Okay so, how cool is this?! Something I've been meaning to talk about for awhile now (before life decided to get in the way) was the WONDERFUL occurrence of I Grade Records doing some lovely reissues of the work of the immortal Vaughn Benjamin. From the beginning of his career up until 2015, Benjamin and company recorded under the collective name "Midnite". While "Midnite" once was -- and still largely was in some sense I suppose throughout its existence -- the name of an actual, fully-functioning band, in the recording sense, the name would, essentially, grow to mean Vaughn Benjamin. He did a variety of albums with a variety of different producers and they were all "Midnite" albums, regardless of who played on the music. In 2015, with "Homage To The Land" for Fifth Son Records ["You have seen many heroes in the villainous light. Seen many villains in the hero's light. Set things in order as in 'good ' and 'right'. Realize who really paid the price. Prosecution said 'Your Honour, this ain't right'. Forget the miscalculation, let's all rejoice' "] the name changed from Midnite to Akae Beka and it became a similar situation of.... pretty much everything Vaughn Benjamin touching coming with the new name attached.
Recently, however, in paying a wonderful tribute to an artist with whom they collaborated very frequently and perhaps more than any other label (which is saying a lot given Benjamin's prolificacy), IGR reissued several older albums under the name Akae Beka that originally released as the work of Midnite; amongst the reissues (which you should be able to see here) are truly unforgettable pieces such as "Beauty For Ashes", "Rule The Time" and others. This is somewhat subtle, I suppose, but it is AWESOME! What a wonderful thing to do! Not only is it a move sure to get the collectors amongst us SALIVATING, but it also helps to maybe snag a few new heads along the way who might've originally missed out on these massive sets.
Also, it is worth mentioning that this isn't the first time such a thing has happened as, a couple of years ago "New 1000" which first reached way back in 2006 for was re-released for Full Grown Records, made its way back courtesy of Native Fyah Productions. Again, just a wonderful and nice thing to do.
it is good to see Midnite's work on vinyl - the only issue is that most of these releases from Before Zero is that they leave out quite a substantial amounnt of songs - while it could be because of price some records feel incomplete dut to this
ReplyDeleteAlso so that Ron is back and might be releasing the early midnites work on streaming and vinyl https://rbmg.one/
The vinyls typically have less songs than the disc, but you're saying that it's even more than usual now. I saw that Ron was back at work - that Tamera EP has some NICE songs on it.
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