Sound Gallery 1 & 2

Freshly ripped to good quality ogg vorbis this is one of the first lounge cds I found in the bargain bin and still one of the best. This basically kick started my interest in lounge and library music and is one of the best sounding Studio 2 compilations ever made.

Even if you have got some of the tracks on this its worth getting for the superlative sound quality.

Vol 1

Here's a link to a converter if, like Kevin, you're having trouble handling Ogg.

And here's Volume 2 which may even be better. Found on the web some time ago its ripped to medium quality MP3.



192kps Vol 2

Get 320kps mp3 version of Vol 2 here (thanks Oracle)

Cover scans for both volumes here (thanks Oracle).

Knowing a turkey

Had high hopes for this as the usually reliable Ebert gave it 4 stars. Giving away my misgivings about Nicholas Cage, the aging grumpy guts and its apparent new age mystic storyline and buoyed by its number one rating on IMDB I had a look at a pretty good cam just to see if it was worth watching in a theatre.

Believe me it aint. What a load of horse manure. It starts of unpromisingly with a young girl writing a page full of numbers to put in a time capsule 50 years ago and then gets even more preposterous as Nic Cage doing his usual phone in job immediately unravels a complex web of dates and places pointing to an eventual apocalypse. Da Vinci code eat your heart out.

From there its all downhill until the idiotic ending involving aliens and the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and I even walked out of my own living room in protest.

Directed by adopted Aussie Alex Proyas who's first movie Dark City was avant garde and pretty good this continues his abysmal decline into Hollywood hell after the previous slop I Robot (Isaac Asimov is revolving in his grave as we speak).

This is supposedly an Aussie movie but everything about it screams Hollywood and they obviously made it in Melbourne to save a couple of bucks. Melbourne's a very English like city prone to bad changeable weather and this movie reflects that and most of it seems to have been shot on a wintry moonless night even though its supposed to be heating up in anticipation of the coming holocaust.

Well there's some justice its dropped like a stone to number 3 on IMDB as word of mouth gets out what a stinker it is and Rotten Tomatoes gives it 32% on its tomatometer (that's bad folks).

So as I offer a silent prayer that Nic wisely picks up his buckets of money and heads off into early retirement I have this pitch brewing myself, a remake of the Addams Family with Nic as Gomez and Angelina Jolie as Morticia, nah they never pick actors that close to the parts they should play.

Lets Face the Music

Here's a 3cd set I just ripped as I'm re-sorting my CDs so they're in some semblance of order. I'm ripping to good quality ogg vorbis as I've done research to indicate this is the best format short of wave of course.

I've confirmed this with my own ears and ogg of 250kps is easily the quality of mp3 of 320kps and probably better. Its down to personal experience however and I found it hard pressed to pick the difference between cd and ogg although of course ogg is many times smaller. I was going to rip everything to wave but changed my mind when I heard the ogg vorbis format. Ogg is playable in Winamp and Foobar (which I use) and is easily converted if thats your preference.

Anyway this superb sounding out of print set of what sounds mostly like Phase 4 English lounge music is going to be shared with one proviso. I'd like a bit of feedback as to whether this is actually wanted by anyone as some of my recent shares have not been all that popular.

I'll make a poll in the sidebar so you can vote with one click and if there's sufficient interest I'll upload the whole set. I'm not asking for comments as probably only one or two people would reply.

Here's a little blurb about this set:

3 CD set. 75 smooth and groovy instrumentals from the 50's & 60's.
The finest Hi-Fidelity Cocktail Vibes from The Masters Of Easy Nelson Riddle,
Joe Loss, Geoff Love, Nat King Cole, Billy May, Ron Goodwin and more.
Over 3 hours of fun, cheezy tunes everyone at the party will know!

Track list is in the comments if you can't read the cover.

OK some response already so here's CD1

Thanks for the comments and votes so far its very encouraging. Here's CD2

Here's the final disc enjoy CD 3

Paul Page - Pieces of Eight

Arrhh me shipmates here be a pot o gold for ye. Well pieces of eight actually. In response to a request here's a pot pourri of exotica, Hawaiian songs and some salty tales by good old sea dog Cap'n Paul hisself.

Originally uploaded by Manakoora who's now unfortunately having a rest from blogging.

Get it here.

This is Soul Funk

This is a compilation I distilled from a double cd put out by Later magazine. The Later comp was brilliant but I've taken out some over familiar tunes and vocals. Mainly hip 70s funky and soulful tunes many of them may be familiar as commercials or TV show music.

The tunes here are delightfully funky and many of them I've never heard before although they all sound somewhat familiar.

Many thanks to Oracle the original uploader of the Later discs. Check the original post on his site and check out his other groovy stuff. Here

Click the pic to read the song info.

Get it here.

Desert Island Discs

Bongolong has made a post listing his 10 favourite discs for that mythical desert island. I ran up a quick list myself including collections and box sets which I presume are allowed. If not I would just choose my favourite album of that artist.

I've probably missed out heaps of stuff but here's my spur of the moment effort:

Buddy Holly complete collection
Byrds Box Set
Cowabunga surf box set
Martin Denny The Exotic Sounds
Les Baxter Exotic Moods
Cal Tjader Greatest Hits
Robert Drasnin Voodoo
Moody Blues Box Set
Arthur Lyman Exotic Sounds
Paul Revere and Raiders Spirit of '67

Honourable mentions:

Pentangle Cruel Sister
Trees On the Shore
Fairport Convention 7
Beatles Sergeant Pepper's LHCB
Everly Brothers The Warner Brothers collection

Some of these albums aren't perfect but they have a song or songs that summon up nostalgic memories and caused repeated playing.

Probably missed out 100 more.

Bongolong's list is here.

Feel free to put your list in the comments here or at bongolong's blog.

Shi-tones - Endless Summer live

Small combo guitar groups don't get much better than this. Jim Thomas, classically trained guitarist for the Mermen fronts this group. More interested in playing classic tunes from the golden age of surf music than the jamming psychedelic surf style of the Mermen this group is a lot of fun and must be great live.

Anyway here's a superbly recorded soundboard recording of the group doing the entire original soundtrack to the film Endless Summer as recorded by the Sandals. Jim according to his introduction to this set mentions that he got to know members of the Sandals during the 90s and Alan Whitman from the Mermen played on the 90s re-recording of the album by the Sandals.

The audience sound is at an absolute minimum and these could have been recorded in a studio.

Download one of the best kept secrets of instrumental rock and then visit the Internet Archive and get more of the Shi-tones and the Mermen live.

Here tis

Village of the Jammed

Click on pic to see song list.

Named after a Four Piece Suit song this compilation touches on exotica, bird calls and cool instro sounds.

Nice sounds for summer and hot off my playlist. Its autumn here but you'd never know it apart from the occasional thunderstorm. We did have a rather serious oil spill during a bad storm last week but I had a look at the beach today and I didn't notice much damage so thank our lucky stars.

Git it here.

There's no substitute for gel

"Maybe he's keeping the gel for himself...that big ginger head of his.."

The boys fresh from their New Romantic success suddenly run out of hair gel. Murray their incompetent manager promises to get more but forgets of course.

There's a hilarious bit where they desperately use a substitute "it s got the same viscosity.." with awful if funny results.

Theremin controller for gear including guitar

This cool Theremin controller plays theremin and controls other gear. Play the guitar with your head!

Check out the Moog youtube site also for more cool stuff.

Flight of the New Romantics

Whew what a relief the new series of Flight of the Conchords continues. I forgot they are New Zealanders and have a 12 episode series not 6 like the Brits.

Anyway here's a hilarious skit from the new episode. After only getting one person to their latest gig (who leaves unseen after the first song) Murray the manager tells the boys they're not cool and need to modernise their image.

He gives them a jar of hair gel and lo and behold the boys go all new romantic and update their image from the 70s to the 80s. Here they do an MTV style video in typical New Romantic style and its brilliant.

Of course once the hair gel quickly runs out after excessive use they're left marooned in their flat unable to face the world.

Honolula Baby

Here's an early exotica tune from Laurel & Hardy's classic 1932 comedy Sons of the Desert. The video and sound quality is excellent and the clip is a funny look at 1930's exotica.

Its a hoot as the oh so gay singer tells us what he'll do to the hula babes dancing around him, probably give them a hug and a haircut I think.

The dancing girls are funny too looking like furry pipe cleaner dolls with bendy legs. They don't look very Hawaiian though. And for some reason everyone calls it Honolula which seems to beg the question whether anyone has actually been to the island in question.

Geezer takes a wrong turn

There's a photoshop comp over at look at this blog featuring this rather comic photo of an OAP who took the wrong turn onto a motorway in Britain. Luckily it all turned out OK thanks to a quick thinking truckie.

Bloody 'ell another wrong turn!

Re-issues coming up

I've had a listen to the advanced copy re-issue of these two classic space age pop albums and I can advise that the transfers have been done very nicely indeed and its a pleasure to hear these records as recorded without distortion and in pristine digital sound.

The Garcia album is a long time favourite replete with spacey sound effects and an almost exotica sound. Great cover too. Highly recommended.

The Elliott album is also great with lots of found sounds and strange vocalising. More big band than exotica but still a great listen. Classic cover also.

I'm strongly in favour of re-issues of classic albums so I support this effort whole heartedly.

The re-issue is through Astralwerks a division of EMI I believe who are releasing the albums from the Capitol catalogue. More titles will only be made available if these sell in sufficient quantities.

I've been advised that these titles will be available for digital download from itunes and Amazon etc around March 24 so do yourself a favour.