Rediscover the Electronic Music Anthology Collection. This time dedicated to TipHop. Real pearls, lovingly selected by the French private radio station FG, collected on 2 vinyl.

Repo Man Review by Stephen Cook
As a backdrop to his fast-paced and cartoon-like debut chronicling the wayward life of Los Angles repo men, punk auteur Alex Cox did well to use music from the city's early-'80s hardcore punk scene; the tongue-in-cheek histrionics of Fear and the Circle Jerks (who appear in the movie as a punk band-turned-lounge act) fit flush with the film's mix of displaced suburban youth, gruff, and wizened repo veterans, Mexican hoods, industrial-skid row scenery, and irradiated UFO conspiracy theorists. Along with tracks by punk godfathers Iggy Pop ("Repo Man") and Jonathan Richman (writer of "Pablo Picasso"), the album's additional L.A. hardcore highlights include Black Flag's "TV Party," Suicidal Tendencies's "Institutionalized," and the Plugz's "Hombre Secreto (Secret Agent Man)." The Plugz's noir-ish, punk en espanol tracks, in fact, formed the trademark sound of the film. One of the first soundtracks to use pre-existing band cuts in lieu of an original score, Repo Man is a fine, if not terribly thorough document of L.A.'s punk heyday.

Tchaikovsky stands as the central figure of 19th-century Russian Romanticism, embodying its widespread and vibrant vitality alongside a profound and sincere depth. This collection seeks to encapsulate the epic and intense qualities inherent in the genius of his compositions.

This disc includes many tracks new to CD, some of the biggest Reggae stars of the era and many of the finest Roots Reggae tracks of the 1970s. When 1976 came along, Niney The Observer was widely seen as one of Jamaica’s finest producers on the island’s music scene. Niney worked with many top Reggae artists, including Dennis Brown, Ken Boothe, Denis Wilson, Junior Byles, Big Youth and Max Romeo. Niney’s reputation as a producer came with his ability to be a man of the people. This 2CD collection comes with Niney’s finest productions from the golden age of classic Roots music and featured we have Gregory Isaacs, Cornel Campbell, Junior Byles and Horace Andy amongst others. Many of the tracks have not been heard widely for almost 50 years.

If you threw a house party in London in the late twentieth century, before the smart phone rendered it redundant, you could guarantee that the following morning there would be a dog-eared copy of the A to Z behind the sofa, or under the coffee table, probably in a Tesco bag. Everybody had at least one. It was an essential aid in understanding London. It joined the dots and threw up obscure names printed over hitherto unexplored grids of streets: Alperton, Shooters Hill, Honor Oak, Tooting Graveney, Childs Hill, Ladywell. It invited you to create your own personal map of London, discover your own secret routes, your own special places. You could peruse the A to Z with the knowledge of who lived where – Sandy Denny in Wimbledon, before she moved to Muswell Hill which was already legendary as the home of the Kinks. Arterial roads as grisly as Archway Road (Rod Stewart) or Holloway Road (Joe Meek) or could be made magic through their pop connections.

This 45-song, two-disc collection is subtitled "two decades of killer fretwork", and never was a set so aptly described. Chess Records was the home to seemingly every hot guitar player in the Chicago area, and many of them make their appearance here. Besides the usual label guitar hotshots (Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, Lowell Fulson, Earl Hooker, Otis Rush, Robert Nighthawk, Little Milton), space is given to sideman work from legends like Hubert Sumlin and Robert Jr. Lockwood and great one-offs by lesser-known artists like Jody Williams, Danny Overbea, Eddie Burns, Joe Hill Louis, Morris Pejoe, Lafayette Thomas and others. It seems as if everyone recorded for Chess at one time or another, also explaining the inclusion of tracks by John Lee Hooker, Albert King, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Lonnie Brooks, Hound Dog Taylor and Elmore James. If electric blues guitar's your thing, then look no further than this fine two-disc compilation.

2010 two CD collection containing 50 more tracks drawn from Bob Dylan's third season of Theme Time Radio Hour. Spanning 76 years, it contains artists as diverse as Roy Rogers, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Nirvana, Toots & the Maytals, Laura Cantrell, the Mississippi Sheiks - shuffle that lot on your iPod. This time there is a nod to the topical collapse of Western capitalism in Joe Mooney's 'The Man with $1 Million' and Mel Blanc's irresistibly alliterative (but blunt) 'Money'. Speaking of Mel we even got Pat Boone to write the sleeve note for that one. A prize for the first person to guess why. The introduction has been written by the novelist and poet Lavinia Greenlaw, whose book "The Importance of Music to Girls", is a must-read for music lovers and we have a spectacular array of annotators this time, ranging from the man who introduced US to the blues, Paul Oliver, to Sir Tim Rice on Elvis (Presley) and Elvis (Costello) on Dave Bartholomew's 'The Monkey (Speaks His Mind)' that he once covered.

50 songs and 75 years of musical dreams, schemes and themes drawn from the first series of the highly acclaimed Theme Time Radio Hour with your host, Bob Dylan. This fully authorised release is packaged with a 48 page booklet.
What, I wonder, do we dream of when we dream of Bob Dylan? And, more intriguingly, what does Bob Dylan dream of when he dreams of us? This is what I think: he dreams of a small boy called Robert who lives in a small city, an industrial centre in a rural landscape. It’s a nowhere town that was once called Alice but had its name changed when an enormous hole was dug where its new name used to be. That giant hole was – and still is – the biggest of its kind in the world, an open-cast iron mine.

Most comprehensive overview yet of the Ladbroke Grove-based late 60s/early 70s freak scene. Four-hour anthology of locally based acts featuring much previously unreleased or rare material. Now widely acknowledged as Albion’s equivalent of the Haight-Ashbury underground scene in San Francisco, Ladbroke Grove in West London developed into the epicentre of the late 60s British counterculture movement. Cheap rents had already attracted beatniks, bohemians and the Windrush generation of West Indian immigrants, and they were joined as the decade wore on by a motley crew of musicians, freaks and anarchists as the home-grown hippie sub-culture found a spiritual and physical base.

This fascinating and thoroughly entertaining 3CD set is now available!
Here's what I had to say about it on All Music Guide:
"The idea of ‘banning’ a song from being broadcast over the airwaves is a familiar story here in the U.S., especially when it comes to offensive lyrics. Many of the decisions made by the FCC have been no-brainers and have met with some resistance but were, for the most part, justifiable. But in the UK (especially during the years covered on this three CD set), the BBC’s judgments on what was inappropriate for airplay made U.S. radio sound like a crowded brothel during happy hour!

Limited 10 CD box set. The first-ever CD box set gathering the entire 10 album collection released by Brian Eno's Obscure Records. Originally issued between 1975 and 1978, nearly 50 years on the output of Obscure remains radically forward-thinking - offering glimpses of a future yet to be fully seen - and amounts to one of the most important, influential, and creatively accomplished album series ever conceived. Curated by Eno and the composers Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman - issuing the recording debuts of Bryars, Nyman, John Adams, Christopher Hobbs, David Toop, Max Eastley, Jan Steele, Simon Jeffes / The Penguin Café Orchestra, and Harold Budd, in addition to important works by John Cage, Tom Phillips, and John White - Obscure's collective output is a groundbreaking landmark in the histories of Minimalism, modern composition, and Experimental music, and laid much of the groundwork for the soon to emerge movement of Ambient music. Illuminating the remarkable, and largely otherwise undocumented, creative ferment within and between the British and American scenes of experimental music during the mid to late 1970s. Offering each of Obscure's albums, completely remastered and housed in faithful replicas of their original covers and liner notes, as well as a booklet filled with rare photos, archival material and texts by - among others - Gavin Bryars, Bradford Bailey, David Toop, Max Eastley, Richard Bernas, and Tom Recchion, this historic collection marks the first time this seminal series has received a complete reissue.

Comprehensive 3CD overview of the American power pop scene's evolution throughout the 70s. Featuring the genre's major bands, cult names, hits, rarites and several previously unissued tracks. Although the power pop genre wasn't named and codified until late 1977, the sound and spirit had been slowly gathering steam throughout the decade. Surrounded by heavy metal and introverted singer/songwriters, the likes of The Raspberries, Big Star, Blue Ash and The Wackers spearheaded an early 70s return to the spiky, three-minute pop urgency of the mid-60s British Invasion bands. While only The Raspberries charted, such bands established a musical template that was adopted by a new raft of slightly younger acts including the Dwight Twilley Band, The Rubinoos and Shoes. The tide had turned by the late 70s, with such names as Cheap Trick and The Cars achieving success as the American music industry embraced power pop as a radio-friendly alternative to punk.

Grammy award winning director (Lou Reed: Rock & Roll Heart) and art photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders has achieved critical acclaim photographing world leaders and major cultural figures, including presidents, writers, artists, actors, and musicians. The soundtrack to XXX features brand new tracks from Ladytron, Felix da Housecat with Princess Superstar, legendary techno artists Rabbit in the Moon and Heather Hunter with Gang Starrs DJ Premier as well as tracks by the Velvet Underground, Peaches and European chart hits by Mylo and Benny Benassi.

The soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino's critically acclaimed Django Unchained features original contributions from Rick Ross, John Legend and Luis Bacalov, as well as classic tracks handpicked from the director's own vinyl collection.

An exclusive vinyl product curated for Record Store Day 2024, this 2LP features wonderful and weird nuggets from the summers of love of the 1960s, from bubblegum gems to psych freakbeats. A cratediggers paradise featuring vanishingly rare and in demand out of print jewels from the likes of The Ivy League, Velvet Fogg, The Uglys, alongside stars such as The Kinks, The Small Faces and more.