An independent label by DJs, for DJs, and of DJs based in Tokyo since 2024. Run by YAMADAtheGIANT and his friends, our passion lies in updating the classic house style through modern underground artists. All our tracks are designed for the dance floor and for slow mixing by house DJs. Each track has been curated and played at underground parties by underground DJs before its release.
**2010 Grammy Award Winner: Best Traditional Folk Album **
‘Marvelous…exuberant’ - Rolling Stone
Nonesuch Records releases a fifteenth anniversary edition of Carolina Chocolate Drop’s 2010 Grammy Award-winning album Genuine Negro Jig, featuring founding band members Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson. The reissue includes the original album and nine bonus tracks: seven previously unreleased tracks plus a 2025 remaster of ‘City of Refuge’ and a 2025 mix of ‘Memphis Shakedown’. This release marks the album’s first time on vinyl since its original pressing in 2010.
Genuine Negro Jig was released on February 16, 2010, reaching the top ten on the Billboard Folk chart and the top of the Bluegrass chart. It won the 2011 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album. Produced by Joe Henry, it was the first of three releases on Nonesuch followed by The Carolina Chocolate Drops/ Luminescent Orchestrii EP (2011) and the Grammy nominated album Leaving Eden (2012), produced by Buddy Miller. Widely acclaimed as one of 2010’s best, Genuine Negro Jig appeared in year-end lists of NPR, Paste, and more, and was featured in Rolling Stone’s 25 Best Country-Soul Albums in 2024.
“Genuine Negro Jig remains fresh fifteen years later not only because of the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ influence on American popular culture but also because it’s an excellent record in itself,” says Dr. Dwandalyn Reece and Dr. Steven Lewis of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in the album’s liner notes.
Carolina Chocolate Drops formed after band members Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson met at the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, NC in 2005. All three trained in the Piedmont banjo and fiddle musical tradition under the tutelage of Joe Thompson, who was one of the last musicians of his era and his community to carry on the southern Black string band tradition. While old-time Southern string music is often associated with Caucasian musicians from Appalachia, Giddens pointed out in an NPR interview that “it seems that two things get left out of the history books. One, that there was string band music in the Piedmont, period. And that Black folk was such a huge part of string tradition.” Carolina Chocolate Drops sought to not only correct this misunderstanding but also to keep the centuries-old string music tradition alive and developing.
The members of Carolina Chocolate Drops, who came from diverse musical backgrounds, shared singing duties and swapped instruments throughout their sets. The band recently reunited for a single show at Rhiannon Giddens’ Biscuits and Banjos festival in Durham, North Carolina in April 2025. In celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the Black Banjo Gathering, the documentary Don’t Get Trouble In Your Mind: The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Story by Filmmaker John Whitehead was released on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and YouTube Free4all streaming platforms.
Mr Lee Perry who in no uncertain terms defines the words musical genius, recorded some of the most inspiring, soulful, funny and weird / wild reggae music ever put down on tape. Working through all the manifestations of reggae from Ska to Roots and Dub, where his ground breaking 1973 ‘Blackboard Jungle’ LP, set the standards, he was an innovator. If this was not enough his recordings of THE WAILERS, many believe to be their finest work. Born Rainford Hugh Perry, 28 March 1936, Hanover, Jamaica. He began his career at the grand age of 16, working for Clement ‘Coxone’ Dodd’s sound system, rising quickly to the position of record scout and organising recording sessions during his 3 year period 1963-1966. Restlessness and unsatisfied with credit he felt due to him he moved on to work with Producers J.J. Johnson and Clancy Eccles, the later of which would help him set up his ‘Upsetter’ label in 1968,which would see his first of many recordings telling the injustices done to him by previous employees. ‘The Upsetter’ track itself pointed at Mr Dodd but reflected back to Perry when he inherited it as a nick name along side many others during the coarse of his career, including ‘Scratch’, again taken from one of his recordings ‘Chicken Scratch’ recorded in 1965/1966. Perry’s work in 1968 with producer Joe Gibbs was fruitful and resulted in many successfulreleases, but again lack of credit and itchy feet, it was time to move on. But not without leaving his trademark recording summing up his feelings at the time ‘People Funny Boy’ this time aimed at Mr Gibbs. Still not having a studio of his own, Perry recorded at the various Kingston establishments of the time, Randy’s Studio 17 on North Parade, Dynamics on Bell Road and Harry J’s on Roosevelt Avenue where the bulk of the aforementioned recordings with The Wailers were carried out. During this time and the years that followed Perry has built up a vast catalogue of backing tracks / instrumentals, he had cut over a 100 releases on his ‘Upsetter’ label alone. A library of music that he has an uncanny knack of reutilising to work into something new when put against a new song / singer. This collection of rare and unreleased dubs stems from his 1971-1974 period. We can here on tracks like ‘Perry’s Jump Up’ Ska-ish up tempo chopping guitar cuts leading through to organ laden tracks like ‘Roots Rock Dub’. The sound moving to a slowed down rhythm on ‘Perry in Dub’ which would predominate his sound, when in mid 1974 he’d open his own studio at his home in the Washington Gardens district of Kingston. We hope this selection of lost treasures will add to the jigsaw that makes Mr Perry’s output now spanning over 5 decades so remarkable.
RESPECT.... JAH FLOYD.
Bristol multi-instrumentalist, producer and nature freak Will Yates offers a new record from his Memotone alias, an expansive, hypothetical revue titled How Was Your Life?
Launching from terrains recognizable to fans of Will’s extensive, restless discography, How Was Your Life? packs up his penchant for baroque druid folk, homespun electronics and weightless woodwinds and explodes them into glistening, fractal star dust.
Instigated by the purchase of an antiquated Y2K era guitar synthesizer, the record was produced over the first half of 2022, in a large part a result of in-studio improvisation and carved by equipment that offered both possibilities and parameters that Will relished and explored to the nth degree. The Roland GR33 not only provided sublime guitar sounds but also empowered the guitar to convincingly mimic fretless bass, tabla and a vast percussive array, also summoning an artillery of uniquely outre atmospheres over the course of the record. The resulting concoction sounds familiar yet subtly, unshakeably otherworldly, shaping up as perhaps the most honed, energized and beatific Memotone album to date.
Paradise Drips gently lifts off with wobbly guitar, randomized sequences and unidentifiable percussive elements situating us somewhere in an unearthly realm, before Open World zaps the serotonin receptors and gushes with ecstatic warmth, it’s quietly insistent soft disco shuffle and levitational fretless driving towards a totally blissed and very soft “drop”. Forest Zone sees Memotone deep in the green, with a loose, propulsive groove and dancing flutes stumbling into a medieval ritual in the clearing halfway through, and Glow In The Dark deftly bounces between spacey ambience and an undulating no wave vamp. Carved By The Moon is a delightfully melted classical cut, while Canteen Sandwich offers the record’s most explicitly nod to modernity in the form of a nimble drum workout with samurai synths and melodic percussion that heaves towards a genuine peak. Lonehead immediately backs right off, viscerally melancholic clarinet and bubbling fx making for the records most hefty introspective moment, before Walking Backwards simmers all the way down on an wistful arpeggio, rooting back in earthly reality with charmed rhythms and jazzy tunings. Catharsis complete, Memotone is onto the next incarnation.
Will Yates has been making music as Memotone since 2010, releasing music on labels like Black Acre, Disktopia and Accidental Meetings, also releasing music as O.G. Jigg and Half Nelson. He’s worked as a producer, session musician and live performer on a broad spectrum of projects, and recently provided source sounds that made up Batu’s “Opal” on Timedance.
How Was Your Life? was written, produced and mixed by Will Yates. It was mastered by Chris Wang. Art and design by Hugo Bernier.
Dublin based disco imprint Fatty Fatty Phonographics return with the 4th instalment of their 'Downtownsounds Classics' series, this time throwing three stone-cold classics onto one 12, all given the re-edit treatment by in house producers Pablo and Shoey.
Voiced by Leroy Burgess, with drums by hip hop legend Marley Marl and production by The Aleem Brothers, 'Release Yourself' was a huge across-the-board anthem in the clubs of NYC on its release in 1984.
The lads have superglued elements of both the vocal and dub sides together for an epic end of night take on this beloved classic.The B side features two under appreciated classics from the pen of one Billy Nichols, a man known for his work with West End Records (the Levan mixed 'Give Your Body Up To The Music') and the funky band of brothers that was BT Express.
On 'Take Me...' Nichols' hooked up with disco master Patrick Adams for an emotional, string drenched disco belter that has found favour with the likes of Dimitri from Paris, Floating Points and Hunee.While 'Dance If Off' is a wonky proto Acid-Disco trip beloved of Rahaan and Eric Duncan of Rub 'n' Tug. With copies going for over 300 euros, you can do your bank account and your dancefloor a favour here...
