Behold Finders Keepers, a British record label, 40 years in the making, introducing fans of psychedelic, jazz, folk, funk, avant-garde and whacked-out movie musak to a lost world of undiscovered vinyl artifacts from the annals of alternative pop history. Catering to record collectors and DJ-producers alike with a huge emphasis on sample friendly soundscapes, rocksteady back-beats and primitive electronic experimentalism. Discerning purveyors of the bizarre and abnormal should expect the Japanese choreography records, space-age Turkish protest songs, Czechoslovakian vampire soundtracks, Welsh rare-beats, bubblegum folk, drugsploitation operatics, banned British crime thrillers and celebrity Gallic Martini adverts... presented on CD, 7" and traditional black plastic discs in authentic packaging...
http://www.finderskeepersrecords.com
ANDY VOTEL - NICHE MARKET 8 - OCCITAN JAZZ
For the latest episode of Niche Market Andy Votel has donned his shopkeepers apron and chose to cast his eyeglass over a maligned strain of French pop culture that has hidden-in-plain-sight under the noses of European crate-diggers and record dealers for far too long. Approximately 400 miles from the continents fertile home of free-jazz and Yé-yé ,namely Paris, exists a different region with its face to Balearic vistas and a progressive music scene that is almost as intoxicating and mystifying as the Languedoc wine for which the area is globally renowned. With a blend of political radicalism, French savoir faire, spiritual jazz and strong Mediterranean and South American undertones, The Occitan Jazz scene was established as a means to rehabilitate and protect the endangered provincial dialect of Occitan while galvanising a vibrant and sprawling community of lesser-celebrated musicians, poets and singers from areas like Sète, Carcassonne and other sun-kissed villages stretched around and in-between Toulouse and Toulon, via studios and engineers from Marseille and Nice. With tenuous links to the likes of JP Massiera, Bernard Lubat, Steve Hillage and Leo Ferrer this lesser furrowed field of Folk Funk, Balearic Bossa and and French Spiritual jazz will lead you to a cast of unknown characters, with fervent independent creativity and mononymous monikers that will hopefully, one day, become firm fixtures in your record collections. Not unlike the first ever Niche Market that Andy prepared at the request of Gilles Peterson, which focussed on Breton Jazz, this exploration of another lesser known French underground will neatly bookend the series as Worldwide.Fm goes into its own mystical hibernation and the sign on Votel’s bespoke brocante reads "closed until further notice".