Buy all new Now-Again releases and your old favorites in all formats at our new webstore at Rappcats.

The Now-Again webstore at rappcats.com

We’ve been telling you that we are going to be launching a webstore for the past, well, going on two years – and while some of y’all have probably noticed some of our releases going live at Rappcats this past six months it’s now official: our entire catalog, and every one of our new releases, is going to be available there, keeping company with releases from Madlib’s Madlib Invazion titles, the Pay Jay imprint run by the J.Dilla Estate and DOOM’s Metalface Records.

To say that we’re overjoyed is an understatement. Look out for special offers – including our 7″ Sureshots bundle, mentioned below, coming soon!

Buy it here.

Personnel: Isaac Mpofu (Lead Guitar, Lead Vocals), Watson Lungu (Drums, Backing Vocals), Jerry Mausala (Bass Guitar, Backing Vocals), John Kanyepa (Rhythm Guitar, Backing Vocals), Keith Kabwe (Maraccas, Tambourine, Backing Vocals)

Both versions of the album originally released in 1975 on Zambia Music Parlour with the same catalog number and inscribe, ZMPL8. Recorded at Malachite Film Studios, Chingola, Zambia in 1975 by Geoff Kachusha Mulenga and Grayson Phiri.

Produced by Amanaz and Emmanuel Mulemena; directed by Edward Khuzyawo; production arrangements by Billie David Nyati. Licensed courtesy Keith Kabwe and Isaac Mpofu. This compilation produced by Eothen “Egon” Alapatt.

LP tracklist:

A

Amanaz
I Am Very Far
Sunday Morning
Khala My Friend
History of Man
Nsunka Lwendo

B

Africa
Green Apple
Making the Scene
Easy Street
Big Enough
Kale

C and D

Each LP has the same tracklist, however sides C and D are the “Reverb Mix.”

CD tracklist:

Disc One

Amanaz
I Am Very Far
Sunday Morning
Khala My Friend
History of Man
Nsunka Lwendo
Africa
Green Apple
Making the Scene
Easy Street
Big Enough
Kale

Disc Two

Each disc has the same tracklist, however disc two is the “Reverb Mix.”

2LP, 2CD and Digital. 2015. NA5123

Previously unreleased and unheard 1970 album by James Brown’s backing band the JB’s, led by Bootsy Collins. Out NOW. 
First edition limited to 3000 pieces – vinyl only.

More information at our webstore at rappcats.com!

In 1970 James Brown perfectly captured a definitive moment in modern music when he called Bootsy Collins into the studio to record the tracks that would be These Are The J.B.’s, a title given to a King Records test-press LP that was never released, and only rumored to exist.

This album is the epitome of funk music, Brown’s innovation that influenced everything that came after it, from Afro-beat to disco to hip-hop. And if there is any funk ensemble as influential as Brown’s in the post-“Cold Sweat” musical landscape, it’s the Bootsy Collins/Parliament/Funkadelic contingent. Those two streams, as Grammy-winning James Brown historian Alan Leeds details in this album’s liner notes, converged for the first time here, making this a Rosetta Stone of funk’s dominant idioms.

This link between Brown’s funk and all that followed features Bootsy and his young band running through twelve-minute instrumental take of Marva Whitney’s “It’s My Thing,” replete with blues chord changes, alongside interpretations of the Meters, Kool and the Gang and none other than Jimi Hendrix. This is a young band’s James Brown-turned-on-his-head style of funk that they nail in a one-minute vamp – available to hear now on our Soundcloud – that embodies the essence of the psychedelic-flavored music that would propel them into the orbit of George Clinton’s mothership.

This is the first commercial issue of this album, overseen by Now-Again’s Eothen “Egon” Alapatt alongside Leeds and Universal Music Group’s James Brown expert Harry Weinger. It was mastered specifically for vinyl by Elysian Master’s Dave Cooley, from the original two-track stereo master that James Brown and his engineer Ron Lenhoff delivered to production forty-four years ago. It’s packaged in a thick, “tip-on” Stoughton jacket, with a booklet with liner notes by Leeds and Alapatt and unpublished photographs.

NPR’s “All Things Considered” interviewed Melvin Van Peebles and the Heliocentrics’ Malcolm Catto about their The Last Transmission album. You can stream the story below.

An excerpt:

“The Heliocentrics supported Van Peebles’ distant love story with other-worldly sounds — a lot of oscillation and static, like distant radio signals that just don’t want to cooperate.

‘That’s basically our idea of what it must seem like by the time it reaches another intelligence far off into space somewhere,” Catto says. ‘What would it be like? This message? It’d start off and then slowly dissipate, dissipate until it’s light years away. And you just get all this radio chatter.'”

The Last Transmission is available for purchase at our webstore at rappcats.com.