This week: Scandinavia, Radio Archives, Circus Clowns, Link Wray, 78s, early Zappa, porno 8-tracks, Sesame swings, and Superman sings.
Doctor Superehelga
Next week we'll be posting links to Christmas music galore. In the meantime, are you ready for your annual holiday Glug Party? Not until you've downloaded a whole mix of Scandinavian Oldies.
Generation Exploitation
The Laughtracks radio hour from Vancouver's CITR usually looks at classic comedy, but for this special podcast the whole show is just radio station IDs and promos from demo LPs of the 70s and 80s.
Sweet Thunder
Tape Findings has recently welcomed a special guest: a Ringling Brother's clown. He takes you backstage with the circus clowns as they drink, fart, and use funny voices. Part One. Part Two.
Turtle's 78rpm Jukebox
You don't need to empty your wallet on eBay to get those old 78s. Here are over a hundred recordings of original 78rpm records all available for just a mouse click. Why not start your tour with a visit to Coney Island? (Update: These aren't great quality recordings, so they are more for education than collection.)
And Then the Chimney Spoke
For his 1971 "comeback" album, Link Wray moved away from his classic instrumental sound to reveal that he really knew his country blues as well. He not only has an amazingly gritty voice (even with just one lung), but this album also features the scorcher "Fire & Brimstone", which I haven't been able to stop listening to.
An Idiot's Guide to Dreaming
Why just this weekend I was posting about Delia Derbyshire, and here is a little love letter to her and samples from her rare album recorded under the name Li De La Russe.
The Cake and Polka Parade
Looking for some vocal experimental work straight out of 1980s Belgium? The magic word is Fluvial. (Pst - this one comes from fellow WFMU blogger Fatty Jubbo)
Crud Crud
Frank Zappa's early surf band The Rotations.
Beauty College
For months I've been getting down and nasty with dirty adult 8 Tracks from the 70s that play out like pornographic radio shows. Here's the last one, a nut-busting black edition featuring the headboard-banging antics of an xXx rated private dick named - what else? - Shaft. Don't miss out.
Bizarre Records
On the other end of the 1970s spectrum, we have the token black Sesame Street muppet (at least for a while). You know what that means? That means it's the funkiest of all the damn CTW records.
Way Out Junk
It's a biiiird, It's a plaaane. It's a Children's Treasury of Superman Musical Stories.
Why oh why do people think 78 rpm records can be rerecordered on such low datarates? 700 kb for 3 minutes! Yaiks. With all the noise, clicks and pops, a higher bitrate is required, as all the noise will eat all bandwidth. As an experiment: compare jpg filesizes between noisy photos and noiseless graphics. Same issue!
Posted by: Dave | December 13, 2006 at 03:38 PM
You can DL the full Roosevelt Franklin LP here
http://www.badongo.com/file/1386713
Posted by: detroitsuperfly | December 13, 2006 at 07:02 PM
Dave: not to mention all the boneheads who believe that a mono track only requires half the bitrate of a stereo track (ohh, head.... throbbing... again....)
Posted by: Hell's Donut House | December 13, 2006 at 07:29 PM
In fact, if you encode both stereo channels separately (like LAME does in stereo mode, default for bitrates higher than 160kbps, not to confuse with joint stereo mode), then you need exactly twice the bitrate of encoding a mono track. I guess for practical purposes 96kbps is a pretty good bitrate for mono tracks.
Posted by: Lukas | December 13, 2006 at 08:56 PM
How could I have possibly missed this Bizarre Records blogspot?!? audio shmaudio this blogspot is killin it
Posted by: Steve PMX | December 14, 2006 at 03:30 PM