Who are these tribesmen the cover speaks of? A record that raises many what, why and when questions.The confusing juxtaposing of Taiwanese villagers and the African savanah is smoothly continued on the record itself. Taiwanese melodies have been given the Daktari treatment with exotic electronic melodies backed by wah wah and cool percussion. “African” grunts [...]
This cool record was made in Indonesia, 1966. All tracks are composed by Puspa herself. There are some indigenous sounding songs, some soft r&b and a couple of jazz songs. I particularly like the track Lagu Untukmu a lot. It sounds like an exotic version of Nina Simone, sung with a deep voice and with [...]
Here’s an experimental record from 1980, featuring the side long “Formal and Informal Music.” It’s performed by three musicians and led by the electronics guy Tom Hamilton. I can best describe it as an oscillating electronic bee-hive with beautiful woodwind solo’s by J.D. Parran and percussion by Rich O’Donnell. Especially the flute segment is amazing, [...]
This Brasilian album from 1968 is suprisingly unknown and probably pretty rare. You wonder for what reason since it’s such an excellent bossa nova record. Tuca displays a nice feel for understatement in her voice and although a portion of the material is in a breezy mood, the blackness of the cover can be felt [...]
Usha Uthup’s crazy record Blast-Off (1984) is somewhat of an oddity in her otherwise impressive discography. The Indian jazz singer did cool solo records like Scotch and Soda and Live in Nairobi and did many Bollywood and Tamil film songs whenever there were English lyrics or a need for a singer skilled in the jazz [...]
Housed in an incredibly nice cover with a unique pre-historic Flinstone vibe (the drum, the model, the hair…), this record contains several outstanding cumbias. I thought the following cumbia (eh, or Gaita?) from this record is a nice one to post because it features a great hot-jazz guitarist who at one point goes out of [...]
The Italian Phase 6 series might have had one of the coolest strings of sexy covers ever. This one is an absolute favorite of mine. The typefont, the angle, the color of the sky, the choice of model, the negligent position of her bikini. One can almost smell the hot herb-filled air of Italy’s coast [...]
 “Suite from the original music of the seven coproduction films of the Bulgarian and Hungarian red cross societies.” Composers Victor Tschoutschkov and Georgi Genkov did an excellent job on this soundtrack for several Red Cross documentaries and educational films from the sixties. This is something of a politically correct Mondo affair where director Gyorgy Karpati [...]
This is a nice little obscure 7″ flexi record containing the soundtrack to a film called “Ontario”. I guess it was a promotional documentary of sorts from around 1970, highlighting this and that of the province. Films like that usually ooze loads of period charm and you often wonder where all the nice tunes went [...]
One side of this 10″ record by Yao Lee has Chinese folk tunes, the other side has western songs. I rather like the sound and the arrangements on this. Yao Lee became famous in China in the 30′s and 40′s but fled to Hong Kong in 1949. She then got inspired by imported western records. [...]