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This Week's Featured Downloads
Famed House producer Kenny Dope curated this collection highlighting the fascinatingly funky, oddball dance releases from the mysterious Chocolate Star. For years, Chocolate Star records were highly coveted by diggers of soul and disco for their unusual production. Whether it was the proto hip-hop of "The Professors Here" and "The Pop," to the jazz-disco of "Gee Dee," all of these recordings had a primitive, dubby sound to them -- like if King Tubby produced disco. The sticker on the vinyl didn't reveal much, just the words Chocolate Star, and no one could quite figure out if this entity was an artist or a record company. It would turn out to be a little of both. Camden, NJ-based eccentric producer, keyboardist and arranger Gary Davis was responsible for the music and the moniker. P&P Records distributed these records, and the eccentric leftfield nature of Davis' music definitely fits in with the sloppy, smoked-out disco aesthetic, but Davis' music was even more primitive than any of that. "The Pop" instrumental could easily be mistaken for a lost Human League demo and "The Professor's Here" boasts a reverb-drenched ricocheting breakbeat that sounds like they recorded it in a racquetball court. But then Davis demonstrates his amazing ear for arrangement with the bona fide NYC disco classic "Got to Get Your Love," a song he wrote and arranged for Clyde Alexander and Sanction. Davis moved to Florida in the '80s and started to release and produce bass records, but the early Chocolate Star material was bootlegged for years with leftfield beatsmiths like Edan and James Pants both acknowledging the influence of these recordings on their work. -Duane Harriott
What else can be said about Basic Channel? It's a label (and trademark) of quality that has released singles worthy of inspiring the entire discography of other labels. Endlessly reverberating waves of damp, vaporous dub and pulsing human heartbeat bass phrasing, or no bass kick at all. BCD contains a generous selection culled from Basic Channel's earliest 12-inch releases, this is the stuff that will be forever imitated but will never be replaced. Other Music Digital has just acquired the entire Basic Channel back catalog including classic singles by Maurizio, Cyrus, and Quadrant. -Scott Mou
Originally released in 2000, the first installment of Schaffelfieber is an outstanding collection compiled by mysterious Kompakt label head Wolfgang Voigt (Mike Ink, GAS, Freiland, etc.). Some of these tech-house masterpieces were borrowed from like-minded contemporary labels like Klang Elektronik and Ladomat, while a few tracks appeared on other Kompakt releases. From the beautiful vocodered downtempo melodies of Sensorama's "Star Escalator" to some of the dirtiest production ever put to house music on Christian Morgenstern's "Gem Club pt. 1," there's no filler to be found. Twelve tracks fit for every use, from the domestic (your living room) to the public (your nearest supper club) -- and a must-have addition to a record collection. -Jeremy Sponder
Orange Twin Records -- the Athens, Georgia label founded by Laura Carter (Elf Power) and Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel) -- brings us this reissue of Elyse Weinberg's solo record from 1968, a lovely psychedelic album of damaged and beautiful pop songs. Elyse's vocals give this album a distinct sound, swooning in a way that might be compared to Janis Joplin drenched in LSD. Full of bizarre orchestration, this shifts between skewed barroom ballads, damaged acid folk and effect-laden pop, creating a whirlwind psychedelic sound that is both overblown and catchy. Neil Young (!) joins Elyse here on one track ("Houses"), a song recorded for her never released follow-up. -Phil Waldorf
Ms. Band's work takes everyday sounds and makes them into songs, or imitates everyday sounds with the instruments at her disposal. I first heard her on an edition of The Aerial (a very good CD series that collected experimental radio pieces) and her piece was transfixing (and reproduced here). She took the clangs at a railroad crossing gate and layered them -- as if played by a gamelan orchestra. Plus sounds of motorcycles whizzing by and hydraulic bus-door brakes (sniffs) became a complementary drumkit. A mesmerizing piece that lets you hear ordinary sounds in an entirely new way. Another piece on this collection makes a swingset in motion become an entire ensemble, squeaks resonating against each other in a remarkably eerie and birdlike chorus. Yet another, made of the tiny taps and steam noises of a radiator, could have come right from the Cologne school -- or she makes a bird into a million clones of itself, building repeats of twitter and stutter like mechanical robot birds on the fritz. She doesn't have to teach the world to sing, she hears the songs that are already there, just shaping, plumping and amping them up into a nearly human form. -Robin Edgerton
Another beautiful-sounding re-master of a unique ESP classic! At the urging of Ornette Coleman, Bernard Stollman recorded Davidson, then a 24 year-old graduate student in biochemistry at Harvard, accompanied by the brilliant Milford Graves on percussion and bass-legend Gary Peacock in July 1965. Davidson's approach and technique exude a lyricism and demeanor mastered by Cecil Taylor only later in his storied career. "Jackie McLean once described Monk and Bud Powell as being 'in a state of grace'. That is how I would describe Lowell. He was extremely brilliant, his sincerity and commitment to creativity was profound. The rhetoric he used to describe his music was very rarefied and reflected his background in church music and science (and perhaps hallucinogens). He talked about the upper partials of a tone, his desire to manipulate them and their effect on the biochemistry of the brain. Lowell felt that if you could expand the consciousness of people with music it would have a molecular effect and cause their brain matter to evolve. He also described hallucinations he had as if they were real and seemed fearless about peering into the darkest parts of his own thoughts." --Joe Morris from the CD liner notes. Sadly, this recording is the only one made by Lowell Davidson that is commercially available. A terrible lab accident caused permanent injuries that profoundly affected the remaining years of his life. His last decade was spent in and out of lucidity, though still performing music on occasion before succumbing to tuberculosis in 1990 at the age of 48. -Jeff Gibson |
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