Category: News

Do you pay attention to current pop music? We don’t, really, but every once in a while we clear a sample for this star or that – and, in the realm of mega stars that might be caught singing over a deep sample, there are few that go deeper than Beyonce (and, to be fair, her stable of producers).

So, if you caught her Just Blaze-produced “Freedom” off of her latest album Lemonade and thought that the track sounded familiar, that’s because it came from one of our favorite garage-psych records of all times – the self titled, and only, record by the Puerto Rican band Kaleidoscope, who recorded their album in the Dominican Republic and saw it issued in a promotional run of two-hundred copies on Mexico’s Orfeon label. It’s gone on to become one of the sought after artifacts of the late 60s world-rock scene, with clean copies – when the surface – selling for upwards of $8,000.

The German reissue label Shadoks – with whom we’ve issued a number of Zamrock titles – licensed the album through the band’s leader, guitarist and vocalist Frank Tirado, and issued it on CD and LP. We approached Frank and got the rights to license Kaleidoscope’s impossible to imitate music on both master and publishing sides – and, at the urging of Shadoks Thomas Hartlage, have made it available for digital purchase for the first time ever. Download a sample song below and if you like what you hear – and we’re almost certain you will – support the release of global wonders by purchasing the entire album.

Download: Kaleidoscope – Let Me Try
Buy: Kaleidoscope: Kaleidoscope on Itunes.

Shipping at our webstore at Rappcats

Globetrotter of parallel subcontinents and digger of rare, forgotten records, Eothen “Egon” Alapatt tracks sounds from the dawn of time to the four corners of the world. On the other side of the globe, French designer Christophe Lemaire stays forward thinking and audacious in his choices: far from our deified present, he cultivates a love of timeless designs and mixed influences; a passion for iconoclastic music hidden in the dark corners of a global cultural industry.

This extraordinary openness has been at the heart of their friendship since 2007. Their exceedingly eclectic, fierce rock discoveries gave birth to a first anthology, Where Are You From? (Now-Again, 2010), the fruit of Lemaire’s excavating Alapatt’s archives. That was a post-geographic exploration in psych, rock and funk territories from 1968 to now; this second anthology celebrates their impressionist vision and explores garage rock from the 1970s, voicing the struggles of independence in Zambia, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

Can’t You Hear Me comes from a track by charismatic Zamrock icon Paul Ngozi, a Lemaire favorite. Ngozi’s title track sets the tone for a drastic selection of seventeen songs with rebellious undertones, riddled by an infectious groove, the forsaken writing about a forgotten chapter in the history of music. Ngozi, WITCH, Chrissy Zebby Tembo, Amanaz, Wells Fargo, Eye Q and the Funkees represent a generation fighting for their freedom, armed with fuzz guitars, symbolic objects of a new movement. They played in Fela’s kingly shadow, were influenced by Hendrix’s psychedelic solos, Jefferson Airplane’s penetrating chords and Cream’s repetitive melodies. The music of their colonial oppressors they reassembled and reinterpreted with pure energy, without nod to hymn or flag.

A halo of cosmic design and pure lines, the cover for the anthology by Sanghon Kim transports us in this whirling odyssey in space and time while composer/producer Pilooski concludes the album with an edit of WITCH’s “No Time,” an expression of the critical need to open up to new perspectives, new imaginations and to keep unearthing riches of our universal heritage.

“Through these tracks we can feel the communicative energy, this pure vitality, not only of Africa , but of youth and hope,” Lemaire states. “And I find it quite universal and timeless. It is not about music as an industry , or as product , but music as a craft . And one can immediately recognized when music is created with heart and soul.”