★Survival Research
Songs Of The Unsung
Distinguished Los Angeles-based jazz pianist Horace Tapscott is probably best-known as the founder of the Pan-Afrikan People’s Orchestra of PAPA, also known as The Ark, though he began his career as a trombonist, working with Lionel Hampton and others during the late 1950s. The 1978 solo album, Songs Of The Unsung, released in small number on pianist Toshiya Taenaka’s Interplay label, features Tapscott alone on piano, delivering a superb set of freely interpreted jazz tunes, including an unfette…
Jazz Piano
Roman pianist and film composer Armando Trovajoli scored over 300 feature films during his remarkable career. Starting out in the 1930s as a player in Orchestra Rocco Grasso and Sesto Carlini’s beloved jazz orchestra, in 1949 he represented Italy at the Festival du Jazz de Paris and he began composing films three years later. Jazz Piano, released by RCA in 1959, saw Trovajoli fronting a quartet with three of his regular orchestra members, namely drummer Sergio Conti, bassist/arranger Berto Pisan…
Embrujo
**500 copies** Chilean prog band Embrujo began as El Embrujo Ques Besa or Kissing Spell, formed by the guitarist, singer and drummer Carlos Fernandez with chief songwriter Juan Carlos “Tato” Gomez on bass and vocals and Ernesto “Kiko” Murillo on lead guitar, with organist/flautist Ernesto Aracena and pianist/flautist Guillermo Olivares joining later. Signing to Camilo Fernandez’s Arena Producciones in 1970, debut LP 'Los Pajaros' was issued under the Kissing Spell moniker, but Chile’s unstable p…
Sitar & Electronics
This work was originally released in 1971 by Okko Bekker, a Dutch sitar player, keyboardist, and producer who has worked with the likes of Brian Eno, Conny Plank, Asmus Tietchens, and Moebius. As the title suggests, this is a sitar and synthesizer dominated trip through six groovy and jazzy originals and two covers. Featuring help from jazz legend Herb Geller on flute, 'Sitar & Electronics' is a funky and rare piece of European exotica that finally returns to vinyl again.
Solta o Pavão
A reissue of Jorge Ben's Solta o Pavão, originally released in 1975. Jorge Ben is one of Brazilian music's iconic and best-loved figures. Born Jorge Duilio Lima Menezes in Rio in 1942, he took the stage name, Jorge Ben, in deference to his mother's Ethiopian roots, and later used Jorge Ben Jorge for further distinction.Playing tambourine and singing in a church choir from an early age, Ben began playing in Carnival blocos and was performing in nightclubs as a teen. Signed to Philips in 1963, his…
Magic Tube
Delaware-based power trio Mouzakis conjured an intriguing sound somewhere between traditional rhythm and blues and garage rock, with psychedelic and hard rock leanings. The band occupied something of a unique space during their short reign during the early 1970s, and it was partly their non-standard outlook that kept the group a trio, since other potential musical recruits simply could not find a way through their multidirectional sound. Drummer / lead singer Eddie Stevenson and bassist / keyboa…
Apryl Fool
The story of Japanese psychedelic band Apryl Fool and their eponymous debut album is simply extraordinary. It was the vehicle by which bassist Haroumi Hosono first came to prominence, years before he became known as the “Godfather of Japanese electronica” as the founding member and leader of Yellow Magic Orchestra, though this musical titan had work released prior to the group’s 1968 founding, such as the song The Sea of Summer Day, recorded with Yuko Okuyama and released by King Records the yea…
Roots of Electronic Sound
**500 copies with insert** Futuristic synthesizer specialist and sound designer Matsuo Ohno was responsible for the sound design of a broad range of film, television and radio soundtracks, most famously the animation series Astro Boy, which he began working on in 1963, together with his assistant, Takehisa Kosugi. Ohno was born in the heavily-populated Kanda district of central Tokyo in 1930 and was heavily affected by the repeated bombing raids on the city enacted in World War II, which took pl…
Psychotic Reaction
Most fans of garage know Count Five as the group behind the classic single Psychotic Reaction – a three minute and eight second distillation of everything that’s great about the genre, from its immediately recognizable opening fuzz riff to its last wigged-out break. Eminent garageologists all agree on the track’s importance in the canon, and its inclusion on the original Nuggets LP cemented its hall-of-fame status long ago. But make no mistake, the sum of Count Five is much more than that one si…
Viaje: Musica Electronica Libre
Cult, obscure 1976 proto-electronics masterpiece 'Viaje' is a purely brain frying avant garde flipout from the electroacoustic musicians Eduardo Polonio and Horacio Vaggione (probably most known for his album on Cramps 'Nova Musicha' series). Together, they deploy synths, electric guitars, organs and bass and squash them all up together in sundry sense befouling ways. On the A side, they're tangled into an overpowering threshing machine of spitting electronic mayhem, while the B side moves the p…