There are, of course, a great many blogs focusing on vintage music from the non-Western world. Between these blogs and the never-ending reissues of every type of music under the sun, it seems like there can’t possibly be anything new to discover. What little remains un-hoarded will likely remain out of the grasp of the average fan as soon as some shyster on an online auction site figures out that he can sell his uncle’s dusty old souvenirs from a 1970s safari trip as “devastating afro funk” and immediately command a hundred times what they were originally purchased for.

Sadly, the above is not a wholly inaccurate description of how things work in the record collecting world. I’ve been both a seller and a buyer for years now, and let me tell you, it can get ugly out there. And yet there is another side to this predatory behavior. For every time I find myself muttering hexes upon a fellow collector under my breath as I receive another outbid notice for that darn Mahmoud Ahmed record, there are at least as many times when I dig through that last pile in the dollar bin at the local record store, or the Salvation Army, or a garage sale, and come up with something I would have never expected or thought to be on the lookout for: An LP with an intriguing cover, a 7” with a center label written in a script I can’t read, or perhaps a cassette tape or 78 that looks like it came to this country in an old suitcase and hasn’t been so much as looked at in decades. As any hopeless record addict will tell you, these are the moments that make all the frustration and the teasing from secretly concerned family members worth it.

This blog does not really have any sort of agenda or focus beyond sharing some of my favorite finds. I figure other blogs cover the development of non-Western rock and pop music or early international music on 78s so well that I shouldn’t dare purposely set up a blog with such specific themes in mind. If anything, I’ve started this blog with the idea of receiving feedback and hopefully information on records and artists that I’ve long loved but been mystified by due to the lack of information about them. There is a special kind of pain when you put an artist or record title into Google and return only references to the auction that you won or lost the record in. All of this music must come from somewhere, and I figure every singer/musician/producer/label mogul has a son, daughter, nephew, niece, or grandchild who would love to have their family member’s contribution to music recognized. Also, even artists who are relatively well-known in a particular part of the world may be completely unknown to outsiders, so it is my hope that this blog will bridge gaps in cultural as well as musical knowledge.