Month:

Paradise

Posted on September 26, 2016 @ 5:46pm by Coqui

I'm talking about freedom in 3D, sonic technicolor laid out before you as far as the eye can see. This is a Paradise Garage type thing, liquid textures in sound glowing, twisting in psychedelic rhythm. Larry Levan behind the decks, pumping bass manoeuvres while the mirrorball casts reflections off each and every wall. Island disco at the Parallax Pier with the Compass Point All Stars in full effect, waves of sound shimmer and cascade over bedrock bass at twilight, bumping somewhere deep in the distance. Grace Jones and Gwen Guthrie shimmy on the mic over rock hard Sly & Robbie riddims, Wally Badarou's synths swirling magic all around.

Crashers take their Flight To Jamaica (Cool Runings) while The Beat do their thing, the shadow of Joe Gibbs sways steady in the sound booth, blessed bass and Uptown Top Ranking plays. Tiger Talking once again, decked out in a three-piece suit, while Big Audio Dynamite bang every beatbox and all the Fine Young Cannibals come out to play on the 12" tip, That Good Thing goes to Pull The Sucker Off, while Prince Paul and De La Soul are 3 Feet High And Rising... take it all in: the sounds, the shapes, the colors. Sister Monie Love missed her plane back to London, with those Bristol blues somewhere on another island, asking where have Smith & Mighty and Daddy G been Lately? Lowrell's Mellow Mellow Right On drift casual into the night, back into jazz and Eno's system - Another Green World played out again but in neon this time.

Take it back to Philly with Dexter Wansel rocking that 21st century blacklight soul, light lives in every groove, illuminating every shadow, every last nerve. Lounge slides back into disco with West End and Prelude, crossing Cloud One on a Heavenly Star, while Eddy Grant got that ICE straight Living On The Frontline sort of tweaked-out rhythm box thang. The Environ is in full effect, jungle vibes (Jungle Wonz) inna Metro Area upon a Virgo sign, starlight and chrome against strobes and a Blacklight Affair. Let's Go Swimming in Arthur Russell's World Of Echo, picking up that Nu Groove on the radio waves as we roll past 4th & Broadway toward Brookside Park and taste the cool air of the night.

Paradise, Paradise with Inner City: it's all there waiting for the touch. Silhouettes shake in rhythm on the cold grid of the dancefloor, While Others Cry we weep with joy, our Night Moves slowly (built to last). Neon dreams in the moonlight, vector traces roll like clockwork down from the top: landscapes on the mental, science just about to drop. This is freedom, this is beauty, this is love in three dimensions, transcribed from the cool of twilight onto the single page of an eight line poem. You can't read it - you just feel it - soaring over solemn organ played divine, a lone voice intones precisely...

"This poem is to be continued in your mind."

The Flame

Posted on September 25, 2016 @ 6:06pm by Coqui

I'll remember being far from home
Talkin' on the telephone
You told me it's over, you made up your mind,
I'm part of the life that you're leaving behind

I'm left holding the torch
And the heat from the flame,
Only leaves me in pain
Don't you know how much it hurts,
You took all I had and you threw it away
I'm left holding the flame, yes I am
Holding the flame once again

No matter what you say, it hurts
You didn't have to make it worse
It would've been better had you told me yourself,
Instead that you left to somebody else

Maybe I can understand
You'd been staying with another man
Day isn't long, nights can be lonely
I wasn't there and you needed to hold me

I'm left holding the torch
And the heat from the flame,
Only leaves me in pain
Don't you know how much it hurts,
You took all I had and you threw it away
I'm left holding the flame, yes I am
Holding the flame once again

David Steele/Roland Gift (The Flame, Fine Young Cannibals - Their Finest)

Streetlight, Streetlight

Posted on September 24, 2016 @ 9:28pm by Coqui

We stumbled out into the rain-slicked streets, half-lit in the blur of dim lamps burning, dawn tucked somewhere beyond the rise. The sound of dub drifts from the portal to some basement club into the damp of night, mixing with the distant shades of piano and the jungle. Rhythm, bass pressure and the spectre of a half-forgotten memory rattling in the darkness.

Excerpt from The Coqui Papers

AG Memories: Rusty Waters

Posted on September 19, 2016 @ 8:50pm by Coqui

Looking down from the Georgia Street bridge, into North Park and the place where it all went down, and the memories of the early days of Radio AG come flooding back.


While uploading the first five episodes of Radio AG over the past few weeks, I was struck by how rough a lot of the mixing was! Sure, partially this was down to being rusty (I'd taken a hiatus from spinning and music production to concentrate on finishing school), but I also suspect it was due to the fact that for the first time I was grappling with a lot of material that wasn't typically intended to be found in the mix.

Up until then, I'd primarily spun techno and house, on the one hand, or downbeat rap and trip hop, on the other. Mixing disparate selections from the sixties, alternative, new wave and so forth - much of it music that wasn't made with the DJ in mind - well, it was like learning to mix all over again. The first year was pretty ramshackle, truth be told, but it was an enjoyable experiment in figuring how to segue between tracks of such varying structure and sequence them to successfully carry a sustained mood (I wouldn't figure out the latter until the following year!)

In retrospect, I'd always tended to approach spinning from more of an electro/hip hop mindset anyway, playing with cuts and juxtaposition, whereas the general tendency with minimal techno at the time was to work gradual fades between similar tunes. The pivotal moment for me was hearing Kevin Saunderson scratch into Carl Craig's Piano Mix of R-Tyme's Use Me (on his X-Mix: Transmission From Deep Space Radio mix): this was everything I wanted dance music to be. On the flipside - the trip hop side - Terranova's DJ-Kicks was a revelatory experience, boasting a broad selection taking in hip hop, dub, post punk, electro and Detroit techno, all while maintaining a consistently vivid atmosphere throughout. Listening to both of these mixes for the first time - within months of each other! - was quite simply a mind-expanding experience, changing the way I listened to music from that point forward.

As such, when I put together the original Allied Heights mix (back in 2002), it already seemed natural to drop things like The B-52's Mesopotamia and Brian Eno & David Byrne's The Jezebel Spirit - not to mention Derrick May's remix of Tired Of Getting Pushed Around for 2 Men A Drum Machine And A Trumpet - in the mix alongside prime techno cuts like Scan 7's Black Moon Rising, The Martian's Meet The Red Planet and UR's Electronic Warfare, opening up plenty of real-estate for raw house material like the KSR Vocal Mix of Octave One's Blackwater, Susumu Yokota's discoid fantasy Future Memory and Carl Craig's awesome garage-tinged A-Dub Mix of The Reese Project's I Believe. There were even a couple brand new Shadez Of Colour cuts - that were just about to be pressed up at NSC in Detroit - slipped into the mix. It was a nice little mix that captured a time when things where humming in the Heights and it seemed as if it would go on that way forever...

But I'd be out of the game in a matter of months, commencing a roughly two-year period during which school, work and other real world commitments managed to monopolize my time completely. The music was still there, however, and I'd spent those years exploring other sounds: lines of flight into the wider world via the post punk (PIL, Mark Stewart, etc.) and reggae (King Tubby, Horace Andy, etc.) that I'd become aware of thanks to trip hop, and the funk (Parliament/Funkadelic, Sly & The Family Stone, etc.), synth (Kraftwerk, YMO, etc.) and jazz (Herbie Hancock, Sun Ra, etc.) music that techno had tuned me into along the way. Winding back through seventies soul into the sixties - Stax and Motown - on a similar tip and sideways into krautrock, prog and arty seventies music like Roxy Music (by way of Brian Eno), it was only a matter of time before I'd worked my way back into the sixties: The Beatles, The Byrds, Hendrix and beyond.

At the end of 2004, I moved out with a couple of mates into a spot over by Balboa Park that we came to call the 1808. The scene that coalesced around the place centered on what you might call the indie rock set, with various bands and scenesters in orbit, doing their thing. I was mainly rocking out to grime like Wiley's Treddin' On Thin Ice, Dizzee Rascal's second album and the Run The Road compilation, plus Roni Size's Return To V - which seemed to key into the same prevailing mood - along with Moodymann's Black Mahogani, Amp Fiddler's Waltz Of A Ghetto Fly and Theo Parrish (with material like The Rotating Assembly's Rusty Waters in constant rotation). There was a solid weekly techno night at the Honey Bee Hive (just up the street), and I did manage to catch the odd desert rave with Snakes and crew, but all of a sudden it seemed like indie rock was everywhere and dance was hard to find. This felt something like the wilderness years, and I was a stranger in a strange land.

So I decided to go back to my roots and start a mixtape series that would take in a bunch of the stuff I grew up on, before I'd even really struck out on my own, musically speaking. I'd basically started out in new wave with Adam Ant and Depeche Mode, along with eighties dance pop like the Jacksons Michael and Janet, before hip hop and swingbeat rolled into town. So why not start there - since this was more or less the lingua franca of my intended audience anyway - sprinkling in an ever increasing dose of beats and atmosphere along the way? Radio AG was born.

The idea at first was to construct a mix in the same way the closing song cycle from the second side of Abbey Road was structured, drifting from one pop song to the next in a kinetic flow. Along with my bedrock of past favorites, I'd lean on everything I'd picked up in the interim, ranging from Can to The Beach Boys and even some of the indie stuff I'd picked up like the Pixies (rock hard beats for miles) and Pavement (whose Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era is basically a breakbeat dance track). Going back into the nineties, my hip uncle Matt from Chicago had tuned me into all sorts of great power pop and indie dance (like Blur, Happy Mondays and so on) that had a profound shaping influence on me at the time. This material flowed logically into groups like Gorillaz (Albarn and Ryder, together), A.R. Kane and The Beta Band that I'd later crossed paths with via dance music, and all of it would in turn form part of the foundation of the series.

So I did one mix, and then another. And then another. By October, I'd knocked out a fifth episode - The Halloween Special - and the series had become a reality. I was pulling in shipments from Submerge on a monthly basis, their shelves still stocked with the finest Detroit techno in abundance. A few months later, I crossed paths with SA-RA and Hot Chip. Woebot dropped his 100 Greatest Records Ever on New Years Day. Suddenly things didn't seem so lonely anymore. And then, couple weeks later I'd move in with my brother Brian - the same place where I live today - and dig into the next chapter of the Radio AG saga. But that's another story for another day!

Radiance Point

Posted on September 10, 2016 @ 5:37pm by Coqui

Every sound seems bathed in vivid shades of color, as if glowing gently in the darkness.

This comment that I made in passing, with regard to Yusef Lateef's Eastern Sounds, has been tumbling over and over in my mind since Thursday. I think it's because it so succinctly captures a very specific set of sonics that remain central to my musical imagination, like a sense memory poised at my very being. Evoking brilliant colors seemingly backlit in neon, it comes on like a haunting sound-mirage, set in stark relief against a jet black backrop. It's a day-glo thing... and at times, perhaps a vector thing too.

Lateef's record is one such example, with the vivid colors of his playing of the xun in Plum Blossom creeping out of the darkness in violet arcs - pulsing against the deep black beyond.

Certain records come to mind; perhaps this is a terrain that could be mapped? More to come shortly...

Yusef Lateef – Eastern Sounds

Posted on September 8, 2016 @ 11:47am by Coqui

Yusef Lateef - Eastern Sounds

(Prestige: 1961)

The other day (for obvious reasons) I get to thinking about Rudy Van Gelder's vast recording discography. The man practically defined what a bop-era jazz recording should sound like, even as he experimented with unorthodox methods for capturing the sounds he was after. Famously secretive about his recording techniques, Van Gelder enjoyed a reputation as the mad scientist and sonic architect of bop-era jazz.

There are so very many phenomenal records bearing the man's touch that it's tough trying to single out a favorite: Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch! and Andrew Hill's Point Of Departure spring immediately to mind as stone cold classic selections that would be hard to argue with. However, if I had to choose an absolute favorite for myself, it would have to be Yusef Lateef's Eastern Sounds.

It makes sense that Van Gelder's sensitivity to things like tonal coloring and atmosphere would be a perfect fit for Yusef Lateef, that visionary multi-instrumentalist whose affinity with music beyond the confines of the West pre-dated just about everyone else's (not only in jazz but the entire pop music sphere). Eastern Sounds is something of a showcase for Lateef's vision, extending the West Asian fascination of his 1957 offering Prayer To The East even deeper into the continent. Rudy Van Gelder's fingerprints are in evidence throughout, with the deep, rich tones of Lateef's quartet bathed in soft reverb, both spacious and crystal clear.1

The record shifts deftly between a number of modes, stretching from proto-world music excursions to lonely downbeat elegies, film music and even touching down with some straight-no-chaser bebop. Lateef's quartet embraced atypical instrumentation throughout these sessions, with Ernie Farrow switching between double bass and rabaab, while Lateef's use of flute and oboe - along with the expected tenor saxophone - add to the record's depth of texture. Every sound seems bathed in vivid shades of color, as if glowing gently in the darkness.

The opening song, Plum Blossom, features extensive use of the Chinese globular flute - or xun - by Lateef, carrying the melody before passing it off to Barry Harris' rolling piano lines and then back again. Meanwhile, Lex Humphries taps out a simple percussive figure in unbroken repetition. The track is verdant and life-affirming, full of the promise of new grass, hope and possibility. Lateef's xun offers a striking, crystalline sound - a sound that cuts through the years to feel right at home in the present (whenever that may be).

Blues For The Orient follows, shifting into a slightly more conventional jazz environment. As the title implies, the tune marries shades of Asian melody to a sort of low key blues shuffle. Ching Miau continues in this vein, speeding up the tempo considerably with a first-rate exercise in bebop alchemy. Grounding the record in jazz fundamentals, both tunes are largely straight-up jazz laced with the tones and progressions of Asian music.

Snafu is cut from similar cloth, but manages to surpass the both of them. Indeed, this is not only the record's longest track but also one its clear highlights: perhaps its finest moment of pure jazz. The rhythm section really shines here, with Ernie Farrow's double bass seeming to carry the whole track as it careens down a winding staircase into the abyss, while Humphries' rolling drum breaks unfurl into orbit all around. There's a distinct sense of depths being plumbed, portals opened and passed through. Strange as it may sound, Snafu seems to predict a sound that The Doors would come to explore extensively in a few years time.2

The record features not one but two interpretations of film music, both of them epics: Spartacus and The Robe. Even in the context of a record as singular as Eastern Sounds, these two tracks possess an atmosphere all their own, with lush textures flowing over clockwork rhythm like a brook over the smooth stones of a riverbed. Love Theme From Spartacus (taken from Alex North's score to the Stanley Kubrick film) is haunted by Lateef's searching oboe coiled at its center, while Love Theme From The Robe (by Alfred Newman) finds him trading sumptuous flute passages with Harris' keys in a beguiling seduction of the senses.

The downbeat melancholia of Don't Blame Me features sparse piano and sax interplay over a creeping, languid rhythm. Notes and timbres are allowed to drift into the ether, evoking a solitary loneliness: haunting sounds haunted by memory. Similarly, the gorgeous Purple Flower crawls along at a snail's pace - its slow-motion brushes manage to evoke both weight-of-the-world and zero-gravity simultaneously - conjuring images of deserted city streets in the dead of night. The closest comparison I could make would be Duke Ellington at his most downcast; either that or Generique from Miles Davis' soundtrack to the French film Ascenseur Pour L'échafaud.

The record closes with The Three Faces Of Balal, a tune more sparse and spacious than anything that has preceded it. The eerie melody rides another one of Humphries' circular percussive figures (this time mirrored by Farrow's bass, to fine effect), with Lateef once again blowing flute and trading lines with Harris. It's the album's most mystical moment, even as it seems to deconstruct itself before your eyes, like the final flush of a dream. You can almost feel the record winding down, as if receding back into the darkness. Landing at your final port of call, all movement ceases and only memories remain...

1. I struggle to think of an earlier recording with an atmosphere quite as evocative, so full of depth. The only one that comes to mind is Eden's Island by Eden Ahbez, another record in thrall to the East.
2. Guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore were both heavy jazz heads who decided to play in a rock 'n roll band. In fact, most of Densmore's rhythms on the early records come from jazz and latin music, while the band - like The Byrds - were deeply touched by the music of John Coltrane. Check out this little interview with Krieger for some words about the influence of jazz on The Doors).

Fall Inna Bassbin

Posted on September 3, 2016 @ 2:25pm by Coqui

During what's turned out to be an exceptionally busy week, I've been vibing out practically non-stop to Woebot's latest mix: Bands a make her dance. The mix's general brief is rapping with instruments inna live band stylee - stretching back through time all the way to the fifties - and it's an absolute burner, packed with incredible music spanning from old school hip hop to killer deejay reggae cuts and beyond: into the nexus of street verse and rough cut funk. Put simply, this is Rap Attack music. Truth be told, it's something of a sweet spot for me, so I couldn't help but dive in with a little off-the-dome commentary... please forgive me.

The mix kicks off with Tone And Poke's lavish production for Jay-Z in 2001's Jigga, from that period when hip hop was routinely interfacing with the machine funk blueprint laid out by Timbaland and The Neptunes. Consequently, the next two tracks are N*E*R*D's man-machine hybrid Lapdance and Timbaland & Magoo's Up Jumps Da' Boogie, featuring Tim's typically lush take on machine soul (with the signature touch of Jimmy Douglass at the controls in fine style).

You could trace a line through material like Supa Dupa Fly and the early Kelis records back into much of the prime late-period swingbeat: things like Tony! Toni! Toné!'s awesome Sons Of Soul record - featuring Raphael Saadiq's fluid basslines and rolling live breakbeats knocked out by Tim Riley - naturally, but also the rugged flexing grooves of Jodeci's sophomore album Diary Of A Mad Band. Indeed, this is where Timbaland's crew Da Bassment hooked up in the first place, with DeVante Swing and Mr. Dalvin linking up with figures like Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott (still with Sista at this point), Jimmy Douglass and Tim himself, who would all go on to map out the future of r&b through the balance of the decade.

Subsequently, this is the context from which all the great Soulquarian material sprung up: records like Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun and D'Angelo's Voodoo, functioning at the nexus of programmed rhythm and live-played instrumentation. These records didn't appear in a vacuum! In many ways they were an extension of and reaction to the crisp, modern blueprint laid out by producers like Timbaland, even as they sometimes pushed against it and dug deeper into the progressive soul roots of the seventies and beyond.

Questlove - key figure and strange attractor in this terrain that he is - was deeply involved in both records, pulling together personnel, offering historical perspective and of course laying down his trademark offhand rhythms at Electric Lady Studios. Indeed The Roots' Things Fall Apart - another peak-era Soulquarian production - is represented in this mix with the next track, Double Trouble, featuring Black Thought and Mos Def trading verses as they run through the classic Wild Style routine.

Appropriately, that other storied hip hop band, the inimitable Stetsasonic make an appearance next with Pen And Paper (from their classic sophomore set, In Full Gear). I've always loved the sort of shambolic, loose-limbed interface between machine music and live funk that Stet traded in. A lot of L.A. records switch into a similar mode from time to time, like The D.O.C.'s The Grande Finalé (one of the great posse cuts, an N.W.A. track in all but name) and The Pharcyde's Labcabincalifornia (with live drumming from Jay Dee on All Live).

Beat Bop - the mix's next selection and another Woebot fave - must be the ur-text for this whole sound. The sinewy live instrumentation gets filtered through a futuristic beat matrix, courtesy of Jean-Michel Basquiat's forward-thinking production, over which Rammelzee and K-Rob trade verses in what I've often described as a hip hop update of Sly & The Family Stone's Africa/Talks To You/The Asphalt Jungle. It's about as next-level as hip hop got in the early eighties, which is no small feat.

Woe sets the scene within an old school context, drawing deep from the pool of Sugar Hill Records, with selections like The Furious Five's Step Off (Remix), Funky 4 + 1's That's The Joint and Trouble Funk's aptly titled Drop The Bomb. All three of which feature MCs doing their thing over live band backing, and right there at the center of rap's evolution (providing further evidence in favor of Woe's central thesis). The D.C. Go-Go of Trouble Funk sits righteously in this context, and tangentially brings to mind one of my absolute favorite records from the scene, The Word/Sardines by The Junkyard Band, with its mad squelching bass and pile-driving breakbeats.

Further old school adventures continue with the improbably early smooth perfection of The Younger Generation's We Rap More Mellow, appearing at the tail end of the seventies as one of the first rap records to hit the shops. There's also the pre-electronic Afrika Bambaataa hip hop tile Zulu Nation Throwdown, featuring raps from the Cosmic Force dancing over a loose-limbed funk jam kicked up by the Harlem Underground band. More honest-to-goodness funk, this time from The Fatback Band (who were twelve albums deep into their career as a hard funk unit by this point), appears later in the mix with King Tim III (Personality Jock), which (depending on who you ask) is often considered thee very first hip hop recording to appear on wax.

These early rap works bring to mind another one of my favorites records from the era, Spoonie Gee's Spoonin' Rap, which almost sounds as if it could have been a stripped down backing track from the Remain In Light/My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts sessions. Similarly far-reaching and futuristic - and featured next in the mix - is The Treacherous Three's The Body Rock, offering up an evocative atmosphere in which a grinding synthetic bassline snakes through a circular guitar figure held down by Pumpkin's relaxed drum breaks, while Special K, L.A. Sunshine and Kool Moe Dee trade verses through carefully arranged reverb effects.

Everything here remarkably in sync with a lot of the era's post punk music: think The Magnificent Seven by The Clash, the Talking Heads's Once In A Lifetime and ESG's Moody.1 Many such figures were seduced by the burgeoning hip hop culture of the day, from Factory Records' whole dalliance with the East Coast2 to Chris Stein's (of new wave group Blondie) involvement with the backing tracks for the Wild Style soundtrack and The Clash bringing Futura 2000 on tour with them (while also backing him on the Celluloid rap 12" The Escapades Of Futura 2000).

Then there's the matter of Tackhead/Fat's Comet, featuring Doug Wimbish3, Skip McDonald and Keith LeBlanc of the Sugar Hill backing band. After leaving Sugar Hill, the group started out as East Coast post punk experimentalists, operating their own World Records imprint before running through Adrian Sherwood's cold dub machinery and backing Mark Stewart as the Maffia. Sherwood's On-U Sound label a crucial conduit of leftfield dub recordings throughout the decade, stretching back into late seventies with material like Creation Rebel's early output and the Cry Tuff Dub Encounter series (which - spiritually, at least - seemed to pick up where Joe Gibbs' Africa Dub All-Mighty string of records left off).

Incidentally, the mix takes a left turn into reggae territory with a trio of discomix cover versions from the decade's turn masterminded by Gibbs, Xanadu & Sweet Lady's Rockers Choice (based on Rapper's Delight), Derrick Laro & Trinity's Don't Stop Till You Get Enough and Ruddy Thomas & Welton Irie's Shake Your Body Down To The Ground (the latter two Jacksons covers). Down mix a piece, Woe even gives the original MC music a look in with Big Youth's 1976 deejay cut Jim Squeachy and the impossibly early (1972) Festival Wise by U-Roy.

In between the Gibbs cuts and Big Youth, you get a pair of key jazz poetry cuts from Gil Scott-Heron (The Revolution Will Not Be Televised) and The Last Poets (Related To What). Both artists retroactively recognized as forefathers of rap music, The Last Poets even washing up with an eighties record on Celluloid. There was even a record from Last Poet Lightnin' Rod with backing from Jimi Hendrix that also came out on Celluloid around the same time. Hendrix himself touching on rap with Crosstown Traffic... perhaps the first rap-rock song ever? Well, certainly the best.

Lightnin' Rod's Sport comes in next, taken from his excellent Hustlers Convention LP and featuring Kool & The Gang providing a nimble funk backing (and a clear precursor to all the old school live hip hop records discussed above). The godfather of funk himself slips into the mix with Black President, another foundational piece of music in hip hop, not only by virtue of its breakbeats - adorning as they do scores of rap 12"s - but also James Brown's ad-libbed vocal asides, dropped into the beat matrix with a rhythmic precision.

From there, we move into the final stretch of the mix with Pigmeat Markham's Here Comes The Judge (as mentioned in David Toop's Rap Attack4) from 1968. Interestingly enough, this record seems to be the basis for the Lee "Scratch" Perry-produced deejay record Public Jestering, fronted by Judge Winchester! And finally, Bo Diddley closes out the set with his epochal self-titled number, bringing it all back to the square root of the blues.

Which drops us into the recent climate round these parts. Post punk, hip hop and the blues. Machine soul is that final ingredient - in its triad forms of techno, house and r&b - of what you might call my kind of music. In fact, this is exactly the sort of thing I meant to broach last winter but for the encroachment of myriad real world commitments (what a drag). Yet with the late summer sun looming deep red on the horizon, it just might be the right time to go deep with it for real. At any rate, it's gonna be a wonderful fall.

1. Note that all three cuts were staples at Larry Levan's Paradise Garage.
2. Starting with A Certain Ratio recording their debut full-length To Each... at E.A.R.S. in New Jersey and continuing with New Order's work with Arthur Baker, John Robie and Jellybean Benitez (also at E.A.R.S.) on 1983's Confusion, with Factory even putting out an ESG record at one point in the interim. In a strange twist, New Order once played a tumultuous set at the Paradise Garage in 1983.
3. Wimbish was also later a member of Mos Def's band Black Jack Johnson.
4. David Toop, Rap Attack #3 (Serpent's Tail, 2000), 40.

Radio AG: The Archives

Posted on September 1, 2016 @ 11:52pm by Coqui

In June of 2005, I launched the Radio AG mixtape series. The plan was simply to provide family and friends with mixes full of music that they might enjoy. I'd rattle them off at varying intervals, sometimes only weeks apart while at others years would pass between installments. Over the years, the episodes began to stack up.

Initially, I played it pretty straight with rock and pop selections - catering to the tastes of my particular set of listeners at the time... but there was an underlying, sinister agenda: with each entry, I allowed a bit more madness to seep in. In the form of electronics, dub and heavy, all-pervasive atmosphere, each mix drew closer to what you might call my neighborhood of sound. The sort of thing we deal in here, naturally!

Consequently, we've just set up an archive of the old episodes of Radio AG over at mixcloud. At the moment, both sides the very first mixtape (Episode 001: June 18, 2005) are available, with more episodes just around the corner. The plan is to upload a couple mixes every week, culminating in a new installment this November to launch the latest stretch of the series' decade-long run.

So if you're so inclined, head over and give it a listen. Some of the transitions may be a little rough here and there, but the music's all top notch and the series truly was (and remains) a labor of love. Hope you enjoy it!