Three years ago, I got rid of my 2009 Chevy Cobalt and got a 2003 Chrysler Town and Country that had been modified with a ramp and tie-downs for wheelchairs. My wife uses a powered wheelchair to get around most of the time, and it helped a lot in getting her to her job every day. For her purposes it was a godsend, though I didn't care too much for it. For starters, while I'm not concerned with having a flashy vehicle, I do want it to look okay, and while the body of the van was okay, the hood had been given a half-ass repainting that couldn't hide a huge shadow from something that once sat on it, specifically an image of a pair of dice with the words Casino Bound written beneath them. This vehicle had clearly been used by a company for the purpose of bringing people to (and presumably from) gambling establishments at one time or another.  The other thing that bothered me about the van was the sound system, a serious downgrade from my Cobalt. I've never been one to spen

So I took most of a month off, and if you were waiting for another post, my apologies. Life gets hectic, and I intended to post something last week, but it just didn't happen. It's a reminder of how much life has changed since when I was running a somewhat popular blog in the late 00s. I was devoted to writing something every day or so, and my life was a bit simpler back then. Now I have a job that doesn't afford me all the free time I could want between work, and while a lot of us have had more free time than we've expected to since around March, the last few weeks have been a mess for me. They're still kind of a mess, but a very big hurdle has been leapt which makes things a bit easier. I was going to wait until tomorrow to work on a post, but fuck it screw it, here we go. This one is a bit of a tribute to my early days on Soulseek . If you haven't followed what I've said about it previously or looked into it yourself, give it a go if you're feeling a

If you haven't heard Carl Craig's remix of Delia & Gavin's Relevee yet, you've really missed out. Much to my dismay, this track, at least in it's original remix form, is no longer available for purchase or streaming via your favorite digital receptacle. Maybe it's a casualty of those brief years that DFA had a distribution via EMI . I have to assume EMI wanted LCD Soundsystem bad enough that they agreed to distributing records by Black Dice as well, which definitely didn't work out for them. Don't get me wrong, DFA is a great label, and Black Dice are a great group if you like noise and weirdness, as are and were many of the artists on DFA , but I can't see EMI benefiting from much of their output beyond LCD , Hot Chip and maybe the Juan MacLean . Delia & Gavin were wonderful too, but their unfettered output is essentially fifteen minute analog synth epics, again a bit of a limited market for the record buying public. So I suppose

Before we begin..., I read some of this post to my wife and she didn't want me to share it. I told her I didn't think there was anything wrong with it but she felt otherwise. Well, everything that follows below is what I'd written, though if anything I've said bothers anyone, please know that wasn't my intent. Call me crazy... no seriously, it's okay, you can call me crazy. That said, before last night I'd never heard the original version of Wanda Dee's To the Bone . I suppose that's because it's a long out-of-print record that is best known as the source of the "gonna make you sweat" sample in the the "live" version of The KLF's What Time Is Love , though I'd heard a version where Trevor Jackson of Playgroup mashed the acapella with Dexter's I Don't Care to wonderful effect. I'll stick with that version, as the original is rather dated. While reading through the comments on the YouTube video for To th

Sorry there hasn't been a real post this week. This one is a little overly easy, but I'm sure you'll find it enjoyable. Here are some links for some albums that aren't generally available through traditional sources. Two of them have been worked on by myself and some friends, but everything else is as it was presented online. Resident Alien - It Takes a Nation of Suckas to Let Us In I've posted this before, but it's been a while. Prince Paul produced this album for his Dew Doo Man imprint which was to be distributed by Def Jam , but Russell Simmons cancelled it. Now Russell Simmons is being cancelled, though Paul seems to be doing fine. By the way, he and Open Mike Eagle have a new podcast dedicated to Paul talking about his career and the interesting people he's worked with. It's called What Had Happened Was and you should definitely go listen to it as it's wonderful. Props to Harvey Cliff for hipping me to the show! Central Services - Fore

Should I have a stupid subtitle for this post, like THE QUICKENING or ELECTRIC BOOGALOO ? Nah, fuck that. And as sad as it is to say this, I've read that the word boogaloo now has some kind of new, shitty context related to racist organizations. Fuck that too! All I'm here for is the music and the history, sometimes in that order, sometimes reversed. And today, it's more about the music because someone else did the history part a long time ago. And with that... Do you remember Richcolour and Mastermix dot org ? If not, well, you missed out. It was a cool site dedicated to mixes played on the radio in the UK primarily in the eighties. The site is technically still there, but there isn't any content and I wouldn't bother visiting. Instead, use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine   and visit some archived versions of the site! Now, at this point you might be saying something to yourself like "None of the links on archive pages ever work, so I can't grab

As if the all caps title doesn't give it away, here are some very old bootlegs. Unlike most of what I've posted so far, most of these mp3s are transfers from bootleg vinyl pressed in the eighties, the exception being a track from an early nineties bootleg compilation that Ninja Tune released on the Bond St. imprint . Let's Do It: More of the 80s Medley (Short Version) Let's Do It: More of the 80s Medley (Long Version) Are you familiar with Stars on 45 ? If not, their initial release, also named Stars on 45 , was a wonderful abomination focused on making a medley of mostly unrelated hits with a side of Beatles classics. It's kind of awful and wonderful all at the same time with a group of studio-based mimics doing miniature covers of songs the whole world sang, or at least danced to in some cases. What's less known about that first record is it was based off a successful bootleg mix created for club DJs, which in turn was also based off yet another bootle

Anyone else miss people making tons of unauthorized remixes and posting them online? Wait, I think I left a few words out, like before and were . Those words belong around people . I guess there have been bootleg remixes forever, even before the term remix was coined. I've been fascinated with remixes since I was a kid, trying to convince my mother to buy me the 12" instead of the 7" after a good piano lesson. Sometimes the remixes sucked, but more often than not they provided insight into what else we weren't allowed to see or, at the very least, extended a good groove. And when I found out about independent producers who made their own remixes, I really wanted to know what else was out there. For that, like many things, the internet was the blessing and curse, in that we got to learn and hear these versions, though we also had to suffer through a deluge of them. It was novel, at least initially, being easy to shine light on the best contributions, though that&#

I've always wanted to start a band. I can play the keys and I've got good rhythm. I can write good lyrics and I've got a low voice that carries. It's probably not going to happen though. I don't think I have the drive for it, not to mention I'm quite a bit older now. Still, if I were to start a band, my goal would either be to create a group covering lots of different styles, or one that was into very loud music, to the point of outright noise with underlying melody. My blueprint for the latter would be Beck's early band recordings where his songwriting talents were sometimes buried behind waves of feedback and screams. If you don't know what I'm talking about, the  Stereopathetic Soulmanure  album will fill in the blanks, though there is a quite a bit of it on Mellow Gold  too. That said, a song that gets straight to the point is his cover of Can's I'm So Green . As for where to find that, well... It was scheduled to be part of a Dust Broth

Am I going to have to come up with increasingly dumb names for my blog posts? Only time will...NAH, I'm definitely going to come up with dumber ones. Anyone else remember Palms Out Sounds ? They, like O.G. Stereogum , did some awesome remix posts where they had official mixes alongside unofficial or rejected versions. As has been the standard since "prosumer" digital audio workstations became the norm, often time the homemade mixes are much more impressive than anything the labels put out. Brings to mind the intense disappointment I had after hearing the four officially sanctioned remixes of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy that were about as generic as a basic house mix could get. We won't even get into how troubled Cee-Lo's career has been since his run-in with rape charges and shitty online behavior, so I'll just say that the first Gnarls Barkley album was so good that it deserved remixes of a much higher caliber. But back to the matter at hand, there were

So for what is probably my first legitimate post, here are some legitimately old mp3s. Well, three of them fit that description, one gets a pass. Lady Sovereign - Hoodie (Spank Rock Remix) Vast Aire - Super Friendz (Edan Remix feat. MF DOOM) Do you remember when websites posted free music you could download? Yeah? Kinda, sorta? Well, both of these tracks were from an EP posted on adult swim in 2006. It featured six tracks from artists on the Chocolate Industries label. I don't know how Chocolate Industries worked something out with adult swim , but they ended up dropping a few digital freebies through them, all of which have now been wiped from the official adult swim sites. You can find some of them via archive.org's Wayback Machine though if you really want them. Chocolate Industries had a pretty good distribution deal in place along with good artists and releases, though I've heard the guy who ran the label was scummy and his big talent was not paying his ar

I made this years ago, living in Wellington, Ohio and playing around with settings in SoundForge after cutting enough from a remix of Come to Butthead to make a perfect loop. Yes, Come to Butthead , that Butthead . I wanted to make music, but I didn't have a keyboard or any other equipment, so I tried making my own mixes from music I loved. I didn't do much, and most of it wouldn't probably be considered music, but it was fun. This though, it was the main loop from a hidden track on the Beavis and Butthead Experience CD. It was a remix of the aforementioned Come to Butthead with Positive K trying to bestow knowledge on the two Bs. I LOVE this beat, so I made this remix of sorts. Regarding the artist name, I wanted to call my group, whether it was just me or anyone else, the scatterbain coalition , as I thought it was a funny sounding name and I'm a scatterbrain sometimes. We would've empowered scatterbrains internationally! Ha ha. Anyway, if you enjoy thi

Okay, if you can handle a very low stakes blog, dare I say a NO STAKES blog, I'm going to post something once a week, maybe more. It'll usually be, as the name suggests, old mp3s I grabbed back in the day, be it from other blogs, sites dedicated to specific music and styles, or obscurities from slsk and whatnot. The metadata has been wiped from most of these files, but I'm trying to make sure I use the original files whenever possible, so the bitrate and quality might be low sometimes, but that's just how it is. Also, some stuff might not be here forever, so grab it as soon as you can. I'm not trying to compete with streaming, so most of what will be posted here is probably not officially available for streaming or purchase, but I'm sure some content owners will want their crap removed as quickly as possible, no matter how forgotten it is. Now I've just gotta go find that demo the DFA did for Britney Spears. I know I've got it around here somewhere...