°°° Brain-Bubbles: Zephir’s Spot

I thought I’d do a small recap of upcoming releases on the modern funk front that I know of. Below is everything I could find for now, but I want to ask upfront, please tell me if you have additions.

So, about that small recap? It’s not going to be small. It appears there is a lot of good stuff on the horizon and this list doesn’t even include some of the bands I reported on earlier. Btw this post is also on last.fm, where links are added for each artist to their last.fm profiles.

Ok, here it goes. First off, coming soon on Freestyle:

• Diesler ‘Tracks On The Rocks’ Sampler (7″) & “Tracks on the Rocks” (CD/LP?)-> preview the two 7″ tracks @ Diesler’s myspace , news via his homepage. Hopefully more tracks of the 14 track CD compilation (hand picked by Freestyle boss Adrian Gibson) will appear soon on the myspace and/or Kudos. Album release date: Autumn 2008 on Freestyle Records.
• The Grits “The Grits” (CD) Tracklisting already @ Kudos, but no previews yet. Listen to some tracks @ their myspace, buy the 7″ now!
• Various Artists “Stay On The Groove vol 4″ (CD) Just listed on the page, no further info available. All previous releases were top notch funk so I expect this one to be too.
• The Perceptions “Introducing The Perceptions” (CD/LP) Preview tracks @ Kudos. Release date: October the 27th.

Second label up, Tru-Thoughts. Although their main focus is not modern funk as such, it has some ace artists, who sure know how to funk and grit it up. Read the rest of this entry »

Read it @ last.fm: http://www.last.fm/user/zephirnl/journal/2008/03/2/663263/

Today I ordered some music. This is not a rare thing for me, in fact I do it way too much, but what is new about it this time is that it is the first time for me to order new music on vinyl (not technically, but it still feels that way).

It does feel a bit like taking a step back in time, but I will try to explain how it came to be. I have been playing music as a dj for some time now, and when I started I just automatically played cd’s. The first reason was that in this way I could get all that music for parties easily without having to fork over big bucks, the second one was that actually pretty good dj cd-decks were just on the market (Denon & Pioneer). Now over time, since the internet is such a great provider of hard-to-come by music, and the market for digital controllers is starting to come up, it would make sense to make the transition into only digital music, by playing from a laptop.

My thoughts on this were for a long time that I still wanted to get the physical product in my hands, and get good quality music instead of other people’s rips that sometimes lacked in compressed quality. But now, since the music you can get (legally and illegally) on the net being such a high quality, I don’t need to get the cd’s myself to rip them to good quality mp3’s. But I do still feel the need to have some physical (’original’) artefact in my hands from time to time. To read cover texts and look at album art etc.

So my decision is to try this with vinyl instead of cd’s, and maybe in a few months time I will even start to try out spinning with the vinyl too, albeit it will be in combination with cd’s since it is hard to get all the music I want with the money I got. But I’ll keep trying!