Lost Lost Lost | Special 5-hour show

Inspired by Jonas Mekas's multi-hour, epic home movie, we presented a very personal, five-hour sonic collage-memory of two decades of music collecting in New York’s slowly disappearing immigrant-owned bodegas and media stores

Listen to the show, now in the archives

Spice Ray | Spice Ray

Another cassette found on the grimy shelves of Nassem Halal Meat and Mediterranean Grocery in Astoria, Queens, Spice Ray is almost certainly an attempt to piggy back on the success of nineties Britpop sensations, Spice Girls. 

And that is precisely the point where any similarity between Spice Girls and Spice Ray evaporates like the 91% alcohol I used to clean the tape head prior to ripping this distinctly odd example of Moroccan pop.

I had erroneously thought this was an Algerian album; it is not. First, an Algerian in an Algerian music collectors' group on FB let me know it wasn't Algerian, and then our blog neighbor Tim confirmed that it indeed sounds Moroccan, not Algerian.

Tim sent along a track list and two bits of info about the cassette: 1) Mustapha Talbi is credited as the composer; and 2) the first track, "Mhemma Ikoun," is a song complaining about the deaths of children in Iraq. As Tim surmises, this cassette is likely late 90s, around the time the U.S. under the Clinton administration was bombing Iraq.

Here's Tim's transliteration of the track list:

1) Mhemma ikoun

2) Lemwima

3) Mama mia

4) Hala

5) Lillah

6) Instrumental

7) Yaoudarouha

Link to download in the comments.

Carpenters

On Wednesday, December 20, we celebrated America's favorite 70s lite pop duo with a chronological throw-down of covers, deconstructions, deep cuts, hits, mashups, samples, strip-downs, and more, from Downey, Calif., to Manila, Osaka, and Phnom Penh.

Listen to the show now in the archives

Maalam Soudani | Essoauira (1999)

Another cassette from the Algerian bodega here in Astoria, this time a terrific gnawa recording featuring vocals, tbal, and gimbri, the latter presumably plucked by our man decked out above, Maalam Soudani.

I mentioned this cassette on my show last week and, unless misunderstood him, Tim wrote in the comments that he knew Soudani back in the day in Essoauira.

If we're lucky, perhaps Tim will share with us what he knows about Soudani's life and work; I wasn't able to find anything about him online, but the music is [squeezes fingers together and presses them to lips] ... mmmwah!

Link to download [and Tim's reply!] in comments.

Looking Back on Looking Back in 2017

On December 13, we spun tracks from some three dozen international reissues and historical compilations released this year, from selections of Arabic and Turkish electronica to a 21st century deconstruction of a watershed moment in Brazilian pop history, to an exhaustive overview of Zamrock, and more ...

Listen to the show in the archives

Esengül ‎| Gizli Yaram

[UPDATE: New link in comments]

This remarkable woman was born Ağan Esen in 1954 in Istanbul, began her career working in casinos in Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir, and died in a car accident near Ataköy. 

Whether it really was an accident is up for debate, however; Adil at Uludag Video in Brooklyn, where I picked this delicious cassette up last weekend, assured me that Esengül was rubbed out by the mob. She had, less than three weeks prior, witnessed the owner and a waitress in a casino where she was gigging assassinated.

Esengül was 24 years old. Her voice sounds much, much more seasoned. You can hear a different sent of tracks by her in this week's Bodega Pop Live broadcast, here.

Link to DL in the comments.

What do you think? I'd love to hear from you ...

Strange Angels

On December 6, Bodega Pop Live spun the Biafran godfather of Nigerian rock, a Turkish casino star cut down by the mob at age 24, the flattest singer in ultra-vertical Hong Kong, Burma’s psychedelic synth-pop answer to yacht rock, the Pakistani ingénue who brought Bollywood to its knees, and the Russian studio producer who secretly recorded the most psychedelic bedroom tapes of all time.

Listen to the show in the archives

Selda Bağcan | Anadolu Konserleri 1970, 1990

Today's cassette rip has no J-card, but I'm assuming what we have on hand is this. Published in 1991, it features two concerts, 20 years apart, by Turkish folk and rock superstar, Selda Bağcan. I found it, along with two dozen other cassettes from the 1980s and 1990s, at Uludag Video on Avenue W in Brooklyn. 

Uludag was one of my favorite places to stop by when I used to ride my bike all over south Brooklyn in the aughts; but I was told at one point that they would no longer be importing music. When I  moved further north to Queens in 2010, I just assumed they were dry, and never went back.

Technically, they probably haven't added anything new, but they seem to have put everything they may have had in storage back up on the right hand wall.

The owner, Adil, motioned me over to a bottom corner of the wall where he'd stashed about 50-75 cassettes, a third of which looked to be ca. 1980s. We talked about the history of his store as we pulled the cassettes from their hiding place and spread them out on a glass case below the CDs.

He lives in Bay Ridge, a 10-minute car ride away, and opened the place in 1985. The back wall, against which there is now a sea of blue evil eye jewelry, had at one time been all cassettes. As I set the older-looking titles off to one side, Adil took others he thought I might like and popped them in his novelty jukebox cassette player behind the register to give me a taste. 

And that was when I saw the Selda cassette. "Which Selda is that?" I asked.

"Anatolian Concerts," Adil explained. I expressed my surprise: I have a number of Selda CDs, most of them bought in this very store, and had no idea that she had put out a live album. I gingerly asked if he might be willing to sell it. Gingerly, because it was right there beside the cassette player, suggesting that he had most likely listened to it recently. But without hesitation, Adil said he'd be happy to sell it to me.

I haven't broken up the rip into distinct tracks because, while Selda performs numerous songs, there's no real break, except at the end of each side. Also, I assume you like Selda enough to just want to take in the whole thing. Right?

Expect many more posts from this haul in the weeks to come.

Link to rip in the comments.

Orchestra Djamal | Mazhariphone Cassette

Confession: I went *back* to Nassem Halal Meat and Mediterranean Grocery here in Astoria, and, after a long conversation with Houssain, found another 40 grime-encrusted cassettes hidden in Nassem's nooks and crannies. Well, technically 38, as two of them were duplicates of a Zehouani tape I'd already picked up, but which was too old and worn to play. These cassettes come from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates. As you've already suspected: Today's offering is from that last haul.

Thanks to the supercollector known as Mehdi J Blige, we know this is by Orchestra Djamal (or Jamal). Thanks to the J-card, we know the publisher is Mazhariphone. Thanks to our ears, we believe this might be the single most psychedelic cassette we've ever heard from al-Mamlakah al-Maghribiyah. 

It's possible that this is the same Orchestra Jamal as in this video:

The sound is vaguely similar and the lead vocal is in the same youthful ballpark as on the tape. Speaking of which, let's talk about the tape in depth.

Side 1 kicks off with a plaintive, haunting string solo, aching and bending upward, until it opens a window for the lead male's voice, and a guitar that lays down a soft-strummed, spider-web thin scaffolding reminiscent of Omar Korshid at his most subtle. The kid's voice, as you'd gather from the cover above, is youthful, almost feminine. He starts off reciting and, as the track develops, begins to sing. At which point, any concern I had that this might be some kind of novelty or vanity project evaporates. The kid has soul. Deep, lived soul.

Just shy of the two-minute mark, the percussion and some sort of barely perceptible keyboard kick in. The drums -- which are nearly isolated in the mid-to-left-hand channel -- sound like a Moroccan Jaki Liebezeit is taking them out for a test drive. I have never, never-ever, heard a kit being played like this on a Moroccan recording. (If we're lucky, Tim might let us know whether they strike his more acutely trained ears as unusual.) The guitar lopes along, breaking out into occasional fuzz-toned fills.

The second track is where things start to get mind-melty. I don't know the specific instrument that opens the track, but it's some form of keyboard or synthesizer, and very trippy. The strings and Jaki Liebezeit kit kick in, followed by a sudden trill of mechanized ululation that swooshes across the sonic landscape. The kid and an adult male chorus trade phrases. 

This is not psychedelic in the normative sense. The architecture feels rooted squarely in Moroccan chaabi; it's in the fills and trills where things get freaky. 

And it's on Side 2 that the psychedelia gets turned up, especially the second and final track. I'm not going to attempt to describe it, other than to note that the synthesizer and guitar do things in this 11+ minute scorcher -- and we're still *technically* talking fills -- that make my head spin. 

And perhaps, dear reader, your head as well?

Link to the cassette rip in comments. 

BYFOR&WITH CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

On Wednesday, November 22, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio celebrated Christian Marclay with three hours of Solo recordings, experimental / altered records, compositions, collaborations, homages, and live performances by the artist / turntablist, his friends, and fellow travelers

Listen to the show now in the archives