Dap­tone Records got busted into recently and a ton of their equip­ment was stolen. Dap­tone is the label of Sharon Jones + The Dap-Kings and Budos Band, among oth­ers, a label keep­ing the old sound still thriv­ing on ana­log record­ing. The Dap-Kings have played with/for Amy Wine­house and Kanye West. This is a real shame and they are ask­ing for peo­ple to keep an eye out for their equip­ment show­ing up for sale or trade. Hope­fully some­one catches the bas­tards that did this.

Check out this amaz­ing look at the Dap­tone stu­dio from MTV’s visit there to under­stand the value of what has been taken from them and from the music com­mu­nity as a whole.

“Friends and associates,

As you may have heard through the grapevine by now, Dap­tone was bro­ken into last night. Unfor­tu­nately, there was a lot of equip­ment (mics, pre-amps, mon­i­tors, turnta­bles, gui­tars, amps, com­put­ers, etc.) stolen and dam­aged. It is going to take us a while to go through every­thing and take full stock of what was stolen, and we are not sup­posed to touch any­thing until the cops come back to col­lect fin­ger­prints so we can only guess what’s miss­ing from some mic draw­ers and cab­i­nets.
And, no, we did not have insur­ance. We had been shop­ping around with dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies ear­lier this month but had not signed a check, so noth­ing was insured. We are work­ing on replac­ing the gate in front, installing an alarm sys­tem, and get­ting insur­ance, but it is President’s day so it’s not going as quickly as we would have liked.
Nydia’s com­puter was stolen (which wasn’t backed up) and the modems/ phone sys­tem was ripped out, so we’ll be rel­a­tively out of com­mis­sion for a few days.

I would like to ask for everyone’s help first in keep­ing an eye out for all of our stuff show­ing up on ebay/craigslist/local music shops, and sec­ondly (and more real­is­ti­cally) keep­ing an eye out for good deals on head­phones, mics, pre-amps, etc. I could really use a heads up on any kind of stu­dio pack­age for sale or stu­dio equip­ment to be pos­si­bly bought or bor­rowed as soon as pos­si­ble. We have a ses­sion sched­uled for Fri­day to lay down some music for (I know this sounds
sur­real) Rod Stew­art, and I’m going to have to get the stu­dio run­ning by then. I know I’m going to need to find head­phones, cables, mics, and pre-amps by then. I’m not sure what else yet.

Upon first glance we are def­i­nitely miss­ing:
Fender Super Gui­tar Amp in case
Fender Deluxe Gui­tar Amp
A whole bunch of head­phones and wires
Nydia’s HP lap­top com­puter
One Desk­top Mac­In­tosh Com­puter
One Pur­ple Audio API style lunch­box with
four Pur­ple Audio Biz mic pre-amps
2 Yamaha NS10 mon­i­tors
Vin­tage Har­mony Rocket Gui­tar
One steel string acoustic gui­tar
Mar­tin Tenor sax in a gig bag
Tech­nics 1200 turntable
Ion USB turntable
Teac Receiver/stereo amp
Sony dual deck CD burner/player
All of our modem/phone sys­tem stuff was ripped out and taken.
A whole bunch of con­den­sor and dynamic micro­phones (I still need to
fig­ure out exactly what’s miss­ing)
The power sup­ply for my Tri­dent con­sole was tossed and the board was
moved (prob­a­bly not gen­tly) so the sta­tus of that is still ques­tion­able.
A bald­win organ was tossed and is prob­a­bly bro­ken.
Lacie Exter­nal hard drive

Over the next few days, as we sort out the rub­ble, we are going to
fig­ure out what else we lost.

We are putting in a roll down front gate, alarm sys­tem, and finally
get­ting our insur­ance hap­pen­ing this week. We are also going to hire
a secu­rity guard to watch the house for tonight as the cops and alarm
guy seemed pretty con­fi­dent that they will be back with a truck now
that they’ve seen what’s in here.

Thanks for keep­ing eyes open for us. AND PLEASE PASS THIS MESSAGE
ALONG TO ANYONE YOU THINK MIGHT BE ABLE TO HELP US.

Thank­fully, we all still have our health, ambi­tion, tape machines, and
sense of humor in tact. You can slow us down, but you can’t stop
us. Sleep well know­ing we here at Dap­tone will con­tinue to…

Keep putting Soul up,

Gabriel Roth

P.S. On a lighter note, it seems like the bur­glars did drop a few
items in order to lift Alex’s old safe out of here, which was VERY
heavy, VERY unwieldy, and also VERY EMPTY!”

Con­tact Dap­tone.

So WORD got hacked a month or so ago. Pretty annoy­ing crap. Took me a few days and some amaz­ing help from my host to sort it out. I haven’t got all the design back in place… mostly because I’ve been decid­ing what to do now. My posts have been very infre­quent as of late. 2008 was a bit weird. There were some good releases, but wasn’t get­ting the sense often of “must post on this now!” that I pre­vi­ously would get. How­ever, towards the end of the year there were some great things out there. I was get­ting ready to write those when WORD went down. I’m going to try to get those writ­ten up soon and prob­a­bly work on a new design for the site. Hope­fully I’ll be back soon but here are some mixes and what­not I’ve been lis­ten­ing to lately:

DJ Snatchatec — Indigo (mp3) | Track­list

V/A — Twist­ing The Frame (Release Page)

Glitch Mob — The Crush Mode (mp3)

Frank — Ghana Nige­ria Con­nec­tion (mp3)

DJ Mekalek — Mek’s Party Mix (mp3)

–EDIT FOR AWESOME–
2tall — The Space Race (mp3) | Track­list