Errant Nights | 04

"Days Gone By (Matt Hughes Mix)" - Barry White 

"Fire" - Death Is Not The End 

"Your Love" - Skool Boys

"Until The End" - Onra 

"What You Won't Do For Love" - Roy Ayers 

"Madlib outro" - Cookin Soul

"Do It!" - DerRalle 

"Love You Bad" - Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, 9th Wonder, Kamasi Washington, Phoelix 

"Just Horizons" - LeBron

"Ain't That Peculiar" - Marvin Gaye

"Woman" - Womack & Womack

"Crystal Powder" - Split Decision Band

"In All My Wildest Dreams (TsaRes Edit)" - Joe Sample

"We Won't Have to Cry No More [Re-Work]" - Slow Steps

"Bird Flying High" - K-Def

"Midnite Affair" - Amin Payne

"Reason 90" - J-Felix

"Tell Me Remix (BDR Edit)" - Groove Theory 

"Days Gone By (Matt Hughes Mix)" - Barry White

Too Slow To Disco names no sample source for "Days Gone By," but it is "Early Years" the closing track on Barry White The Man. This platinum 1978 LP was his sixth to top the R&B album chart. Matt Hughes took the title from the spoken introduction, where White looks back over his life and concludes he would do it all the same way. His co-producer Jack Perry pointed out that White sang as a tenor and only spoke in the low register. White’s early years were spent in South Central Los Angeles where he was arrested for stealing tires, and his days in jail made him determined to never go back. Hughes, half of the Leeds duo MAM, made this edit as a 7-inch of 500, released in 2026, and shipped as a misprint with its side labels swapped.

"Fire" - Death Is Not The End

"Fire" is track four of Pure Wicked Tune: Rare Groove Blues Dances & House Parties, 1985-1992, released in 2022 on Death Is Not The End, the London archival label and NTS Radio show run by Luke Owen. Culled from DIY recordings of "soul blues" soundsystems playing London flats and warehouses between 1985 and 1992, often from paid house parties to help pay rents. Traditionally it ran on reggae, but with lovers rock fading and dancehall turning digital, sounds like Funkadelic and Touch of Class kept the toasting and sirens and swapped in rare soul and boogie, stretching from  the early hours until the next afternoon. Norman Jay recalls word of a Funkadelic sound in East London reaching him around 1982. While the label gave no track IDs, collectors named the record under this MC: Skool Boyz's "Your Love."

"Your Love" - Skool Boyz

"Your Love" opens the 1981 LP Skool Boyz and came out on 45 from Destiny Records, written by keyboardist Chauncey Matthews. It reached number 57 on the R&B chart. The band was from Chicago and on its third name. As Flavor they recorded for Ju-Par, a Detroit label distributed by Motown, then became Livin' Proof, folded, and regrouped in 1980 with singer Stan Sheppard's brother Billy on bass. Their father is the executive producer and shares the mastering credit with Bernie Grundman. Bill "Bunky" Sheppard had produced Gene Chandler and the Dukays for Vee-Jay and Constellation and ran the Bunky label behind the Esquires' "Get On Up." By Stan's account he also headed Black music at 20th Century Fox Records, Barry White's label.  It reached number 57 on the Billboard R&B chart, the first of five Skool Boyz chart entries, none higher than 47. The group moved to Columbia in 1984 and disbanded after 1985's This Is The Real Thing.

"Until The End" - Onra

Every sound in "Until The End," drums included, comes off a Thai 45. Onra built Nosthaigia from about 40 of the 400 seven-inches he bought in Bangkok through 2016, working the cheapest crates at 20 to 40 baht a record. The sleeves were paper slips printed only in Thai, so he navigated by label logos and the age of the paper. He programmed this track in 2017 on an MPC1000, then left it unfinished. He had already sworn off being "the dude who makes the Asian beats" after three volumes of Chinoiseries, the series that began with 40 unreadable records from a Vietnam holiday. He came back to the project in 2020 at what he called rock bottom: a divorce from his Thai wife, COVID isolation in the French countryside, cancelled tours, a death close to him and damaged hearing. He has said the record was an expression of that sadness and not having been able to tour Thailand.

"What You Won't Do For Love" - Roy Ayers

Bobby Caldwell made his name in Miami clubs and signed to TK Records in 1978. Label president Henry Stone heard the finished debut album, decided it had no hit, and sent him back to the studio. Caldwell returned with "What You Won't Do for Love," with horns written and recorded by Miami arranger Mike Lewis. It reached number six R&B and nine pop, and sold 50,000 copies. Fourteen months later Roy Ayers cut it for No Stranger to Love, his second Polydor album of 1979, arranging it himself and singing lead over female backing voices. The album credits him on a Deagan Vibraharp and splits the drums among Bernard Purdie, Dennis Davis and Gene Dunlap. Ayers was born in Los Angeles in 1940. By family legend he danced so hard at a Lionel Hampton concert at age five that Hampton handed him his first pair of mallets. He came up in the city's hard bop scene, found his sound with 1970's Ubiquity, scored Coffy, and by the late 1970s was making vocal-led records for R&B radio at a rate of two a year. He died in New York on March 4, 2025, at 84.

"Madlib outro" - Cookin Soul

DOOM died on October 31, 2020. The news came on New Year's Eve. Ten days later Cookin Soul, Valencia's David Garcia, posted MF DOOM Tribute: six remixes, three skits and a one-minute closer built on a clip of Madlib describing how the two of them worked. Everything is credited as produced, remixed and mastered by Cookin Soul, with art by teriyakidonut. The tribute carries one epigraph, DOOM's boast from "Accordion" about being the finest MC never to wear a chain. DOOM died October 31, 2020; the news was released December 31. Photographer Eric Coleman, who shot the Madvillainy cover, has said DOOM's opening line, about living on borrowed time, was DOOM telling the world he was sick.

"Do It!" - DerRalle

"Do It!" is featured on LoopLanguage Volume Two, released by POSTPARTUM in 2019 as 400 hand-numbered copies of 180-gram white vinyl with an obi strip. DerRalle is a Saarbrücken beatmaker, born 1984, who describes himself as a digger, producing small-run tapes, Am Strand in 2017 and Chubby&Funky with MadMoneyMorv in 2018, plus production for Saarland rappers Tetsuo and Mr.Moe. On this release he is one of a dozen producers gathered on the premise that music crosses the borders language builds. POSTPARTUM is Mario Böhm and Satu Nerbel, who started the label in 2016 because they felt most beat tapes sounded bad. 

"Love You Bad" - Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, 9th Wonder, Kamasi Washington, Phoelix

"Love You Bad" is the second cut on Dinner Party, a 23-minute album that Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington and 9th Wonder recorded at Chalice in late 2019 and released in 2020 on Martin's Sounds of Crenshaw through Empire. Martin plays alto, Washington tenor, 9th Wonder programs the drums, Marlon Williams is on guitar, and Glasper, on electric piano. Phoelix, the Chicago producer behind Noname's Room 25, sings lead and shares the writing credit as Michael E. Neil. Martin met him on tour with Herbie Hancock; he went to high school with Washington and met Glasper at jazz camp in the mid-'90s. Under the vocal runs "It's Something," a David Foster and Brenda Russell song Donna Washington cut for Going for the Glow, her 1981 Capitol album with Chuck Jackson producing, which peaked at number 53 on the R&B chart.

"Just Horizons" - LeBron

"Just Horizons" is on Yacht Disco Edits Vol. 4, the compilation Too Slow To Disco posted in 2021. LeBRON is Sam Roney, a disco and house producer from Melbourne. While the label names no sample source, it is "Temptation," which Leah Kunkel wrote and cut for I Run With Trouble, her second and last Columbia album which ws released 1980. Kunkel was Cass Elliot's younger sister, a first-call harmony singer for James Taylor and Art Garfunkel, who got her the Columbia deal. Roney's edit is one of the few places her own work got wider airplay.

"Ain't That Peculiar" - Marvin Gaye

Released in 1965, with "She's Got to Be Real" on the flip. Marv Tarplin of the Miracles came up with the riff on the road, borrowing, he said, from Bill Doggett's "Honky Tonk," and Smokey Robinson wrote the lyrics. Gaye cut the vocal at Hitsville with James Jamerson and Uriel Jones on drums, and Earl Van Dyke's piano and Andantes. It spent a week at number one on the R&B chart, reached eight pop, and was his second platinum single. Gaye had been hospitalized that March for nervous exhaustion. Gaye said that Smokey saved him during a period when he needed some records. Berry Gordy got three Top 10 pop hits from him that year.

"Woman" - Womack & Womack

"Woman" is on side B of Love Wars, the 1983 debut Cecil and Linda Womack cut at Ocean Way in Hollywood for Elektra, with Stewart Levine producing. The couple wrote it; Paulinho Da Costa plays percussion, James Gadson drums, Abraham Laboriel bass, and Bernie Grundman mastered. The synthesizer is Eddie "Gip" Noble, who co-wrote Teddy Pendergrass's "Love TKO" with Cecil. Linda is Sam Cooke's daughter and met Cecil at eight, when he was thirteen and singing with his brothers in the Valentinos, the gospel group Cooke turned secular. She wrote "A Woman's Gotta Have It" for Bobby Womack at nineteen; Cecil spent the 1970s married to Mary Wells and writing for Philadelphia International. Love Wars reached 34 on Billboard's R&B chart, and NME named it the fourth best of 1984. 

"Crystal Powder" - Split Decision Band

"Crystal Powder" sat in a Des Moines house for thirty years. Split Decision Band's whole public output was just one 45, "Watching Out" b/w "Dazed," cut at Triad Studios around 1979 for the local Network label and chased by collectors for decades. Eothen "Egon" Alapatt of Now-Again went looking for more and found Gordon Starr Flipping, the band's guitarist, singer and songwriter, who had a full unreleased album recorded between 1979 and 1984, some of it at his own house, that was meant to come out as A Thing of Your Own. Now-Again issued it as Split Decision Band on April 20, 2017, restored by Dave Cooley, with "Crystal Powder" at track five. The label's copy describes Flipping's later work with Prince's circle. The record’s primary vocalist was Cocoa Brown. In 2022 Izipho Soul cut the song to a UK 45. Flipping now runs Young Heroes, a Des Moines nonprofit teaching music to kids.

"In All My Wildest Dreams (TsaRes Edit)" - Joe Sample

"In All My Wildest Dreams" is on Rainbow Seeker, Joe Sample's 1978 album for ABC. The track was cut in Hollywood with his Crusaders bandmates Stix Hooper and Pops Popwell producing alongside him, David T. Walker on guitar, Rik Pekkonen engineering and Bernie Grundman mastering. The Houston pianist had formed the Jazz Crusaders in high school and moved the band to Los Angeles in 1960. Pekkonen and Grundman also produced "Woman," three tracks back. Fifteen years after the album, Tupac Shakur brought the track to Tony Pizarro as the model for "Dear Mama", and Pizarro built the beat from it; the single reached number nine pop in 1995 and in 2009 became the first hip-hop recording by a solo artist entered in the National Recording Registry. The edit belongs to TsaRes, the Greek DJ and producer Petros Tsares, who produced and mixed at home. 

"We Won't Have to Cry No More (Re-Work)" - Slow Steps

"We Won't Have to Cry No More" is a remix produced in 2016 on Bingo Hall Boogie, a six-artist compilation from the edit label Editorial Records. The sample underneath is "It'll All Be Over," the title track of the only album by the Supreme Jubilees, two families from Fresno who pressed it themselves in 1980 on a label named for their surnames, Sanders and Kingsby. Sessions at a country and western studio ended when the engineer, tired of requests for more bass, threw them out; they finished the record in Visalia. A Texas tour with the Mighty Clouds of Joy left them sleeping a dozen to a room, and afterward the band went home to their former jobs. One copy sold on that tour turned up in a San Antonio record shop decades later, which is how Light in the Attic came to reissue it in 2015.

"Bird Flying High" - K-Def

"Bird Flying High" is on For Def's Sake, a three-track 7-inch that Redefinition Records pressed to vinyl in 2011 and sold out within the year. The track was then added to K-Def's Night Shift that December. Kevin Hansford grew up in Passaic, where in 1978, aged eight, his father let him stay up for the Afrika Islam Show and he heard a James Brown break being cut for the first time. He came up under Marley Marl at the House of Hits, produced and scratched on the Lords of the Underground's "Chief Rocka", a number one rap single in 1993. By 2007 he had left the MPC for software and was replaying anything meant for a single rather than sampling it. His standing claim is that New Jersey has breaks no one else knows about.

"Midnite Affair" - Amin Payne

Amin Payne released George Benson Tribute in 2013, all thirteen tracks built from vinyl samples, live instruments and percussion. "Midnite Affair" samples "Midnight Love Affair," the David "Hawk" Wolinski song on Give Me the Night, the 1980 album Quincy Jones produced for Benson on his new Qwest label with Bruce Swedien at the board and Herbie Hancock, George Duke and Patti Austin in the studio. That record went platinum in two months and won three Grammys. Payne, a producer and multi-instrumentalist who spent his early childhood in Iran and started out in Auckland, told Acclaim in 2012 that his first beats came from Fruity Loops, a guitar and a karaoke mic. By the time of this tribute he was working on an MPC1000 in Melbourne, where he co-founded the Condensed Milk collective and names J Dilla as his role model for sampling without limits.

"Reason 90" - J-Felix

"Reason 90 [The Funky Individual]" is on 101 Reasons, the debut album J-Felix released through Brighton's Tru Thoughts in 2015, one of three numbered reasons on a fifteen-track record. J-Felix is Joe F Newman, Bristol-born, who grew up on drum and bass, hip-hop and dub, traced the samples back to their funk and soul sources, and settled on P-funk and boogie as his own style. He came to the label as Alice Russell's touring guitarist and was signed on a handful of demos. He plays drums, guitar, bass, keys and synths himself and keeps samples out of his own records, building them from layered performances instead. Tru Thoughts began in 1999 out of two club nights, released Bonobo and Quantic's first albums, and took Gilles Peterson's Label of the Year in 2005. Newman's live band has since opened for George Clinton and, closing a loop in this mix, Roy Ayers.

"Tell Me (BDR Edit)" - Groove Theory

A classic of mid-nineties Neo-Soul and R&B, "Tell Me" was released as a single June 23, 1995 on Epic, four months ahead of Groove Theory, the duo's only album. The  BDR edit extends the track, with bass and the drum programming highlighted. The song went to number five on the pop chart and three R&B. It began as a remake: Bryce Wilson had produced it two years earlier for a group called Rhythm-N-Bass, then rebuilt it around a Mary Jane Girls interpolation that put Rick James on the writing credit. Amel Larrieux was a receptionist at Rondor Music when a publisher handed her one of Wilson's tracks and asked whether she wanted to write to it; she wrote, sang and arranged everything after that. Wilson, formerly of Mantronix, wanted a producer's vehicle and got one. Larrieux left in 1999. Wilson's second Groove Theory album was shelved by Columbia, and Jay-Z, having heard it, shopped its songs to Beyoncé.

Listen to: Errant Nights | 01