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First up is Kid Koala's Some of My Best Friends are DJs. I've been on a kick of revisiting the Kid. He's definitely one of my biggest influences as a DJ. He's one of the last of the true turntablists. He's one of the last djs I saw using the turntable as an instrument. He was the first person I'd ever seen sample a vocal live and scratch it right in front of my eyes (a kind of hidden trick that you can still do on Serato, but is highly underused). Beat tapes aren't really on my radar anymore (not that this is merely a beat tape), but Koala's roots in that style of recording shines through here.
I've always loved his jazz style of warped clarinet sounds and frantic fader shuffling. The definitive statement of why I love Kid Koala was from some interview where he told the reporter how he searched for four years for the perfect clarinet C-note. The depth and dedication involved in that hunt for something so specific blew my mind.
I've been rinsing "Stompin' at Le Savoi" for the last couple of weeks and I'm really happy with playing it out right now. I've always found Kid Koala pieces to be more well structured than the madness of J. Dilla and that set of producers. I think his tracks are easier to listen to than those sorts of artists and so incorporating his horn-stab-filled jams into a set are a lot easier than Dilla et al.
This album came out post Nufonia Must Fall his graphic novel, which I consider more like a silent film since it comes with a soundtrack with page numbers as track names. I'm pretty sure I saw the tour come through, but I can't really remember. This paragraph is filled with boring.
Best Friends comes with a 50-page comic that I didn't read this time around. I just know it's annoying having stuff in the sleeve when you're trying to put records away.
Um...yeah...next!
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I used to be able to tell you the date, what the weather was like on that day, and, at the very least, where I bought my records. This one, Leadbelly from the Archive of Folk Music, I have absolutely no idea where it came from. I'm wondering if it was something I just found in my basement, but I don't know why anyone in my family would've bought it. Well, maybe my sister did. It's an anomaly I found in my collection one way or another. It blew me away though and I was happy to have put it on that afternoon.
I was telling my homie, the doorman at the bar I play at, this story just the other day. We started talking blues music and I mentioned to him what was on this, "It had this really interesting version of Black Betty."
He replied, "It's probably the original."
See, I know far less about music than most people assume. I know sample history and that's about it.
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Alright, I started writing this because I was bored with today. Now, I'm bored with writing this. So, that's it!
Thanks for reading and whatever.
