Room To Breathe

I stumbled upon this comp via O-Dub and the now infamous Soulstrut message board. This is a collection of electronic loner soul from '74-'84 compiled by Dante Carfagna. Some of it's good, some of it's not my thing, but all of it is honest and reaching toward the ether. If you like lost, independent music ala Numero, PPU, Superior Elevation, Chocolate Star etc. I recommend checking it out.

"If the independently-pressed record made the galaxy of recorded music that much larger, the burgeoning home studio became the black hole from which little escaped. Flowering in the mid-to-late '70s, affordable high-quality tape recorders, synthesizers, and simple drum machines permitted the aspiring artist to never leave his home, never request the assistance of another human being. In the world of American black music, name artists such as Sly Stone, Timmy Thomas, and Shuggie Otis had experimented with rudimentary electronic soul with a modicum of success, but on record what remains is scant. This collection presents the unheard underground of the self-produced, often solo, electronic soul world of the '70s and early '80s, offering a view into an ocean of sound that is in turn peaceful, bizarre, funky, and often humbly ahead of its time. Available as a deluxe bound book CD, featuring arial photography by NASA astronaut Donald Pettit."

HOLDER OF A BOULDER

Brothers in musical (and blogging) arms, Matthew Africa & DJ B. Cause are back again with a sequel to their impeccable Soul Boulders mix. For those of you not familiar, Soul Boulders is one my favorite mixes of all-time and put me up on some amazing artists (more than I care to admit - these dudes combined knowledge runs deep!). After 5 years they did not disappoint. More info after the jump...

At long last, DJ B.Cause and I are back with Soul Boulders 2, another 76 minutes of slow, funky soul burners.


The Soul Boulders sampler

To purchase the mix in digital form, go here.

To purchase the mix in physical form, please send payment via Paypal to matthewafrica at hotmail dot com. The price including shipping is $10 in the U.S, $11 to Canada. and $14 to the rest of the world.

Currently there is a limited number of copies of the mix available at Big City Records and Good Records NYC. We hope to place CDs with some of our other favorite stores soon.

For those who aren't familiar with Soul Boulders, here's the story.

Back in 2005, San Francisco's DJ B.Cause posted a mind-blowing 10-minute mini-mix on the SoulStrut message board. The songs were exquisite but hard to pigeonhole-- soulful and funky, but not purely funk or soul, slow, psychedelic, moody, maybe a little haunted. In other words, exactly my sound.

I sent him a message urging him either to finish the mix or to let me hop on and collaborate with him on turning his ten minutes into something CD length. I grabbed a dozen or so of my favorite records, figured out their sequence and recorded my half at B.Cause's house one rainy afternoon. Once B.Cause fleshed out his half and massaged the whole thing a bit, we released it in the spring of 2006. It was my first commercial mix CD.

The response to Soul Boulders was amazing. The Fader, The Wire, Wax Poetics and Hip Hop Connection said nice things about it. Friends and peers raved, telling us we soundtracked their summer, that it was their favorite mix, etc. In a couple cases, I even had people tell me that the mix changed their lives. Although it sold pretty modestly-- we only pressed 1,000 copies and gave many of them away-- it's easily the most beloved thing I've ever had a hand in. Over the years, people have consistently and insistently pressed me and Josh to give them more. So we did.

For me, Soul Boulders was hard to follow up because I worried a lot about how to make something that people would appreciate in the same way. The landscape has changed a lot since we made the first mix. Compilations, blogs and message boards have made a lot of formerly obscure music easily accessible and consequently everyone seems pretty blasé. Although rarity was never really the point of Soul Boulders-- creating something unique was-- the mix did feature a lot of music that was unknown to even hardcore soul listeners and that did help create some excitement around it. Since I more or less stopped seriously buying records in about 2005, I worried that I might not have a good enough set of records to construct another set; I didn't want to just present some tracks that didn't make the original mix.

Soul Boulders 2 features 40 meticulously mixed songs. Some are from common records, many are from rare ones, but all are (to us) extraordinary soul songs that embody a special feeling. We labored hard on the mix, cleaning up tracks, re-editing them to emphasize parts we liked, obsessing over the sequencing and tiny details in the transitions and generally polishing until we felt like we had made a worthy sequel. I think we succeeded.