Earthtone mix series

[JussiK]

I've been mamboing to the volume 3 of Fruitmeat label "Earthtone mix series : Bobbito aka Dj Cucumberslice: Para Ramon", an awesome latin/salsa house/groove/disco mix cd. Dj cucumberslice does all sorts of latinesque beats including Joe Clausell/Kerri Chandler's "Escraves de Jo" and La gente urbana's "Osanyin", and it's all great. Check this series out.

Another quite different new bag that I got is Irma label's "Mo'Plein 4000 - Glamorous boogie grooves for a fashion lifestyle". The packaging is stylish and the music wonderful though it's hard to say exactly what it is all about. Some of it is clearly disco like a couple of 1978 tracks by Orchestra King Zerand whose titles "Night Song" and "Love On love" have a kind of Silvetti-on-acid feel to them. Paolo Ormi's "Cocco Secco" is disco-cum-shakebeat with jazzy breaks and female voices.Paolo also does two versions of "No No No", with throaty moans. That and some others are swinging lounge cha-cha so one gets a good party vibe going with this comp and the earthtone cd.

I also wondered about an album by someone called JJ Mack. Judging by the sleeve the record would seem to be country rock from hell as it showed a screaming rhinestone cowboy type holding an electric guitar, yet the label was Salsoul. The thing did turn out to be disco and did include a very good track called "You can make it dancing", quite a surprise considering the ugly packaging. No electric guitars but a nice harmonica. What were they thinking at Salsoul, some sort of country rock disco crossover for confused rednecks?

[Forrrce]

The oddest LP I've seen on Salsoul was an LP of '50s Nina Simone material. That was surpassed sometime later by the sighting of a Lena Zavaroni LP on Stax!

[Giovanni]

AS a Salsoulogist, I confirm the JJ Mack and the Nina Simone albums are really odd. They have the Salsoul disco codes anyway and not the Latin codes. Two other very strange Salsoul disco-coded albums are:
Tierra (SA 8541), disco code but classical latin Tierra material
The Mighty Sparrow (SZS 5510), caribbean-reggae-discoish stuff