Egon and the team are hosting a regular series of pop up events throughout 2025 and 2026 at the Now-Again Space in Los Angeles. Our next event Is the return of Noel and Dave and their always-epic Magic Isle record shops.
Magic Isle
Pop Up Record Shop At Now-Again
Sept. 20th & 21st
Noon-6
5638 York Blvd, Los Angeles
1000’s of vintage LPs/45s from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, beyond. MORE
The lost album by Rodney Stepp’s Rapture ensemble. Unreleased Sweet Soul and Disco Funk from mid-70s Indianapolis, featuring members of Amnesty, Midnight Star, and The Spinners.
Rapture’s story told in great detail in liner notes written by Naptown historian Kyle Long.
BUY THE LP NOW AT BANDCAMP» Rapture – Rapture
A photo in Rodney Stepp’s scrapbook sums this period in his life in music. It’s 1974, The Spinners were headliners at the “Zaire 74” music festival, a sideshow to Muhammad Ali’s fabled “Rumble in the Jungle” fight with George Foreman. Among the faded snapshots, there’s a picture of Stepp backstage posing arm in arm with Ali; another image shows The Greatest seated at Stepp’s Fender Rhodes alongside vocalist Etta James.
It was all a dream for this Naptown wunderkind, who had previously recorded for Herb Miller’s LAMP Records as the Diplomatics and had issued the sweet soul killer “Young Girl” as Jazzie Cazzie and the Eight Sounds on a rare Knaptown 45. (These recordings have been documented on the Now-Again LAMP anthology and our Loving On The Flipside compilation.) But as exciting as his rise out of those local status was, as exciting as it was to headline festivals and arenas and appear on late night talk shows, Stepp grew restless with the mechanical routine of being a sideman. MORE
Unreleased disco and boogie from Dayton, Ohio’s Record Player: their full album, recorded in the late ‘70s, and unreleased until now. Contains oversized booklet detailing the Record Player’s story and the history of the Ohio music scenes that allowed for their rise.
BUY THE LP NOW AT BANDCAMP» Record Player – Free Your Mind
In 1979, Record Player privately pressed and issued a solitary 45 on their Gem City Records imprint in Dayton, Ohio. Though they had recorded a host of other songs, and were on the verge of signing to a major label, their trajectory stalled and the band splintered by the early 1980s. In the early 2000s, Record Player principle Charles Jackson surfaced with their unreleased songs. To date, only two Record Player songs have been reissued, as part of Now-Again’s long-running Soul Cal series. Now, the entirety of their oeuvre is presented here as Free Your Mind, and their story detailed in words by Bret Sjerven in the oversized booklet contained within. MORE
Now-Again Records presents – Une Voix M’Appelle: The Modern Lebanese Sounds of the Voix De L’Orient Label. Vol. 1. 1967 – 1984
BUY THE LP NOW AT BANDCAMP» Une Voix M’Appelle
Arabic Pop, Oriental Funk, Jazz Fusion and Experimental Synth: the birth of the modern Lebanese musical adventure, presented as a survey spanning the high points of two decades of releases on the groundbreaking Voix De L’Orient label.
Those profiled include Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid, maverick producer/arranger/composer Elias Rahbani, mysterious talents like Nicolas Dick and Robert Maalouf and the father of the label’s founder, Abdallah Chahine, a pianist of immense talent. MORE
Streaming Everywhere Now: The Complete Lennan Records Discography
Over twenty years ago, when we went to reissue Lil’ Lavair and the Fabulous Jade’s funk masterpiece “Cold Heat,” we had one source for the audio: a CD-R that the Scottish collector and DJ Keb Darge had given Egon. At the time, Egon had only heard the group’s A-side, “I’ll Be So Happy,” once, at Keb’s Deep Funk night in London, where he played the Northen Soul classic as a favor to our erstwhile founder. He’d owned the record for years, but never really rated the track. And it was in that Deep Funk era in which Lil’ Lavair’s fortunes changed, and with them, those of Leonard Wojtowicz and his small Southern California concern, Lennan Records. MORE