Funk | Soul 306 Items

Here comes the highly anticipated album release from Aaron Abernathy featuring Black Milk, Deborah Bond, Nat Turner, Phonte (of Little Brother + The Foreign Exchange), Zo!

Aaron Abernathy, is a jazz pianist/soul singer and multi-talented entertainer. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Abernathy comes from a long-line of historical pioneers including Civil Rights Leader, Rev. Ralph David Abernathy and student of the same high school music program as the late R&B great Gerald Levert.

He joined the ranks of artists like Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack as a graduate from the prestigious music program at Howard University, where he sharpened his piano playing and musicianship by majoring in jazz piano. With outstanding talents as both a pianist and a vocalist, he has acted as musical director for global touring acts Black Milk and Slum Village and collaborated with Grammy-nominated artists including Jack White, The Foreign Exchange, and Eric Roberson.

Always best selling Adele is back with a new set of heartfelt anthems.

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.

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.

Ahmed Malek - Algeria's Ennio Morricone

Ahmed Malek was one of the most important musicians of the Algerian scene of the 1970s. His sountrack works that were composed for various Algerian movies of the time fuse Arabic influences with jazz, psych and funk influences. Dark cineastic soundscapes meet african Jazz at times reminicent of Mulatu. Original copies of his vinyl releases have been sold for enormous amounts. For this release we combined the strongest tracks from his releases with a selection of unreleased material straight from the families archive. The vinyl edition comes with a 8 page 12” size booklet, the cd version with a 16 page booklet with lot of unseen photos, an interview with the artist from 1978 and an introduction to Algerian cinema.

White vinyl. Original inner sleeve. Tiny wear.

When first I got to know that I was going to create the score for this short, I was pretty excited about the idea behind the film, and especially the story of the character Jens, who suffers from schizophrenia.I started inventing sounds to depict the character’s visions and hallucinations and I knew right away that I was going for a style more experimental than the two previous scores, Eastern Army and Mosaic, both written during the same year. The working process of the soundtrack for Hell is Other People (Helvede er de Andre) has perhaps been the most creative I have ever done. I just started recording sounds, effects and handmade percussion with no idea as to where I was heading, only the sense that I was going somewhere else, somewhere I had never been before. Somewhere where I felt very comfortable. All of the sounds are performed and recorded at night in my home studio Easy Beat Evil Bite and I used everything I could at home, everything I could get my hands on: wine glasses, chimes, shakers, African percussion instruments, angel harp, tambourine, sitar, hand drumming on a paper box or on naked skin, cymbals, synthesizer, effect pedals, the Rhodes, the piano and a lot of reverse recording from my old Revox tape recorder as well as electric and acoustic guitars. The title song “Every Missing Beat of Your Heart” and ”Falling Papers from a Staircase” are both very calm and reflecting tunes, characterized by a dreaming acoustic guitar arpeggio and a persuasive hypnotized tempo from an old metronome. On the track ”Metal Me” is a lot of psycho-blues; the strumming of an acoustic Yamaha is evident on three monotone chords and the 'sloppy' beat makes everything sound so heavy. I love the production of the song ”At the Clinic” where I chose to do a swing beat playing on the glasses to generate a more defined sound, like something you just can’t get rid of; like an annoying sound , and together with electric guitar playing in surf mood I really did something cool and easy there… I pictured the boy Jens walking up and down the corridors at the hospital and having trouble thinking clearly, or maybe seeing what other people couldn’t see. I think that all in all, I was most inspired by the sound of the 50’s in the making of this album; the warmth of the tremolo of in ”My Room” and the dark and psychotic mood of “Perspective” and ”Second Moon”. From time to time there is a touch of emptiness, death, agony and the feeling of loneliness behind those moments in tunes such as ”One of Us”, “No More Dead Flies” and ”She Suicide”. The second part of ”Every Missing Beat of Your Heart” I wrote on an acoustic guitar in Berlin during a short vacation. I remember having written the chords and the lyrics for the melody in half an hour and was very happy with the result. Signe Isager, who recently sang live with the band Alex Puddu and The Butterfly Collectors, sings in this song with me and I thought it would be a good choice to go with the end credits. For the making of the songs on this album I have been searching for the clinical, cold aesthetics of the rooms and corridors of a hospital and the warm sound of the sea from a house on the beach and I do believe this is what inspired me. It has been a great experience working on this album and the production, from the very start to the very end of the process, and being able to give what I felt was right for this picture at this moment.

A groovy vibrant jazz / soul / funk soundtrack for an imaginary hard-boiled movie from the 70s!
The varied selection of instruments (organ, flute, moog, bongos, cello, violin, drums, bass, acoustic
and electric guitars etc.) blend flawlessly into each other and make this album an intense and
inspired trip... in fact it may turn into a movie in front of your very eyes! Featuring the legendary
Edda Dell’Orso on vocals and her husband Giacomo on string arrangements!!!

An explosive boogie funk production for your dancefloor, with special guest Joe Bataan on 3 tracks.

This 45rpm single anticipates the new full-length album by Alex Puddu, a real specialist in
the field of groovy imaginary soundtracks with a strong ‘70s vibe. The title of this 7’’ is “The
Bull”, and it’s the most representative track from the upcoming record “In the Eye of the
Cat”, which undoubtedly is one of Puddu’ s best and cohesive works to date.
As Nils Markvardsen (editor of the film magazine eXtase and film festival curator) says in
his liner notes featured on the album, “The Bull” confronts you with some intense flute and
a killer groove and here it’s easy to imagine a mob of armed gangsters robbing a bank in
an Italian crime film/poliziottesco!
As a B-side we have “Sequenza Erotica” (Erotic Sequence), an unreleased track that can
only be found on this 7’’, spreading that sexy cinematic feeling typical of Puddu’s production
(see for example his “Golden Age of Danish Pornography” series).
As for “In the Eye of the Cat”, Nils Markvardsen also defines it as a reference to the Italian
giallo film genre of the 1960s and 70s. These lurid murder mysteries/thrillers, featuring
black gloved killers lurking in the dark, gorgeous young ladies being chased and artistic displays
of blood and cruelty, usually had horrifying and imaginative film titles, in many cases
with the words; eye(s), black, blood, death, killer and the name of an animal of some sort
thrown in the mix. [...] A nice homage to giallo maestro Dario Argento from fellow Roman
Alex Puddu.
The North African influence on the percussion can be found throughout the album; it has
that groovy, vibrant 70s vibe. The varied selection of instruments (organ, flute, moog, bongos,
cello, violin, drums, bass, acoustic and electric guitars etc.) blend flawlessly into each
other and make this

An explosing boogie funk for your dancefloor with a special guest Joe Bataan on the track 'The Mover'.

Top Originally Unissued Killer Sixties Northern Soul Mover Outta Philadelphia For Upfront Deejays Which Is Taking No Prisoners!

Vinyl with a couple of light scuffs

Vinyl with a couple of light scuffs. 180 gram reissue

Vinyl with scuffs and hairlines. Still in shrink, but opened, with hype sticker

A delicate, slinky figure with a powerhouse voice, Ann Peebles occupied a special place among the many great talents that roamed the halls of Memphis' iconic Hi Records in the 1960s and 1970s. While producer Willie Mitchell was the company's heart, musicians the Hodges Brothers its soul, and Al Green its top star, it was Peebles who gave the label its first national success, and a lasting female identity. Over the course of seven albums and dozens of singles for Hi, Peebles expressed a complex range of moods and emotions in her music. Her songs were alternately pleading and defiant and destructive, but always, utterly soulful.

‘Caribbean Roots’ represents a return to his roots for Anthony Joseph, who has always remained true to a powerful, deep-seated sense of his Caribbean identity.

Cover close to NM

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.

Two rare Thai treasures from the late 1960s. Hit covers of Japanese songs; pan-Asian music produced by the legendary Surin Paksiri.
A version of Soran Bushi, the traditional work-song of Hokkaido fishermen, Ya Deon Show was his first success, fusing a Luk Thung arrangement with a Japanese Dodonpa rhythm.
On the flip, a bi-lingual do-over of the 1968 smash by Pinky & The Killers, Sakura La Kon — Goodbye Sakura — featuring fine, bittersweet khaen.
Lovely picture sleeve, with lyrics and liner notes in English.

In demand 7 inch sees a limited edition in translucent yellow vinyl. Regarding the album: "This has not been off the decks since I first got it and have been hammering it to death on the show. One of the Essential albums of 2011. Perfect in every sense and totally irresistable" Craig Charles (bbc 6Music) Two cover versions taken from the essential album Gitano Real. I Believe in Miracles is an overwhelming take on the Jackson Sisters classic in a rumba funk fashion. Party stomper!! And on the other side, a longer trip departing from McFadden and Whitehead's seminal Ain't Non Stoping Us Now and touching the revered latin disco version of Charanga 76, only to end up as a fabulous clap-driven rumba stormer. Two very necessary sun-soaked tunes for any self-respecting dj on neat black vinyl. And yes, it's a limited edition!

Vinyl with some light scuffs on the matrix runout. Copy close to NM

Betty Harris’ The Lost Queen of New Orleans Soul collects together the steady stream of amazing soul and funk singles issued by Betty Harris from 1964 to 1969, under the musical guidance of legendary composer, musician and producer extraordinaire Allen Toussaint, a collection which truly captures the heart and soul of the city of New Orleans during this era.
Betty Harris’s powerful, fiery soulful vocals found a perfect accompaniment with the New Orleans’ players that Toussaint put together to back her, which by the time of her funk classic ‘There’s A Break In The Road’ were the legendary super-tight, super-funk New Orleans group The Meters.
With the extraordinary song-writing skills of Allen Toussaint alongside the powerful, soaring, confident and emotive singer and the groove of The Meters, you have an unbeatable combination. That Harris never in fact lived in New Orleans (she flew in from Florida for all her sessions with Toussaint’s local in-house players) seems almost an irrelevance, a geographical aside to the defining New Orleans sound captured on the recordings featured here.
All of these singles featured here were released on Allen Toussaint and his business partner Marshal Sehorn’s local New Orleans label Sansu, widely distributed in the southern city but in only limited quantities elsewhere. As a consequence, Betty Harris’ music failed to achieve the commercial success of other New Orleans artists such as Lee Dorsey (who she recorded with) and The Meters (who backed her). And so at the end of the decade she stopped recording, retired from the music business to raise her family in Florida.