by SHANE SINNOTT

Someone recently passed on to me one of the Mississippi Records Tape Series, and I’ve been having a grand old time with them. The Mississippi Records label revolves around a store in Portland and was started a few years ago by two guys named Alex Yusimov and Eric Isaacson. After a few releases, they enlisted the help of Montrealer Warren Hill (of the finding-that-Velvet-Underground-acetate-in-a-record-bin fame), and started reissuing a lot of old, forgotten and (apologies for the term) “outsider” music. Fun, right? Well, even more fun is when Issacson started releasing the Tape Series, which is currently up to 28 volumes—fantastic cassette-only mixtapes, usually genre-focused. They’re called things like Afraid of the Dark: “Garage” Rock N’ Roll 1965–1981 and Like I’m Dying: Ska, Rocksteady & Dub. The great part is that you can download a ton of them on the Root Strata blog (rootstrata.com). Here’s two to get you started, the aforementioned Afraid of the Dark (tinyurl.com/mp9mow) and Classical Music for & by the People (tinyurl.com/l6lgzk).

Beck, meanwhile, has recently started an awesome-sounding project—the Record Club. The idea is that a bunch of musicians will get together and pick an album to cover entirely, and then release one track a week. A note from the Web site reads, “For this first edition, after lengthy deliberation and coming close to covering Digital Underground’s Sex Packets, all present voted in favour of the ‘other’ Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico. Participants included this time around are Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker, Brian Lebarton, Bram Inscore, Yo, Giovanni Ribisi, Chris Holmes and from Iceland, special guest Thorunn Magnusdottir, and myself.” The first available track is “Sunday Morning” at beck.com, and it sounds great, especially considering that nothing is rehearsed or arranged ahead of time.

Finally, the best blog I’ve come across in a while is 60s Garage (garage60s.blogspot.com), run by a guy with encyclopedic knowledge of the scene, and chock full of lesser-known gems from the era. Check out the 1966 promo film for the Pretty Things near the top.