Welcome ye fare forwarded voyagers to my humble abode for all that is under appreciated in the world of recorded music. I specialize in the past but the current is certainly not completely ignored either. I hope you will find a gem or two before you mosey on down the road. I mostly post recent finds from my digging expeditions across the land, but occasionally I will post up random things as well. -Transpac Jackson
Okay so you're probably thinking enough with the tapes already but seriously, the tape explosion has just begun, so please bare with me... I have a lot of tapes to go... but I will of course be uploading my standard vinyl stuffs too but I just recently got my bad ass tape player hookup so I've been catching up on all these demos. I felt like since I had already done a 90s bedroom indie and a neosoul joint I should get back to the meat of the tape collecting world and do a new wave/synthpop/minimalwave release, so I am going to unleash yet another utterly unknown and unheard gem from the TX demo tape collection on you with this one, presenting... FELT NUN. The San Antonio synthpop/newwave group from 1988. I actually really started to like the first track, 'oh boy' after a few listens and then the rest of the tape grew on my as well, lots of nice moments here, the first track is probably the most upbeat and poppy, theres a little bit darker moments if thats your thing. So I'm quite happy with this find, cause trust me, decently good synthpop tapes that are still unknown are not easy to come by at all. Enjoy.
Breaking new ground on the blog today, my first tape!, I have now added the art of tape digging to my repertoire and sold my first successful Ebay tape auction last week, 75 bucks for Jack Kevorkian and the Suicide Machines... and since then I have acquired a huge amount of weird demo tapes and I think some of them are definitely worth sharing, so that will be the theme of the blog for a little bit. Tapes are a completely different ball of wax from records, they go way deeper down the rabbit hole of obscurity first of all, because basically anyone with a 4 track and a mic can make a release, and the availability of weird tapes out there for 50 cents is still massive, unlike records, though the market for tapes is much smaller and more particular. Theres 4 strong tape genres in collecting, private metal tapes, private synthpop/minimal tapes, private hip hop tapes, and private boogie tapes. I think gangsta rap accounts for the largest share of money transactions on Ebay by far. There's a healthy Japanese and NY/LA rap tape scene going, and next behind that is probably the uber hip minimal wave tape collectors, because the majority of great releases in the genre are on tape.
Anyway, my first post of a tape was supposed to be this bedroom psych/folk-pop demo I found but I haven't finished recording it yet(now posted!), so instead we have KATAU, which is Hawaiian neo-soul/funk circa 1990 by way of Dallas TX. I know thats a lot to take in but you'll understand better when you hear it. It's not Hawaiian like traditional ethnic music, I mean the regional variety of jazzy soul/funk that became popular in Hawaii in the early 80s and sounds a lot like Cali modern soul stuff, so it's that kinda, but 'Neo' cause its 1990 and the tuning is really tight and crisp sounding, a little bluesy almost, but don't let that dissuade you, and the group is performing in Dallas TX for this demo. I absolutely love slap bass boogie jams and this track definitely makes the cut for bombastic slap bass shakedowns, just listen to that breakdown at the end where the guy goes off! Like some Conrad Benjamin up in this biznitch. Man, I need to make a best of rare slap bass boogie compilation. Anyway, Hope you like it as much as I do, here's my favorite track below and then a link to the .rar of the rest.
Okay, here is the rest of the good tracks from Rosemary, there might be a couple piano only interludes missing but these are the tracks that make up the sample I gave you plus some others, seemed like everyone really liked Rosemary so this is everything I have of it for you. Enjoy.
Classic gospel funk album by the Violinaires, one of the best gospel funk outfits ever, and one of the longest lasting groups as well. They have a ton of fantastic albums but I particularly like this one for the title track Groovin with Jesus. This is a rip from ym copy, it has some scratches but I think it still sounds pretty good.
Violinaires - Groovin with Jesus
I love this song, I don't know why it, the Mel Prod have a few other releases that are much better, like 'airplane' but I figured I'd share this less often heard track from a local favorite with you.
Mel Production Band - She's My Lady (San Antonio TX 1980)
This post is for a friend of mine, I know this has been reissued in one way or another, it's not easily findable in the blog world, most likely because someone owns the rights, but whatever, if it's a problem I'll take it down, until then, anyone that doesn't have this gem of a record, get it now, this is from an original vinyl copy that was in very nice condition.
Kind of amazed that this LP isn't more readily available in the blog sphere, I see lots of uploads of the track 'Morning Spring' but that's it. Obviously that is the real highlight of the album but the rest is pretty solid too. Classic afro-funk spiritual jazz album that is sought after by many and rarely ever turns up. A few years ago someone tracked down the source and got a bunch of sealed copies, that's how a handful of copies got back onto the market and traded around, before it was near impossible to find and ran 500 bucks. Now all those are gone too and you see one pop up occasional for 200 bucks or so in really nice condition. This remains a perennial digger classic. I really do love that Morning Spring song, wow.
I was shocked to find that this album isnt available already on a blog somewhere so I felt it was high time I fixed that problem. Classic late 70s soul gospel record with a funky disco vibe, especially on track B1, which is why everyone wants this record. It's about 75 bucks usually, a standard in any serious gospel LP collection. Overall it's got some nice soulful gospel tunes, nothing mind blowing, but like I said track B1 - 'everything is gonna be alright' is the real killer here, its got breaks and samples galore, more disco breaks than hip hop but really you could go either way with it. I thought about just upping that track but it seems like everyone prefers the entire LP when possible so here it is, this is from my rip of course and it was in great condition, so enjoy.
I include links in each post as either a hyperlink to a .rar that is held on divshare or rapidshare, or if there is a divshare player to listen to a track but no hyperlink to the .rar you can still download the mp3s from the divshare site if you click on the divshare button as they are all stored and ready for downloading as mp3.
