Ebay snipes that haunt you...

River View

OK lots of great music about at the minute, but these are a few of the things that have been keeping my ears happy lately.

Firstly from the ‘village former Delegate of Culture, and half of the Skuff and Inja show, Dr Skuff has made his deep covers project available to us all. You can grab a free download here

http://skuff.bandcamp.com/

Speaking of Skuff and Inja you will remember the track “Zen” they did with Mr Scuff.

Mr Scruff 'Zen (with Skuff & Inja)' by Mr Scruff

 Cambridge based readers may wish to get themselves to the junction on Saturday night for “Keep It Unreal” 10-3 advance tickets are a tenner from the junction

http://www.junction.co.uk/artist/619

Ital

Release number one on a new label called 100% Silk, this record is simply brilliant. I played the a side “Ital’s Theme” on the radio show last night and a lovely bit of acid house nonsense it is too. The b side has a couple of amazing tracks also, “Queens” and “Hit and Run” are both killer. Left field dance floor business for  modern disco dandy’s. The ep sleeve as you can see is a thing of great beauty and it’s limited to 350 copies so no dithering. For those of you who are undecided have a listen to “Queens” here

Ital - Queens by nofearofpop.net

Also check the 100% silk blog here

http://listentosilk.blogspot.com/

Stilllove4music

Edits, a thorny issue at the best of times.
 Often you get a well known charity shop cheapie/reissued to death record/ old classic that even though it’s a “classic” you could happily never hear again with a 4/4 beat on the intro and the outro and some shit effects thrown in. However for every 100 wasted bits of shiny black plastic lurks a gem. And stilllove4music seem to be behind more of the gems.
I cant recommend the “still love for music” ep by Delano Smith enough. 3 tracks and 2 of them are parts 1 and 2 of a cut up of the O’ Jays “I Love Music”, not a rare or expensive or particularly obscure cut. However I cant get enough of it, very Detroit, lots of looped up sections and a female vocal taking about still having love for music. I played part 2 last night, and I also played “Drive It” off the Bim Marx “Make it Hot EP”. The Bim Marx ep has 4 tracks and they are all lovely.
 If disco edits is your thing, or you think you are over them, you should check out the stilllove4music back catalogue, Rahaan, Al Kent, and Rick Wilhite are amongst the treats in store

http://www.juno.co.uk/labels/Stilove4music+US/

Any readers who enjoyed Matts recent digital reggae piece should check the Prince Jammy lp “Strictly Dub” reissued on Pressure Sounds, actually if you like reggae full stop check out the pressure sounds label. Too much good stuff , credit cards at the ready heres the website

http://www.pressure.co.uk/

Booze news
This weeks top tipple Canadian Club whisky, with Canada Dry and a squueze of lemon juice.
x

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

Afrodelica

Heads up, essential afro reissue alert! K Frimpong and his Cubano Fiestas is a bit of a mouthful, and the track titles even more so, but on my music radar I've been hearing bits for a long time from this masterful artist. There are two albums from Mr Frimpong, and the first has been lovinly reissued by Continental Records.

Highly recommended afro dancefloor psychedelia, a gorgeous combination of afrobeat and hi-life, the 1st track on the 4 track album absolutely slays me every time. Non-vinyl heads rejoice, I'm not leaving you behind this time as the 1st track off this glorious album is also available on a CD compilation from the wicked Soundway records (check their entire catalogue for all things afro):

Not only does Ghana Soundz contain the massive K Frimpong track, but also contains the Chez Le Funk afro-disco anthem "Bukom Mashie" - bonus! Buy here: http://www.juno.co.uk/ppps/products/106651-02.htm

Inna dubwise direction

I'm loving the Reggae right now, lookout for a dancehall dubwise selection soon come from the disco village.
Rodigan on the Today programme this morning:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9391000/9391786.stm

And these Makasound limited releases are just the most beautiful reissues I've seen for a while, 500 pressed of each, don't, as they say, sleep!

Zombies

So, inbetween battering a bunch of drunken hipsters over the head with some chicago acid and camp disco, we had one of those deep philosophical discussions like you do in a boozer late at night. We were talking about music, what else? Anyway, whilst looking stuff up this morning I can across the following quote particuarly relevant to our conversation which I quite liked, it's an obvious but eloquent statement:

"Art is created under one of two auspices: glory or truth. Either the creative process is conducted with the intention of gaining status—cultural, financial, social—or it is an act of necessity, an imperative born of the constant suffocation of the old world." 

The quote came from a reference to this:

Moldy Peaches

In what may be the first of a long running feature may I present you dear reader(s) with an lp that here at Disco-Village HQ we love. Ladies and gentlemen it gives me great pleasure to introduce the Moldy Peaches “The Moldy Peaches”, released by Rough Trade in 2001 this lp is ace.

At the core of the Moldy peaches were Adam Green and Kimya Dawson, who met in a record shop in New York and had been recording together since 1994. Here are what I consider the gems of the lp to be:

and of course