recording under the Pseudonym "Godsy". His LP is reeeaaally out there, exotic soundtracky music, again, super psychedelic ambient/noise/concrete/folk...

Godsy - My Snow Does Not Melt

Of course there is a huge controversy around these releases owing to their frankly insane price tags (up to $50 each depending on where you get them), but as Harvey says "records are luxury items".

More Whatever We Want shizzle here:

http://www.tiltcorp.com/

 And arrrghhh!!!! There's more!!!! Our good friend Mudd over at Claremont HQ is just releasing a hidden gem from the Post Punk era NYC girl group Dog Eat Dog. With sleeve artwork by Keith Haring and heavyweight vinyl pressing this is a surefire winner:

It's out mid march on vinyl and CD from the claremont store: http://claremont56.bigcartel.com/product/dog-eat-dog-lp

You can still find my Claremont 56 retrospective mix over on soundcloud here for a taster of other music on the label:


http://soundcloud.com/village-idiot/claremont-56