Sound Foundation – Soul Foundation
Sound Foundation – Bruised
Sound Foundation – Aquarius
This is a record I really just lucked upon. Last week while I was prepping for my guest stint at Funky Sole, I was checking out some tunes on youtube as I was considering a trip to some local record stores. By sheer luck I came across a post that featured “Soul Foundation” from this group. Instantly smitten with the raw drums, handclaps and fuzzy guitars (the trifecta of perfect ingredients for a perfect song in my book, how could I resist!) I set about trying to find a copy. Local stores didn’t turn anything up, so I turned to the internet as a last ditch effort. Given the break heavy nature of this track, I wasn’t surprised that copies were running in the $50-$65+ range. After a fair amount of searching though I came across a listing for the record for $11 (including priority shipping!) at a Chicago area record store Reckless Records. Condition was listed as “good,” (which if you don’t know means “crap” in vinyl parlance) but given the price and the possibility of the record arriving in time for Funky Sole, I figured it was worth the shot.
My luck continued as the LP arrived late on Saturday just hours before my guest set. Better still the condition of the LP itself was actually quite excellent, the cover was a little beat up but the album itself was beautiful, it didn’t even have much surface noise. I was also surprised with how deep the LP turned out to be, “Soul Foundation” is a bonafide monster of an instrumental cut, but the album was filled with a number of other solid numbers. From the sound of things, Sound Foundation listened to quite a bit of Sly & the Family Stone, and that’s clearly the vibe and audience they were going for on this LP, especially on the lead track “Morning Dew” which has a couple of bits that sound just like Sly’s “Higher.”
The two biggest surprises on this record connected to songs that have been covered quite a bit during this same period of time. Their version of “Get Out My Life Woman,” a song that is almost always simply breaktastic, is probably the weakest song on the album without a single discernable break, while their version of “Aquarius” from Hair, a cover that is almost always terribly boring, has a fabulous break and nice (though still heavily hippie-fied) funky style throughout. I’m also fond of their original track “Bruised” that leads off the second side with it’s super sweet breakdown behind the singer’s “think about it now” lyrics in the waning moments.
All in all, my first real buy of 2011 (and first Dig Deep post of the year) might turn out to be one of my favorite finds of the entire year. Big thanks once again to the crew at Reckless Records for sending this out to me quick fast (I will definitely stop by on my next trip to Chi-town!) and to the crowd at Funky Sole for making the whole affair absolutely worth every single penny and then some.
Cheers,
Michael
…p.s. here’s an example of what a proper DJ can do with materials such as these: