Boogie Chitz

Barely out of their teens Carmelo and Michelangelo La Bionda of Milan established themselves as competent ballad authors for other Italian singers. But after a trip to Munich in 1977 the boys took their action to the dance floor and became pioneers of the emerging Italo-Disco scene. The ★ Collection is a fifteen track German compilation documenting the La Bionda brother's time spent under the glitter ball during the turn of the decade. Viva la Bionda!

Reckless crowned young denim dandy Bryan Adams the surest thing in rock and roll in 1984. Ten flawlessly-constructed and produced songs void of experimentation but full of heart. Adams was at the top of his game - but SOMEONE was watching closely from three-thousand miles southeast of Vancouver.

Erasure are NOW regarded as 'homosexual pop' icons - but back when they started in the eighties no one noticed because EVERYONE was wearing spandex and sequined vests. The duo's second album The Circus is a joyous realization of destiny. Keyboardist/leader Vince Clarke had finally found the perfect front-twink in Andy Bell to sing his songs. For Andy - a dream come true - he was now in a group with THEE Vince Clarke - his hero from Depeche Mode and Yazoo.

Italian prog rock band Goblin found their destiny during the second half of the 1970's when they became the go-to musical score composers for the hot-shot horror movie directors of Italy. Goblin split at their peak but reunited (most of them) for 1982's Tenebrae - directed by their old friend Dario Argento.

Creatively juiced by the wet-mulleted beefcakes of production team Full Force, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam continued to pump the coffers of the Freestyle genre they helped create with 1987's Spanish Fly - a solid urban dance album in a genre generally defined by singles.

In 1974 forty-five year old Cameroonian Renaissance Man Francis Bebey retired from a career as a journalist and musical director of UNESCO to focus more time on his family and the arts. He turned a spare room of his Parisian flat into a studio, bought a synthesizer, drum machine and four-track recorder - and began an early-retirement musical quest that would last thirty years. Trésor Magnétique is twenty tracks beautifully extracted from the wagonload of unused analog material Francis Bebey left behind in that glorified walk-in closet.

A galley pisser and a tighty-whitey wearer meet in a record store in Athens, Georgia and form R.E.M. They begin their thirty year gentle-rock quest with Murmur - a deep-track treasure considered a Rosetta Stone to all indie-rock that followed.

A dispatch of wonderful garage sleaze from France made by a Boogie Chitz supergroup consisting of The Limiñanas, loose-of-mind Anton from Jonestown and Emmanuelle Seigner - the GILF wife of creepo director Roman Polanski.

Somewhere is the only release by Gum Country - a side project of the guitarist from artisanal grunge band The Courtneys. Infectious 1990s shoegaze rockery for the present day slacker - it's hard to believe an album this catchy can be so obscure. A 'blind listening' treasure to the fullest.

Given the MTV buzz and debutantal boom the Bangles experienced during the second half of their run, it's easy to forget their debut LP is a bonafide hitless alt-rock classic. All Over the Place reminds us that the Bangles were a really cool Paisley Underground band before the Egyptian pantomimes and Prince lil' purple penis pageantry.

A young guitarist named Maximiliano Chavez experiences a flash of divinity when he discovers the Wah-Wah guitar pedal in mid-1960s Peru and assembles Los Orientales de Paramonga - one of the cornerstone bands of Peru's psychedelic Chicha scene. Fiesta en Oriente was the band's second album - and the only one they recorded for the understatedly-historic Infopesa Records.

A hobbyist Sikh devotional singer and her three sons create the first ever Asian-infused electronic dance album in England at their kitchen table in the Punjabi-populated London suburb of Southall in 1982. The record sat in obscurity until this year when Naya Beat resurrected and reissued the magic for our consumption.

The first music ever recorded in the multi-track format in Ethiopia came about from a Swedish national living in Addis Ababa who offered use of his four-track recorder to a group of Ethio-Jazz workhorses named Ibex Band. The Ibex boys welcomed the opportunity and set up shop in the empty ballroom of a hotel. For two days they made magic that would lay dormant for close to fifty years before a formal release this past April. What a gift.