It’s remarkable enough that the resident band of Houston’s Kashmere Senior High School (led by bandleader Conrad O. Johnson) was unusually prodigious, blasting out J.B.’s-esque funk before they were old enough to purchase cigarettes. But the fact that they could pass for seasoned vets with their music transcends the novelty of youth and holds them up as a genuinely tight unit. Originals like “Headwiggle” and “Kash Register” bristle with all the intensity you’d expect from a bunch of kids gleefully realizing they’ve become skilled players.
Now-Again Records
by Nate Patrin
Think about your stereotypical rare vinyl collector — the worst possible representative of the hobby, who zealously guards all info and knowledge of impossibly hard-to-find and underheard music for themselves and maybe a small circle of friends, who values obscurity for its own sake, whose only investment in the finds they rescue from the realm of the ephemeral is a financial investment. Now imagine the kind of cratedigger who refuses to stop at just “nobody else has this,” who wants to know who made the music, how it was made, and what happened to the musicians afterwards — and who, more than anything, wants as many people as possible to get their minds blown in the same way.
If anybody stood athwart the solipsistic Record Guy mindset à la Indiana Jones shouting “that belongs in a museum!” during the peak internet collector-frenzy years, it was Eothen “Egon” Alapatt. The kind of ceaselessly curious music head whose fascination with classic vinyl had him crossing paths with cult heroes from Hair composer Galt MacDermot to sample-freaking college radio co-host Count Bass D, Egon came into his own as a curator as the general manager at Stones Throw. When a rare funk compilation he assembled for the label, The Funky 16 Corners, took off in 2001, he was soon entrusted with his own imprint, which initially emerged with a succession of expansive and like-minded funk reissues before gradually sprawling out into every genre a beathead would ever go searching for nuggets in. No matter the era, genre, language, nation, or popularity, Now-Again had the tendency to find an importance in everything it put out — even if it was only important at the time to the people who made it.
Another great thing about Now-Again is that for all the long-past years and older-gen fashions that wind up adorning its reissues’ titles and covers, there’s never a sense that this is retro kitsch or woozy nostalgia — after all, even the name of the label points more to musical history as an echo rather than a thing to be discarded and exhumed. It’s the kind of philosophy that clicks with so many artists Egon’s worked alongside — and not just Madlib, his long-running co-cratedigger and past-mutating futurist. There’s also the litany of contemporaneous artists like Heliocentrics, the Whitefield Brothers, and Paul White, who came of age under the aegis of hip-hop’s making-the-new-from-the-old production innovations and realized the music of earlier generations was better off being rebuilt in new images than discarded when trends died down. Here are some of the label’s best releases — a broad-scope of outside-the-ordinary selections which prove that some long-lost music can, in fact, sound like now again.
Despite their reissue roots, Now-Again also has a place for contemporary bands that loosely evoke the label’s hip-hop-educated, genre-adventurous rediscoveries. In some cases, those musicians usually wind up cross-pollinating — which, in the case of Connie Price & the Keystones (actually the pseudonymous project of multi-instrumentalist Dan Ubick), means one of the most ambitious cross-generational supergroup albums of the peak ’00s funk revival era. Members of veteran acts like Funk Inc. and L.A. Carnival mingle with revivalists from Poets of Rhythm, Orgone, and Breakestra to meet in the chronological middle, tourniquet-tight J.B.’s-style funk melding with the jazz, reggae, and psych influences that hip-hop producers added to the boom-bap mix in the ’90s.
OK, so they weren’t from Los Angeles — The L.A. Carnival, who got their name off the initials of frontman/singer Lester Abrams, cut all the material on this album in a studio in Omaha sometime between 1969 and 1971. But even a band in Nebraska could stir up some heavy funk back then, especially as a mixed-race group unafraid to hit social issues dead-on (“The Klan”; “We Need Peace and Love”; “Blind Man”). Brassy and bottom-heavy in a way that could unite casual Chicago fans with Kool & the Gang diehards, this shoulda-been-an-album anthology proves that surprisingly great local funk bands could be found just about anywhere.
Now-Again Records had a remarkable knack for finding bands that only released a couple singles in their time and discovering that they had at least a full album’s worth of tunes stashed away somewhere. A couple years after doing the same for fellow Indianapolis-based LAMP labelmates Ebony Rhythm Band, Now-Again reassembled a chunk of Amnesty’s scarce recorded-yet-unreleased output around a core of songs from a string of studio sessions and demos cut in 1973, revealing the full potential of a band that could pull off ambitious prog-soul suites (“Can I Help You?”) short-and-tight funk jams (“Love Fades”), and piercing harmonic balladry (“We Have Love”) with equal fire.
It’d be impossible to talk about funk revivalism without bringing up Jan and Max Weissenfeldt (a.k.a the Whitefield Brothers), the Munich-based groove scholars who woodshedded their way into tons of indie-hip-hoppers’ crates with their group Poets of Rhythm. It’d be even more impossible to even mention all their aliases and side projects in a reasonable amount of space, so why not focus on Karl Hector and the Malcouns, the pseudonymous Jan-led Afro-and-elsewhere-beat group that shines by evoking rather than imitating. Sahara Swing lets its pan-African influences — Nigerian grooves, Ethiopian melodies, and the all-important American on-the-one — sound more like a fair trade fusion than a colonizer snatch-and-grab.
UK beat-wielder Coz Littler got his alias “Mr. Chop” from his tendency to be meticulous with his edits, but as a studio rat his obsession with all things analogue makes his world fulfill some of the deepest promises of hip-hop’s “unstuck in time” sonics. 2009’s For Pete’s Sake adds another reflection to that room of mirrors, a live band reproducing the famous beats of legendary producer Pete Rock in a way that rewires the originals’ soul-jazz influences into something more cosmic and psychedelic. The foggy noir version of “The World Is Yours,” the acid-western fuzzbomb take on “T.R.O.Y.,” and the King Tubby reverbed funeral strut “Shut Em Down” prove that mutation can be the best form of homage.
The ’70s Zambian musical movement known as “Zamrock” rose out of a sense of post-independence urbanized progress, and before it was quashed by economic crashes, political turmoil, and the AIDS crisis, it served as a powerful scene that demonstrated what continental Africa could contribute in the fields of hard rock and heavy funk. Musi-O-Tunya and their frontman Rikki Illilonga specialized in music that was superficially similar to Afrobeat at first listen, but pierced with searing electric guitar solos and heavy Afro-Latin grooves that evoke Santana, Can, and Deep Purple even more than they do Fela.
If any contemporary band on the Now-Again label necessitated the designation of a vibe rather than a genre, it’s The Heliocentrics, the psych-jazz-funk-break-and-so-on ensemble built around a core of musicians (chiefly drummer Malcolm Catto, bassist Jake Ferguson, and multi-instrumentalist Jack Yglesias) who can express free-flowing improvisational journeys at the same time they keep everything (poly)rhythmically on point. Out There is a magnificent debut and an example of retrofuturism done right, sounding like yesterday’s tomorrow today — an acid-soul mutation that escapes the orbit of “world music” because there are no borders in space.
Every time they delve into some thought-obscure corner of international rock, Now-Again takes great care to highlight it the same way other labels would venerate influential punk and classic rock forebears. This peaked with the deluxe treatment given to Zamrock pioneers Witch with this box set, featuring all five of the LPs released by the original lineup in the ’70s. It’s far and away the best way to experience the rise of a band whose sound carries far beyond the borders of home, and reveals just how many angles they could take, from power-poppy garage rock to heavy blues dirges to prog-leaning R&B.
If all the Whitefield Brothers’ projects ever face the risk of all blurring into each other, at least it’s a colorful blur — and you’re 100% guaranteed to get a deep, rare-groove-worthy beat or thirteen out of the whole situation. The first release under the Brothers’ more-or-less-real-named identities since 2002’s In the Raw fits right in with the Now-Again philosophy of deep immersion in some of hip-hop and funk’s more esoteric pan-global sources, clicking tight beneath top-tier indie MCs (Percee P, Edan, Mr. Lif) and fellow funkateers (Quantic, El Michels Affair) for a musical travelogue so mutable and cross-bordered it feels like touring via instantaneous teleportation.
Two years after his appearance on Forge Your Own Chains sparked curiosity, Now-Again brought together a collection of songs by Iranian singer Kourosh Yaghmaei that lay heavy with the implications of its subtitle. A massive star in his home country before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 banned anything with nods to Western culture, Yaghmaei’s works collected here would feel hauntingly sweet and sorrowful — thanks in part to the expressive melodic nuance of his voice — even without the specter of it being taken away from him.
Those Shocking Shaking Days: Indonesian Hard, Psychedelic, Progressive Rock and Funk (1970-1978)
Various Artists
The best reissue labels make the obscure into the obvious — of course a populous Eastern nation had its own underground rock scene — and then find the mysteries and ghosts beneath that deceptively simple discovery. The edification in this comp is a two-fer: collaborative liner notes detail the process of figuring out the lineage of this music in a way that’s just as revealing as hearing the music itself, which ranges from thunderous hard rock (AKA’s “Do What You Like”) to wandering psych (Shark Move’s “Evil War”) to slinky wah-wah funk (Rollies’ “Bad News”) to all-of-the-above (Panbers’ “Haai”).
They’d eventually drop a couple LPs in the early-mid ’70s under the name Ebony Rhythm Funk Campaign, but before that, the Ebony Rhythm Band was a house band for the Indy indie Lamp Records that had only a sole 1969 7” (“Soul Heart Transplant” / “Drugs Ain’t Cool”) under their own name. But an archival digging session came up with an LP’s worth of lively, mostly-instrumental organ-heavy sprawling soul gems, including covers of late ’60s standards like “Light My Fire” and “Ode to Billy Joe” that would have Booker T. & the M.G.’s sweating.
Egon’s curatorial enthusiasm on Stones Throw rare groove release The Funky 16 Corners turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. Once Now-Again became his reissue domain, the label provided a still-running catalogue of obscure soul and funk unearthings that values top-notch musicality above all other collector-driven metrics. The catch is that there isn’t actually a Cold Heat Vol. 2 (yet) — maybe it’d be too hard to top? — but this cross-country collection still stands as a catalyst for Now-Again’s more region-bound future excursions into nearly-forgotten bands and far-flung scenes, with this collection’s gems ranging from high school band phenoms to why-weren’t-they-huge local heroes.
By the end of the 2000s, Now-Again had established itself as a different sort of reissue label — one that took its sample-searching record-fiend roots to further and deeper outer-world realms to meticulously-researched and endlessly curious levels. And even when the results were uneven, they were definitely edifying: Forge Your Own Chains depicts psychedelic rock in all its transcendent, dopey, innovative, eccentric, deeply messy totality. And if that guarantees at least one bummer trip for every two brushes with the divine, the global scope of this comp — Sweden (Baby Grandmothers), Nigeria (Ofege), Iran (Kourosh Yaghmaei), South Korea (Shin Jung Hyun & the Men) — delivers glorious unpredictability.
If you’re ever curious as to what kind of beats an enterprising producer could concoct from the deeply researched, deeply strange Now-Again vaults, here’s your answer — or at least the first of three volumes’ worth of answers. Chicago-based Marco “Maker” Jacobo made his name in the early ’00s collaborating with the prolific-yet-underrated rapper Qwel from Typical Cats, but this comp gave his profile a bigger boost outside the Second City, letting him work his reconstructive chops on cuts ranging from psychedelic nuggets (“Forge Your Own Chains”) to soaring, horn-driven soul (“The Love We Have”) to atomic-kickdrum disco-turned-house (“Free”).
Sometimes reissues just happen because they’re labors of love — which is the case with the short-lived Austrian jazz-prog band Paternoster, whose 1972 self-titled album was declared by Egon to be one of his personal favorites. But aside from simply giving that LP a basic reissue treatment, Now-Again dug even deeper to find the soundtrack cues to the 1971 film Die Ersten Tage that served as Paternoster's precursor, making for a staggeringly detailed and historically deep companion to an album most people barely know exists. Think a more sinister take on pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd and you’ve got a good start as to why this is such a find.
Hip-hop heads might know him best from his beats for MCs like Danny Brown, Homeboy Sandman, and Open Mike Eagle, but he’s maintained that profile in parallel with his own top-billed work — stuff that takes the already outre psych / prog / post-punk source material he favors and brings it into the forefront. Paul White & the Purple Brain is one of those who else would think of this? concepts, the producer building off the obscure but expansive ’90s discography of psychedelic Swede S.T. Mikael for a beat record dripping with lysergic intrigue.