Funk | Soul 349 Items

15 newly remastered tracks. Great psychedelic brazilian soul!

Magic Source is a project led by producer Björn Wagner (The Mighty Mocambos, Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band, Mocambo Records), who is renowned for creating an authentic and hard-hitting raw funk sound. Following a few acclaimed single releases on Favorite Recordings over the past few years, the French label deeply wanted to collaborate further with the German combo, for a special and exclusive project bringing their music on new paths. This new project is a step towards a new style: Analog-Electronica, or so called Cosmic-Disco sound. Recorded on a 16-track reel-to-reel tape, EARTHRISING combines raw unedited live band recording, with the refined production aesthetics of the Disco era, including the use of vintage synthesizers, group chants and processed acoustic percussions, for an organic club feeling. While maintaining an un-edited, but highly hypnotic four-on-the-floor groove, Magic Source leaves the old beaten track of cheesy Disco-Pop and overheard Dance classics.

Producing under the moniker Isoul8, as well as teaming up with Domu under the Rima alias for the incredible jazz/fusion album 'This World', Volcov is a truly important player in the underground music scene.
Remixing artists such as Frankie Valentine, Azymuth & Taylor McFerrin, running his two labels Archive and Neroli, as well as DJing all over the World has given Volcov a rare knowledge of soul, funk, disco and deep house music; knowledge which is very apparent throughout this album.
'From The Archive' comprises a lovingly chosen collection of obscure Funk, Disco & Boogie tracks, alongside three very special edits produced by the man himself. From Chez Damier's sun-drenched remix of The Urban Crew's 'Go' to Bembe Segue's emotional 'Sun On My Back' via Shuya Okino's disco epic 'Still In Love', this record takes the listener on a joyful journey deep into Volcov's musical mind.

Originally released on Gloria and her husband Walter Whisenhunt’s label Selector Sound as a 7in single, “Love Is A Hurtin’ Thing” features her soaring vocals
backed by luscious strings, orchestral horns and a searing guitar. On the flip is “Brother Less Than A Man” which sounds like a proto Funkadelic
/Parliament psychedelic funk bomb. Pressed as a 7in single on the House Guests label, it highlights a grittier side of her singing that matches the song’s depth and intensity. Backed by a rhythm section featuring Bootsy Collins and brother Catfish who along with Gloria and her husband founded the label
after leaving James Brown’s band. Look for the similarly titled anthology of Gloria’s ouput on the Selector Sound label to drop later in 2015.

James Brown had several incredibly talented funky divas in his late 60s and early 70s stable, including Vicki Anderson and Marva Whitney. But as great as those two powerhouse singers were, Lyn Collins was the strongest hitmaker of that funky JB era. Her strong voice and commanding stage presence - which earned her the nicknames The Female Preacher and Mama Feelgood - quickly proved to be a potent addition to the People Records universe. In the spring of 1972 her second single, the driving and ridiculously funky “Think (About It)” hit the R&B music world like a ton of bricks. As fans young and old know, thanks to its timeless, relentless groove and powerful vocals, “Think” gained a powerful second life in the 1980s thanks to the hip-hop generation, fueling the platinum smash “It Takes Two,” by Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock in 1988 and additionally sampled by dozens of hip-hop and dance music artists up to the present day. But Collins was far from a one hit wonder: she was as vocally adept on ballads as she was with full-blown funk. She proves this throughout her debut album, which was released in 1972 on James Browns new People Records - the imprint's second full-length release. To wit, aside from the title smash: a powerful and emotional cover of Bill Withers "Ain’t No Sunshine"; the socially progressive "Women’s Lib"; the Gamble & Huff-penned "Never Gonna Give You Up" (originally done by Jerry Butler); and even a daring, muscular take on the song “Fly Me To The Moon,” made famous by, among others, Frank Sinatra. Throughout Think (About It), Collins shows that she was a vocal force to be reckoned with. Backed by a James Brown assembled musical crew that included Pee Wee Ellis, Fred Wesley and, of course, James Brown himself, the platter was bound to impress and succeed. And that it did.

Another big retro-soul-money anthem!

Repress of sought after Habibi Funk release from 2016! Carthago: Rare Tunisian Disco Including Unreleased Instrumentals And Eight Page Booklet! When we first decided to start Habibi Funk, a label dedicated to re-releasing "funky" Arabic music from the 1960s to 1980s, a band called Dalton was the first release we worked on. Dalton was a band from the Tunisian capital of Tunis and they played a unique mix of soul & funk with an Arabic DNA. We licensed the release from the band's composer Fawzi Chekili, and when we spoke to him on the phone in preparation of the release he mentioned another band he was part of, called Carthago. Our work with Habibi Funk is like a big treasure hunt. There are too many great bands that fully vanished into obscurity and didn’t leave any traces in the digital sphere yet. We are so used to the internet providing all informations we might be looking for, but Carthago was one of those bands where the internet largely failed to provide any infos despite the fact that Carthago created some incredible music in the form of an highly infectious Tunisian take on disco music. Luckily most of the members of the 1970s musical scene of Tunis are still around to tell their story.

Carthago was founded in the late 1970s as a fusion of Dalton and a second band called Marhaba Band. Both bands frequently played at hotels and night clubs in Tunis and Sousse. They had similar musical influences and despite the fact that they were competition for the most part, they came up with the idea to join forces for a new band. Musically Carthago kept on walking on the musical path of Dalton and Marhaba but incorporated disco music, a new style that was making its way to North Africa from Europe and North America. The band had quite some success on local radio and played a number of big shows with thousands of people showing up. The band’s concerts were a mixture of their own compositions as well as cover versions of the hits of the time from Stevie Wonder to Chicago. At the end of the 70s they went to Paris to record their only, self titled album. For our reissue we picked out two of our favorite tracks: „Hanen“ and the outstanding disco version of the Dalton track „Alech“ which has proved to work on every dance floor we played over the last two years.

When I came to Tunis for the first time after the Dalton reissue I met Fawzi in person. He still lives in Tunis and still works as a full time musician though his focus has shifted more towards Jazz over the years. Luckily he did not only keep a spotless copy of the Carthago album but he also kept the master tape of the instrumental versions of the album which to this day were unreleased. Being able to add exclusive content to a reissue is something that is rare and we feel highly privileged to be able to do so. Futher more we are so happy that we will be able to add something new to the bands legacy not only musically but also visually: One day I realized that most of the releases from Tunisia I liked, be it from Dalton, Carthago or Marhaba Band had the same photographer credit.

Hassen Turki started taking photos at a young age and when he was 18 he started going to the gigs of the bands of the time that were playing in the Marhaba Hotel which was managed by his father at the time. He became friends with the bands and ended up being the person to be asked when it came to shooting the photos for the covers of the records. After some research I managed to get in touch with Hassen and met him in his hometown Sousse. Luckily he kept most of the negatives of the photos he took so we’re more than happy to be able to share these unseen photos with whoever is interested.

Back IN Print 2022 Edition - Limited Edition of 300 copies Recorded Live in Hyattsville, MD 1975-2015. George really had no interest in releasing this record. "Seeing Is believing, they don’t need records, trust me I did that, today they getting it live". So this record is that, live tapes from the house, recorded on a government issued cassette recorder from National Library Service for the Blind. George calls these his practice tapes for songwriting, and performance warm-up, and never beyond his ears were they intended to travel. "You just got to see me live if you want to really see me.. so when we get there just plug me in, and point me at that crowd". Last time I saw George they had him wired to the club system. He unplugs his Yamaha keyboard, licks the tip of the power cord and taps a beat on it, finally plugging in, synth lights up, tones all at zero, beats at zero. Then he builds from there, counting blind through a preset one hunderd factory tones and rhythm patterns. "I gotta start off at zero, and go from there." After the Marshmellow Band disperesed, he got this Yamaha keyboard, same one he’s been playing since 1990, endless scrolling over the same presets, trying to make them fit, tempo down, tapping while telling the story and asking if that feels right to you. "This always gonna be different live."Some selections on this album are original material from home sessions prior to George’s 1980 self- released LP. The rest, just a sampling from the Smallwood mind’s library of classic song writers. - Andrew Morgan (Peoples Potential Unlimited)

This is the first ever vinyl release of Ikebe Shakedown’s debut release. The sound of the album is still as heavy as an angry herd of elephants! Recorded at Dunham Studios in Brooklyn with the help of members of The Budos Band, these tracks are rough and tough to be sure and offer a variety of different sounds from the band. Ikebe seamlessly blends the raw emotion and passion of ‘70s African Funk with the danceable horns and rhythms of American soul music! The records is housed in a heavyweight gatefold tip-on jacket and comes with a download.

It was made the way they made electronic music in the good old days, all analog everything, right after synthesizers shrunk to a manageable size and you didn’t have to trek down to a university to use one anymore. Electronic music as practiced and developed by pioneers like Dick Hyman and Raymond Scott and Wendy Carlos is precise and intentional. In making his first electronic album, Younge took his cues from them, reminding a contemporary audience what a synthesizer, deep in its heart, really could be. “Black Noise” is men talking to men about women; “Lemonade” is a woman talking to women about men, and they both orbit around a failure we take for granted like the sun: loving you is complicated. It’s a skill; we forgot. Adrian Younge calls “The Electronique Void” an academic album, by which he means it is both instructional and informational. There’s a problem at the heart of it, a woman who’s been told that she’s loved, but she doesn’t recognize that, can’t feel it, may have heard it all before, may be worrying about the wrong things. Jack Waterson, long a guitarist in Younge’s band, plays the role of narrator, sounding professorial and rather superior as he lays out for the woman where she’s erred. That vocoder you hear is Adrian, talking to her on a subterranean level, the way an artist must. The discourse on the album is the kind of thing that happens when you go blonde and then you can’t keep ‘em off you. These truths are cold and hard, and our hero begrudges the well-meaning advice being rained down upon her as any independent woman would. The science of love, its formulas and if-then constraints, causal relationships and observable properties, is best taught experientially, but learning it hurts so, so bad. Music, especially electronic music, reliant as it is on abstraction and unrepentant as it is about hijacking your physiological responses to tempo and rhythm and dynamics, is a way to get there without going through it.

Exact replica repress!! George gave us his orginal metal stampers and we were able to press a limited run of these before the plate broke! Best sound quality here.. don't miss this sought after modern soul masterpice. Perfect for all the still clubbing moms on the dancefloor.

Reissue of these sampled to death classics! Should be in every decent collection…

Robbie M of Midnight Express (Danger Zone) is back with his latest single! This is the first track from Robbie's Upcoming LP.

Big Crown Records is proud to present Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band’s new 45, “Scorpio” b/w “8th Wonder”. Coming after the smashing success of their debut full length “55” they drop 2 B-Boy classics back to back on this tough two sider that comes in a beautifully illustrated picture sleeve.
The A side “Scorpio” is a killer cover of the Dennis Coffey breakbeat staple. BRSB turn up the tempo a touch on the original doing the tune justice with crushing drums they have become known for. This is sure to be in every breakbeat enthusiasts box. The B side features the non album cut, BRSB’s cover of The Sugarhill Gang’s 8th Wonder, a tune that lends itself to pans like it was written for them. Another dance floor winner sure to be in DJs sets the world over shortly.

San Diego’s The Sure Fire Soul Ensemble is here with
their debut full-length on Colemine Records. Laid back
vibes, funky rhythms, and heavy instrumental goodness
are the order for the day.

"Fire Walker" is Jungle Fire's sophmore single that's blazin' up dancefloors around the world!

Back in! It all started in a local club in Pine Bluff Arkansas where Mojo and Spider played in their first group together Zodiac in the mid 70s. Spider played lead guitar, and Mojo held the brass section. Sam "Spider" Rice was also the music director for a vocal group called "La Pinch" which included vocalist Gary Pinchom (Pinch). As the 80s approached La Pinch was looking for a new sound. After relocating to the East Coast "The Pinch" was born. New York and Jersey was quite a change. Spider wanted to write a song to address the drug abuse he was seeing all around him. "Shot Out was a street term we used to describe someone with an excessive drug habit", recalls Spider. "We built a voice box from a horn driver, a couple of switches, and some tubing". They had some money stashed from a Zodiac gig and picked up a Prophet 5 and Roland Drum machine. After recording the track in 1981, the song was mastered at the legendary Power Plant in NYC. That would prove to be the major limitation for the release, since they were out of money now and could only afford to press 200 copies of the 7". Distributed in Texas and locally on the east coast, "Shot Out" would be the only release from The Pinch. UNTIL NOW! Re-mastered for the first time on 12" vinyl, this 80s funk masterpiece is finally back on wax.

"Psychic Welfare" was produced by Pink Skull and Jeff Zeigler (Kurt Vile, War On Drugs) between the band's Philadelphia studio and Brooklyn, NY. Contending with the seismic swells in both the macro and micro worlds around him, Grefe refracted the polluted waves in a fantastical fit to write the 13 songs of "Psychic Welfare". The album is a map of time and space portals in which the listener can navigate from the corroded corners of machinated life to boundless, amorphous space in mere seconds. Across the album's pull-out poster artwork for "Psychic Welfare" is a hand-scrawled poem by the late NYC sage Ira Cohen entitled "Blind Assemblage". In the poem, Cohen describes the decay of society and struggles to find civility within tragedy, a sentiment mirrored in Grefe's lyrical content of Psychic Welfare, if not masked by a new found pop propensity. The lead track on the album, "Hot Bubblegum," a Television-inspired piece of pop perfectly pushes this dichotomy of psychotic playfulness. "Mu" is a sprawling instrumental spread of blissed-out 80s funk, complete with a tin rooftop sax solo by Billy Dufala (Man Man). "Janine Aubergine" fictionalizes Grefe's girlfriend's bluegrass fiddle-playing aunt as a psychedelic maven over a tango groover, while "Bee Nose (Put Yr Face On)" is a woozy, hazy late-night phone call from the warped Scottish countryside circa 1998. "Summer Reading" feels like a Transformer-era Lou Reed bullying Mark E. Smith around a disco bouncey castle. Tracks from Psychic Welfare were remixed by Brassica, Higamos Hagamos, Ray Mang, and Worst Friends. Each of these remixes will be released as single support and included alongside additional original tracks as bonus downloads. The artwork of Psychic Welfare is taken from a a series of visual synth feedback experiments conducted by the band and video artist Adam Carrigan. The LP edition features a 48" x 96" heavy-stock pull out poster.

This is the Linear Labs deluxe edition in cardboard sleeve. The release contains the full CD album and instrumentals including bonus tracks.

Adrian Younge is the next generation of soul music. A self-taught musician and recording engineer who has dedicated his life to the study of classic soul music, Younge finds himself at the center of a new soul renaissance with a vision for pushing the boundaries of the music itself.

For his current solo project, Younge envisioned a new sound that would revisit his earlier, more baroque instrumental work of Venice Dawn and mesh it with the deep, gritty soul of Black Dynamite, eventually deciding to bring everything full circle by releasing the material under the moniker Venice Dawn.

Brass Horizon only ever had one effort put out onto vinyl. The much sought after "We want to play" on the Minda Mark label. Currently commanding big bucks on the collector’s scene. The single also made it onto Keb Darge's Deep Funk LP. Now Super Disco Edits has dug deep again, and unearthed some killer tracks by the band. Brass Horizon were heavily into the Bay Area sound of the mid 70's and especially Tower of Power. The first recording to come to light from these dusty sessions is this one off studio mic take, introducing the band. Fully 6 mins long, we have trimmed it down, so it gets a 45 release. Part 1&2. polish your headspin hat, and hear all the components of the band, horns, keyboards, and last but not least a big arse drum break!! Beware you b-boys out there!

8 tracks of raw Arabic funk music, none of these have ever been reissued before. It took 2 years and countless trips to Morocco to find the artists family to license the release from them. Vinyl and CD edition come with liner notes, unseen live photos and lyrics translations.

Bow down to the 'Screaming Eagle Of Soul'! Download code for the full album is included.

Classics by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes & others get a rework courtesy of Maceo & The WDR Big Band!

Stix Recordings rounds up all those essential Mato 7" anthems onto this extended player, with all the cuts remastered for the occasion! Includes two unreleased hits featuring Blackstreet (No
Diggity) & Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre (The Wash). Woopiwoop, that's the sound of reggae-hip hop perfection!

Detailed liner notes, insert with pictures. Expertly remastered sound.

Raised amid the rich musical culture and history of the San Francisco Bay Area, Monophonics proudly carry the torch through the generations into today’s musical landscape. Holding on to tradition, but by no means purists of any kind, they play their own brand of music known as “Psychedelic Soul.”

The 2012 release of Monophonics last album In Your Brain saw the band pulling influences from such acts as early Funkadelic, Sly and The Family Stone and the The Temptation's Norman Whitfield produced records. With the new album, Sound of Sinning (April 14, 2015 on Transistor Sound Records), the band has grown in all areas of record making and felt a need to explore other important in- fluences. While the group has come to cherish these inspirations, With Sound of Sinning they started venturing beyond, to the groups that were inspiring those soul acts to embrace the psychedelic sound of the 60's and 70's. Bands such as The Zombies, The Beatles, Beach Boys and Pink Floyd. Even with the experimentation of new musical territory, they display the sound that people know and love about Monophonics. Touching on Northern soul, doo-wop, rock and roll, Psych pop, and cinematic music, Monophonics show off their diversity while remaining true to their roots. Overall it's heartfelt music and old school vibes, without losing sight of the present. This is is music steeped in that timeless feeling when people could write and produce songs that you could listen to over and over again. Sound of Sinning was produced by Kelly Finnigan & Ian McDonald and recorded on an old Tascam eight-track 1/4” tape machine at Transistor Sound Studios in San Rafael, CA.