RhoDeo 1934 Grooves

Hello,


Today's Artists are all swallowed by the mist of time, yet they were all...fresh. ...... N Joy

xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx

In one sense, you could call Morgan Khan an importer. That's basically what he did when he set up Street Sounds, the subsidiary to his dance label Streetwave, and released the first Street Sounds Electro compilation in 1983: here were eight tracks out of the United States that would've cost a couple of dozen quid for a UK buyer to import, all collected together for a price under five pounds. As a business decision, it was pretty shrewd, but as a scene-maker it was flat-out seismic: Thanks to the budget pricing and each volume's two sides of tight, continuous mixing from the likes of Herbie Laidley and the Mastermind sound system, the 22-volume Street Sounds Electro series-- later Street Sounds Hip Hop Electro and finally just Street Sounds Hip Hop-- was a major factor in defining what UK B-boys caught on to in the hip-hop world between 1983 and 1988.

Street Sounds Electro: In many ways, it's a fortunate time capsule that hits on a lot of the now-iconic electro and rap classics of the mid-late 1980s and what sort of context they came from. Yet it also offers a deeper, messier variation on the evolution of hip-hop, one that covers most of the major bases between the old school and the sample era-- Grandmaster Flash, Run-D.M.C., the Roxanne wars, the dawn of golden age icons like BDP and Eric B. & Rakim and EPMD-- then complicates it all by throwing in a lot of strange stuff that history completely forgot, for reasons both unfair and justified.

While the significant presence of classic early-mid 80s rap integrated itself into the tenor of each Street Sounds edition-- or sometimes clashed against it, like the slow, wobbly dubbed-out strut-bounce of Rammellzee vs. K-Rob's "Beat Bop" did amongst the otherwise uptempo pop-and-lock fodder of 1983's Volume 2-- it started to gradually dominate the series as a whole, swapping out the vocoders-and-Kraftwerk vibe of classic electro for the harder, sparser sounds of hip hop's first hardcore phase.

By 1987, the word "Electro" started disappearing from the compilation's now "Hip Hop"-focused titles, the 808s slowed down drastically and sample-based cuts by the Ultramagnetic MCs ("Traveling at the Speed of Thought"; "Funky") and J.V.C. F.O.R.C.E. ("Strong Island"; "Doing Damage") started making their way into the mix. By '88, the last year of the Street Sounds Electro series, the closest it got to uptempo electro-rap was Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock's "It Takes Two"-- by which time it was on its way to bypassing the whole "electro" thing entirely and getting identified as "hip-house." It's an illuminating history, an evolution of sound in a sort of beyond-canonical macrocosm.


xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx

This is the one that started it all. Morgan Khan is a legend in my eyes for introducing this music across the pond to the U.K back in the day. A fantastic and diverse array of quality electro tunes

 VA - Street Sounds Electro 1  (flac   365mb)

01 The Packman - I'm The Packman (Eat Everything I Can) 6:35
02 Newcleus - Jam On Revenge (The Wikki-Wikki Song) 7:49
03 West Street Mob - Break Dancin' - Electric Boogie 5:02
04 C-Bank - Get Wet 7:52
05 K-9 Corp Featuring Pretty C - Dog Talk 9:35
06 G-Force (Feat Ronnie Gee & Captain Cee) - Feel The Force 7:24
07 Project Future - Ray - Gun - Omics 6:40
08 Captain Rock - Return Of Captain Rock 8:23


xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx

This is the best of the SSE albums by a mile -- absolutely love this (and won't sell it, even though I could get a couple of quid for it). Xena's On The Upside is brilliant in an era when Shannon was just about to let the music play. This is superior. The B-Boys tracks are great -- Two Sisters are having great fun with some early sampling, and a brilliantly sequenced and dynamic piece. And of course it has White Lines at the end. Incredible stuff. This album took you off into the world of underground electronic music, away from all that was commercial. The stand out track on this compilation was definitely Al-Naafiysh which set quite a standard in the Electro genre. I think we have to thank Morgan Khan for introducing the Electro underground to a world of people who would never have got into this style of music.

PS. If you're a Shaun of the Dead fan, this album is being rocked by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost near the beginning of the film, before they later frisbee it at a zombie. Heartbreaking waste of vinyl! :)

VA - Street Sounds Electro 2  (flac   292mb)

01 The B-Boys - Two, Three, Break 5:01
02 The B-Boys - Cuttin' Herbie 4:36
03 Xena - On The Upside 5:53
04 Hashim - Al-Naafiysh (The Soul) 6:06
05 Rammellzee Vs K-Rob - Beat Bop 10:10
06 Two Sisters - B-Boys Beware (Club Mix) 5:50
07 Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel - White Lines (Don't Don't Do It) 7:33

xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx

Some more stinkin' Electro, sounds a lot more danceable with todays ears as it was back then, but then thist was o so 'fresh' - the perfect anti dote to global warming...

VA - Street Sounds Electro 3 (flac   266mb)

01 Divine Sounds - Dollar Bill 7:58
02 Imperial Brothers - We Come To Rock 5:44
03 Newcleus - Jam On It 6:09
04 Boogie Boys - Zodiac 6:09
05 Pumpkin - King Of The Beat 3:40
06 Davy DMX - One For The Treble (Fresh) 5:54
07 Fresh 3 MC's - Fresh 5:37

xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx

t has been said on more than a few occasions that the UK embraced hip hop wholeheartedly and saw it largely as more of a United States phenomenon rather than a Five Boroughs thing. This meant that for us most US-based inter-borough/city/state politics were not factors as to whether we thought a record was hot or not, and may have helped form the ideas of how to make Electro/Hip Hop which are expressed through this LP.

Personally speaking, every track on UK Electro is a winner with my most(est) favourite of the time being Hip Hop Beat, produced by the Mastermind with scratching by the spectacular Whiz Kid no less, it's similar to Jazzy Jay's Def Jam but with added groove. Syncbeat's Music is another favourite, in fact the A Side starts off strong and ends just as strong.

It wasn't until years later that I found out that Morgan Khan manufactured it with session musicians, with the same ones all pretending to be different artists, in an effort to kick start the UK Hip Hop scene. None of them charted or were released, other than to appear on this. I suppose it has its charm.

VA - Street Sounds Electro UK (flac   236mb)

01 Zer-O - Real Time (Retrospective Dub)
02 Syncbeat - Music
03 Broken Glass - Style Of The Street
04 Forevereaction - U People
05 Zer-O - Real Time
06 Rapologists - Hip Hop Beat (Street Mix)
07 Forevereaction - B.E.D. '34

xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx