Them Sugar Hill Gang bangers got everywhere in the 80's didn't they? Here replacing Grandmaster Flash with erstwhile lead screecher from The Pop Group, Mark Stewart. No subtlety here from absent lovers rock producer Dennis Bovell, who dubbed up The Pop Group's debut LP "Y" six years earlier, not with Adrian Sherwood at the controls there ain't. It's all there,distorted max feedback tape echo,…
Keith LeBlanc was the only white boy in the Sugar Hill Gang Village, hence the name. So to win the respect of the majority Black members of America's premier Hip-Hop collective Keith had to show off his technologically enhanced and Electro-influenced Drum style. Just as Robin Hood and Little John fought each other in a sickening display of male machismo flailing staffs over what i can only imagine…
Is this that only Rap record that should have ever been made? Y'know wot, its not that I dispise Rap moozique, which to some peoples addled brane, means I must be a follower of Steven Yaxley Lennon,or ,if you're American anyone in the Republican Party. It's just,beyond its monotonous habit of repeating itself over and over again on a scale that only has one solitary note on its stanza's, that on…
Wow!? this Duo must have invented everything chill room infesting and bedroom festering one could care to imagine, it says 1985 to '96 here!? Not that it sounds like it was recorded on one of those cassette four track portastudios which I assume they must have used, with a noise reduction system that can only have been left behind by fleeing Aliens. Just listening to this stuff makes me smug…
Hands Up anyone who thought Boards of Canada were from Canada? Ah......only me it seems!? Two smart-arsed Scottish brothers....no not Black Scottish, they were actually proper brothers,as in genetically brothers from the same mother. Well that's as Funky as it gets i'm afraid, as we are gently lulled to sleep by a myriad of rejected downtempo leftfield LP fillers recorded from 1991 to 1995. If you…
When things start going all Highfalutin,the nerds reappear from their lair, and try and fix the stuff the Alpha-Males did while they were away. Sick of getting ambient sand from the chill out room kicked in their collective spotty visage-s, they normally attach the word 'Intelligent' as a pronoun, enabling them to look down their lengthy olfactory organs at the Rave kids who had reduced electronic…
At last an Acid 12" with an actual sleeve, albeit in a strange sort of K-Tel trend cash in style,complete with smiley faces. It's the French pressing, licenced from Trax in Chicago,that's why. 'Tis also the reason why, out of dozens of re-releases and re-mixes, this one was the only one to feature the Original, and vastly superior 'Original' mix ,by Maurice himself. The K&T mix, is surprisingly a…
Nothing's fucking changed has it? No its not another posthumous release by Muslimgauze ,but some politically aware Rave Techno by a group of persons who clearly grew up on a diet of Industrial Funk, such as Tackhead, 400 Blows ,23 Skidoo and the like, along with other spin offs therein...like...er...Muslimgauze? This could easily be rearranged to read Bombers over Tehran, and hopefully predicts a…
The healing hands of Donald J. Trump? Yep, this is what we woke up to today, Trump is actually God!?.....It's all so clear to me now,Jesus is no longer a humble carpenter, he's a incontinent Real Estate Con Artist, Pedophile, convicted Rapist, and wanna be Genocidal war-monger with a serious Messiah complex. And by the way, The Pope is weak on Crime(wot?),and "terrible for foreign Policy."huh?"…
They didn't waste much time on cover artwork at Trax records did they? Then again why should they? I suspect that these things were regarded as something disposable and functional. Like the UK DIY cassette scene,which this blog was supposed to be originally about. Cassettes were usually disposed of after listening, or taped over by a bedroom Synth duo and resold.Making them ultra rare bits of kit.…
Groan!.Here we go again......Who's invented Acid House this time? Ay Up, its a bloke from India of course,who in the process of modernising the instrumentation of some classical Indian Raga's, and bunging a TR 808 and an Acid in a box TB303 in there amongst his tinkling fingers, he accidently came up with something that sounded a bit like........yep......Acid House? He had as little idea about…
Under the guise of Mr Fingers,aka Larry Heard,the inventor of House music,one can certainly feel the transition from Disco to House to Acid House occurring before our very ears.The difference between standard House and Acid House being,a bit of knob twiddling,and some rubbish electronics rescued from the orphanage of Electronica. Its hard to imagine now, but these tunes,especially "Can You Feel…
Look backwards from any point in time up to 1970,and some clever dick will always find a long lost Krautrock classic waiting to be hauled up the flag poll as the inventor of any number of Influential,Seminal, or any amount of flattering superlatives applied to heavily lauded albums such as this,which obviously was Trance before Trance. Then again, sift backwards trough the marshlands of Kraut,and…
Well, these Acid House pioneers didn't get where they are today through sleeve art alone,or lack of there in, but, for a brief moment they were certainly the Phuture of the Future and their questionable legacy seems to live beyond eternity. Out-living the clubs which are closing down at variable and increasing rates. Surveys show that persons over 65 were far more likely to go out partying than…
Did I say Don't Mention The WAR!?? Is this record a warning from History, or did a Hip Hop Nostradamus write these dope lyrics? "Star Raid" is an obvious reference to ballistic missiles passing through Space in a sub earth orbit raining down on Europe's civilian Infrastructure.....its all so clear to me now. OMG! aka Oh.My.Allan, we're all gonna DIE.....AGAIN!? Of course, Allan's radical Hip-Hop…
Was this repetitively bleepy knob twiddling four to the floor thumper really the year zero for Acid House? Or was it that it was Accidently created by three knob twiddlers from Chicago with silly names,including Spanky, DJ Pierre, and Herbert Herb Jackson?....who all worked for the music department in the CIA to rob the yooth of their minds(obviously NOT True....I think?) Legend has it that…
Like hunter gatherers these Crate Diggers scoured the used records section of junk stalls,and thrift stores looking for new breaks from the forgotten failures of the recent past.As if searching for fresh meat beneath the rotting vegetables of a throw away society. Most junk vinyl has at least one nanosecond of interesting noise to repurpose. And back in the halcyon days before E-fucking-Bay…
DON'T MENTION THE WAR! .....I mentioned it about a thousand times but I think I got away with it!?) Back in the good olde bad olde days ,like last week, America used to be a luminous toothed smiley bunch of friendly fun-lovin'liberal fans of freedom.Two Hundred and Fifty years of independence from the Motherland (Great Britain)later ,The failure to make America Great Again has bred a few million…
The lifeless oceans of the pre-cambrian period, surrounding the one solitary super continent of Pangaea.Devoid of anything but insects,and simple plant-life, the seeds of something greater flew on the desert winds,which led to an early version of 'us'.Something even more basic than today and mamalian. Something that mis-evolved in to something quite terrifying, basic, and unevolved.....you know…
Okay!I like the cover of this misogynistic Old School Gangsta shiesterwerk. ......that just about sums it all up. You know what its gonna sound like,and I'm straining at the leash to make any quips concerning the word "ICE". That being the American acronym equivalent of Ernst Rhome's storm-trooper Brownshirts. If you're watching this from the Future please don't make me explain,....we're actually…
Don't have much to say about this one, which includes slagging it off, so by elimination this must be a good one?......right? It's,if anything, a bit Disco-Lite and his slaggo-lettes, with most of the tracks displaying a preposterous preponderance for old school Rapping, lashings of vocoder abuse,early sampler misuse,vinyll-ill treatment and DMX maltreatment with some inappropriate gated digital…
Post Elvis,1985 was once looked upon as the official worst year of music evah! Live Aid happened,and the possibilities of world corporate mass control of young peoples personal taste became very real.....meanwhile on the streets of the five boroughs no-one had heard of "We are the World" by the bloated morons of superstars immodest bleatings about saving poor African children like the Gods they…
I can only assume that the misspelling is deliberate, otherwise it translates as the sounds of serial killers on drugs.....which is not a bad Band name.....not quite as good as "Drunks with Guns",but that one's taken. So we've heard Angela the 6 year Old Rapper (aka Talking over a back beat"? Now we got 10 year old Howard M.Moore Jr showing off and captured on self-released vinyl.Backed up by his…
Hey...let's take a short break from Electro Compilations and stray onto the controversial turf of who was the first Rapper person? Not quite Old School, more like Pre-School Rap, where six year old Angela Simpson out does Roxanne by 8 years to be the youngest Rapper on the block. This ain't no Rap I hear you cry,even though there's a track actually called 'Rapping' .....so stuff that in yer pipe…
"The Roxanne Wars", as these call and response rap songs on side one are known as,featuring a 14 year old Female old school Rapper called....you guessed it "Roxanne".She took it on herself to challenge UTFO's hit tune "Roxanne, Roxanne".Of which there were over one hundred response Raps by Herself and various pseudonymous artists.Likely to avoid the authorities causing problems over Roxannes's…