VA - Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974-1984

Mandatory listening for anyone with a soft spot for the rhythm-box workouts of Sly Stone, Timmy Thomas and Shuggie Otis, Personal Space is a private-press soul/funk excavation of the highest order, and a solid front-to-back listen that has graced our store's P.A. on many a sunny afternoon so far.

"At the spine of this astounding collection is the ostensibly unburdening effect of affordable studio technology—synthesizers, drum machines, high-quality recording—as manifested in private soul music from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. As the liner notes lament, so little of this deeply affecting and forward-looking music ever saw release, and so little of what they did ever found any kind of audience. In the canopic jars of these recordings, however, they are preserved and sealed—as they once were in small studios, home studios, basement studios, bedroom studios—and their misshapen forms are allowed to move into the future by themselves, of themselves." - Soul Sides