You probably missed Egon’s Fireside Chat on RBMA Radio earlier this year. Recorded while Egon (seen above with the BBC’s Benji B) moderated at the 2010 Red Bull Music Academy in London, this set offers an excellent introduction to our Dark Sunrise anthology, gives a larger overview of Zambia’s Zamrock scene, and also offers a sneak peak at our forthcoming anthologies that dig into Indonesian prog, Iranian psychedelia, Nigerian fuzz-funk, beat-heavy American ballads, and gives an inside look into the process of working with the likes of Madlib and Oh No on albums like Beat Konducta in Africa and Ethiopium.

Stones Throw is now offering an exclusive pre-sale of this anthology; it is out everywhere good music is sold on 11.23.10.

Link (Audio): Egon’s Fireside Chat at RBMA Radio.
Buy: Rikki Ililonga and Musi-O-Tunya Dark Sunrise on 3LP, 2CD and Digital at stonesthrow.com
Download: Rikki Ililonga and Musi-O-Tunya “Dark Sunrise.”

Egon’s Stone Cold Psychedelic Soul podcast – a mix around a series of psychedelic ballads and otherwise funky dirge-like songs when Now-Again released Amnesty’s Free Your Mind album in 2007 – is back up at Stones Throw.

We’ve heard Egon’s Turkish Funk podcast is next – but that we cannot yet verify. Stay tuned!

Stone Cold Psychedelic Soul Tracklist:

01. Battered Ornaments “Crosswords & Safety Pins”
02. Lee Moses “Hey Joe”
03. Lee Moses “California Dreaming”
04. Stone Coal White “Free”
05. Stone Coal White “Stone Coal White”
06. Stone Coal White “You Know”
07. Smithstonian “Just Sittin’”
08. Timothy McNealy “Sagittarius Black”
09. Fifty Foot Hose “If Not This Time”
11. Agape – Rejoice
12. East of Underground “If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Gonna Go”
13. The Battered Ornaments “Smoke Rings”

Link: Egon’s Stone Cold Psychedelic Soul.

Promotional Only. Free with your purchace of the Forge Your Own Chains LP.

Side A:

1. Guilty Simpson: My Time To Shine
2. Oh No: Feel Me

Side B:

3. Oh No: Loneliness
4. Oh No: Sensational Smash

NA 7021 7″ 2009

Side A, Track 1 produced by Egon and J.Rocc. Side A, Track 2 and Side B, Tracks 3 and 4 produced by Oh No. Created with samples taken from the Forge Your Own Chains compilation.

Egon is on tour with Madlib and J Rocc. He’s Djing on select dates, including Paris and Athens, and will be regularly updating the Now-Again site over the next two weeks with photo galleries.

Every time I’m in New York, I follow largely the same routine. Cab from JFK to the loft in Bushwick, wash the sheets (Stones Throw’s East Coast headquarters isn’t an Ian Schraeger type joint, but it works), make my way to Taralucci E Vino for an espresso, check out the East Village Record stores and then call Edan. Why Edan? Well, I’ve been trying to convince him to do an album for Stones Throw for a very long while and, even though that looks to be a long way off (though still a distinct possibility), he and I often share good conversations about music, life, “the business,” and food.

He’s been telling me that a day trip to Di Fara?s Pizza was in order, but, in New York, without a car, Grimaldi?s is just so much easier. But, two weeks ago, on a short layover in the City on my way back to LA from Portugal, the timing worked out. I met Edan and Lif on the Q Train (quite surreal that we happened to be on the same train at the same time), and, Scrabble Board in hand, we made our way to Di Fara’s for the inevitable hour long wait for one of its legendary pies.

The end result? An hour into our Scrabble game (and an hour and a half after placing our order), the proprietor’s daughter politely informed us that our pie never hit the oven. “I called out that we had no wild onions,” she said. Uh.. ok. A half hour later, Lif is so clearly ahead in the game that Edan and I can’t possibly catch up, we’ve discussed the collapse of the rather limited music industry that we knew (and how exciting that was for optimists like ourselves), we’ve mapped out the song that the duo promise for the second Whitefield Brothers album, talked more about that Stones Throw album, and are so damn hungry that anything would taste like manna from heaven.

But the pie is a masterpiece. And, watching the slow, steady approach that the maestro takes with each pie, I think that there is an analogy between Di Fara’s Pizza and Stones Throw (and Now-Again). Somewhere.

Egon’s once sporadic blog on NPR.org is now an official column on the site. Funk Archaeology promises regular trawls through Egon’s collection of global funk, soul, psychedelia and hip hop. Sign up for the RSS feed here and check his latest piece on West African Discoveries at the WFMU Record Fair.