The Earl of Edgecombe has been up to his old tricks, here mashing one of the previously unavailable tracks from the 25th Anniversary Edition of My Life In The Bush of Ghosts (the track called Pitch to Voltage) with the planetary hit from Jamie Foxx, Unpredictable, with predictable results.

More info about My Life In The Bush of Ghosts here. You can buy the Jamie Foxx record here. The Earl of Edgecombe’s previous mixes are available here and here.

On April 11th Nonesuch are releasing a special 25th anniversary edition of My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, the record which changed the course of music by combining found vocals with “world” music influenced musical collages, giving rise to a new genre of sampled music and influencing everyone from Public Enemy to… Moby?

The new version contains all of the original tracks remastered, plus seven previously unavailable outtake tracks. Well, almost all of the original tracks… the track featured here, Qu’ran, has not been included on most versions of the record since shortly after it’s initial release. A partial explanation for this comes from the enoweb site:

The Islamic Council of Great Britain had approached the record company with a complaint about the use of the “found” material [a ritual chanting of the Holy Koran. Actually, I’m surprised that anyone got permission to even tape it in the first place]; There are some expressions of Islam in which *all* music is considered “haram” [I think that’s the Arabic term, anyway] - or against the teachings of the Koran. There is an argument about whether or not Mohammed (pbuh) stated that “music” for use in certain Islamic festivals or special occasions *is* allowable, but that’s for folks who know the Surahs better than I.

At any rate, the Islamic Council voiced its strong disapproval of having the original source material used in the way it was used [in some ways, the objection is really quite similar to that raised by Kathryn Kuhlman’s estate when they wanted her sermon on Lot and the angels removed from what finally became “The Jezebel Spirit”], and in the days of watching the Fatwahs [pronouncements of death] fly back and forth, Eno and his pals deemed it meet to exclude it. “Very Very Hungry” was added instead. However, my copy of it includes both, so some other judgements must have been made later [I think that my copy is a domestic one, so perhaps that’s why]. {The track could for many years be found on the US releases of the cd.

More detail from enoweb here.

I am making Qu’ran available here for a limited time because I believe it to be one of the best tracks of this important part of 20th century music history.

There is a great site about the new release here. You can buy the new 25th anniversary release of My Life In The Bush of Ghosts (minus Qu’ran) here.

Lee Scratch Perry turns 70 today, March 20th. This track, sung in appropriated Hindi by an un-credited vocalist, comes from the 1978 masterpiece Return of The Super Ape, which Perry recorded with The Upsetters as a sequel to the original Super Ape.

A great background article about Perry from Sasha Frere Jones can be found here. The Dub Discussion Board has some interesting background on the lyrics to Bird in Hand here. Apparently Scratch borrowed the Hindi words from a song which he heard in a 1950 film called Babul directed by Raj Kapoor.

Lee Perry has a site here. You can buy Return of The Super Ape for a measly $8.98 here.

Happy birthday Scratch.

2006 just might be the year that Baltimore Club blows up. About time, I say. This track comes from the excellent mixtape Bmore Gutter Music: 67 minutes of unstoppable energy, high-octane obscenity, infectious stripped-down beats, and relentless DJ skills, emerging spontaneously from the minds and hands of Baltimore’s own Aaron LaCrate and the less-famous half of the Hollertronix team, DJ Low Budget. They get a lot of help from Spank Rock and the foul-mouthed Amanda Blank, who both rant on this track, in addition to a host of snippets from some of Baltimore’s finest local MCs.

This is not the most authentic version of the insanity known as Baltimore Club (as if authenticity matters). For the purest version of the genre check DJ Technics and Rod Lee, for instance. But part of the reason that Bmore Club has flown below the radar for so long is because it is hard to translate from a live club to a fixed medium like a CD, and even harder to make legally releasable versions of the pure stuff, which overlays the crazy beats with appropriated samples of everything from Sponge Bob Squarepants to Sanford and Son. But here is a CD that you can actually buy, even outside of Baltimore, which takes the rawest of the Bmore raw and filters it through a more worldly international DJ scene, serving it up hot and ready for the hipster set. Highly recommended.

You can buy Bmore Gutter Music here or here. Wikipedia has an amusingly pedantic encyclopedia entry about Baltimore Club here. Aaron LaCrate has a Myspace page here, complete with more mp3s. Hook up with DJ Technics here, and buy Rod Lee’s brilliant Vol. 5: The Offical CD here.