ECHOES OF Linkwood Family - Miles Away 10"

Time for another installment of Echoes with your boy Herb P. This time around I'm cupping my ear to the Firecracker Recordings reissue of Linkwood Family's 2004 limited-run underground burner Miles Away on 10" wax.

CLICK HERE to BUY(restocking)

ECHO 1: Miles Davis' On the Corner

The cartoon/comic strip soul sista cover art and use of "Miles" in the title immediately threw my mind to Davis' groundbreaking 1972 release. Called "the most street record ever recorded by a jazz musician" by Allmusic.com, On the Corner was decried by purists and pundits at the time for its unapologetically trailblazing forays into the future sounds of drum and bass loops, concrète production techniques (which would come to epitomize hip hop and all sample-based musics), electronic timbres and -- perhaps most presciently of all -- a licentious infidelity to genre so familiar and inoffensive to consumers of popular and avant-garde music today. In my and many other people's opinion this record is a masterpiece, so it's not a bad reflection to bear in your own work.

ECHO 2: Theo's Righteous Rant

Also on the topic of the cover art... After realizing that this label and these dudes are all based in the UK (and so I'm assuming they're white, sue me. ...there's no pics of them on their myspace and I'm betting it's more because they look like the aristocracy than because they're on some UR-styled anonymity thing), the next thing to rush into my mind was a tremendously on-point rant by Theo Parrish when questioned by Moodmat on the topic of white theft of black arts. A pointed excerpt:

We don’t have a lot of protection against thieves because their aren’t a lot of lawyers, because there’s usually just enough money for the artists to survive on, unless you helped father the form. There aren’t managers suggesting to artists to do white versions of black songs, but there are white artists with labels doing it on their own. This is one of the few places a thief will try to copy your music, then send it to you calling it a tribute in hopes of you endorsing it. They’ll find the sources of your samples if you use them, and use them verbatim, then try to cash in on your previous successes. The Black producers in this form are a lot closer knit, so there’s a lot of respect for the other producers doing it, and there’s a shared philosophy of innovation as a supreme ethic, you simply would lose respect from your contemporaries if you tried to use the same sources as they did for sampling. The thieves, usually white, are typically the culprits of this phenomena. Its almost as if they want to convince the buying market that since they sampled from where you did then they must be just like YOU, only white! Once they get it ready to put out, they’ll use pictures of little black children, and black women with afros- things they never could be, and never have been -on their cover art to help complete the illusion of having a truly down, soulful product to offer the market. Sometimes they’ll outright sample YOUR song, and copy your drumpattern, send it to a magazine and some adjective limited writer will say the copy sounds ’so-and-so esque’, never making that artist stand on their own, letting the thief who made it ride on the back of original artists.

Saturday, December 23, 2006
STEAL

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.

Devour films, music, books, paintings, poems, photographs, conversations, dreams, trees, architecture, street signs, clouds, light and shadows.

Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.

Authenticity is invaluable.

Originality is non-existant.

Don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it.

Remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."

*I stole this from author Paul Arden who stole it from Jim Jarmusch.
Currently listening :
You Are What You Is
By Frank Zappa
Release date: 02 May, 1995

5:19 AM - 1 Comments - 1 Kudos - Add Comment

There are a few non black underground dance artists that simply have gravitated to the form because its as free a musical form as you can get. They don’t even care who their music sounds like, they are just trying to express themselves honestly and truthfully. I’m not talking about them. They are rare and appreciated. They are original. Whatever success they garner is deserved.

*props to Emynd for posting this interview on the hollerboard, where I found it.

ECHO 3: Sun Ra's "Fate in a Pleasant Mood"

This one's pretty literal. I'm 99.9% sure that the AA2 track, "Fate," samples a version of Sun Ra's composition, "Fate in a Pleasant Mood." Specifically the version from Ra to the Rescue (1982). Let's just hope Theo didn't sample this one first.