Forge your own chains (2LP)

“Heavy Psychedelic Ballads and Dirges, 1968-1974”: With the same detailed, no-stone-unturned approachused for Deep Funk (The Funky 16 Corners, Cold Heat),Now-Again Records and its owner, Stones Throw Records producer Egon tacklesglobal psychedelia withForge Your Own Chains.

Those of us birthed into record collecting by the Hip Hop midwife revered Jimi Hendrix as well as James Brown. We searched for albums by Mulatu Astatke and Power of Zeus with the same fervor,Egon writes in his introduction to the comp.

Forge Your Own Chainsshowcases music from all corners of the world: Colombia, Nigeria, Sweden, South Korea, Thailand and Iran. The focus in keeping with Now-Agains tradition is on melody,driving rhythms and accessibility. Not one song is included on this compilation because it is from a ‘rare’ album.

Certainly, many of these songs do spring from albums that exchange hands for many thousands of dollars and many of these songs have never seenreissue.

But these songs are all beautiful in their own right and work to form a coherent album. Psychedelic records, long the mainstay of older, grizzled collectors, are giving up new ghostsin the hands of Egon and those of his generation.
And, with comps likeForge Your Own Chains, they are inspiring new investigations into our not so distant (and still very much alive) musical past. American gospel, paranoic soul, loner folk, East-Nigerian fuzz, Thai rock, Iranian ballads, and more. Deluxe gatefold jacket contains extensive and detailed liner notes, rare photos, and other ephemera.