Oddio Overplay is Odd Audio. That isn’t their logo, as far as I know, but it could be. Perhaps it should be Odd and Wonderful Audio. I was tipped to this website by a blog I like to read: boing boing. Boing’s subtitle or logo is “A Directory of Wonderful Things”. For instance, today Boing Boing has a feature on a Project Gutenberg book- this one about Shadow Puppets.
Oddio Overplay has collections of music from all over the world, and all of it well off the beaten bath. Some of it is streamed, quite a lot is available as mp3 downloads.
As a sample of what is available, I spent part of my Friday workday listening to vintage Deparment Store Music. Sweet! Happy and Relaxing! Good For Buying!
I have also started to explore the compilations Oddio offers. I have found the Kick The Gong Around: Drug Culture In Jazz 1932 – 1945 compilation to be particularly good. The Cab Calloway track “Man from Harlem” is an early favorite. Besides the theme, the music itself is also quite good. I also found in particular some of the terminology interesting: frails as slang for women, vipers as lady drug users, gauge and jive as slang for drugs.
Another compilation with interesting tracks on it is the Pop Hits collection. I really like Senor Coconut’s cover of the Kraftwerk “Showroom Dummies” song. The cover is an over the top rendition, in Richard Cheese fashion, except the style is South American/Latin influenced instead of lounge music. Hell, it could be RC, for all I know. Other tracks are equally eclectic, though I didn’t enjoy all of them quite as much. At any rate, these prolly won’t be heard on your local radio station, or at least not mine.
As an aside, I have so far found Little Rock radio stations to be so bad it is cliche. If I sat down and tried to come up with examples of what bad radio would be like, I would find my work has already been conceived and implemented here in Little Rock. Thank goodess for radioio.
Greg and I stumbled across a great web site several years ago that was full of talk about the Jazz/drug scene around that time frame and the lingo was great. Greg, you don’t have any idea where that was, do you? I bet if we try hard enough, we could find it again. It was educational in terms of the jazz musicians of the time too.