Category Archives: editorial

Easy Tempo: La Ragazza dalla pelle di Luna

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One of my favorite vinyl collecting quirks is picking up soundtrack records from odd, obscure or surreal-seeming movies that I’ve never seen-it becomes a challenge to find the damn movie! At times the soundtracks are better than the films, but the search and discovery is fun anyway. For some reason the Italians and the French put really excellent sounds into their skin flicks, erotic movies and left-of-center romance/thrillers. If you go to my favorite record store, Dusty Groove America, you will find this particular sexy Italian soundtrack out of stock as I managed to grab it up before it even had a chance to collect dust. Or was that the Le Beat Bespoke disc I found the same day? I can’t remember which was new or not…but this one is everything I hoped it would be. If you like Morricone, you should invest some coin in some Piero Umilliani. Well worth the cash for anyone who owns more than one of the Maestro’s 60s and 70s soundtracks.

The Yellow Stereo

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While The Yellow Stereo isn’t completely vinyl-centric, I really enjoy it and thought it would be fun to share. Anybody who has the patience and endurance to cover Pitchfork deserves their props, and besides all that, TYS is pretty sweet. The Yellow Stereo does give mentions to new bands releasing stuff on vinyl and that’s more than enough for me, especially when there is plenty of free music on offer to help you decide which indie bands to support this week with your MP3 purchases.

The thing I like most about this blog is that the About section reveals TYS to be a fellow traveler: “(The Yellow Stereo is) A place for friends to keep up with a lot of the music I was listening to. Usually it would fall upon deaf ears, but I figured someone out there liked the same music as me.”

This sums up the purpose to Turntabling.net quite well, and a lot more succinctly than my own About section! Please drop by The Yellow Stereo and have a look, it’s well worth the time. If I could remember how I stumbled across this one, I’d give props…

JapRockSampler: Julian Cope on Far East Psych Vinyl

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I picked this up yesterday in one of Chicago’s finest vinyl sources, Reckless Records. I’m already four chapters into this amazing tome and I must say, Copey is right on the money. I got addicted to his confessional acid-soaked memoirs Head On and Reposessed ; since then Cope has written a slew of books including the vital KrautRockSampler.

Julian Cope has a fascinating brain. He’s not content to look at the music–he examines the cultural forces which shaped Japan’s psychedelic music explosion–including the seeming contradictory anti-drug stance of some of these performers. Acid music without the acid? A stretch for the western mind, to be sure until you understand that Japan has a long-standing cultural association with meditative states and free-form musical expression. Take one part Shinto, one part Zen, and mix in an obsession with death and rebirth and you have a quite fertile breeding ground for the imagination.

Cope hits all this, plus Commodore Perry’s “opening of Japan” and more. I’m a huge fan of this book already and haven’t yet put it down except to write this. All the bands listed in this book are on vinyl, glorious vinyl and I am afraid that I’m about to be drawn into some kind of obsessive tunnel-vision quest for all these and more. Any musical omnivore will love this.

I foolishly paid $30 for this, only to find it JapRockSampler at Amazon for much cheaper. This will teach me to fall in love with hardcover books before doing my research. Still, I don’t begrudge Reckless Records–I never would have found this otherwise until getting clued in by some fellow traveler.