Holy shit, this blog turned 20 years old this month!

I don’t even know where to begin. My life has changed so much since I first launched this site in 2006. Let’s not even mention how much our nightmare world has changed over that same period of time (I want to keep this positive).

Despite the world being a hellscape, I think that my life has gotten considerably better in the two decades since I first hit “publish” on my very first blog post. I don’t need to go over the litany of ways that my life has changed during that time, do I? I went back to college, got a second (useless) degree, bought a house in Pittsburgh, sold said house in Pittsburgh, moved across the world to Japan, got a boyfriend (who I’m still with, by the way), came out of the closet, and so on and so forth.

I also like to think that I’ve become a considerably better person since starting this site. A lot of my old posts are fucking cringe to me now. I was a borderline edgelord shithead when I started this site in my mid-20s. When I look at right-wing shitheads outline, reactionary sexist gamers, and other assorted pieces of shit across the wastelands of the web, I often think “there but for the grace of several very influential friends go I.” Thanks to commenters back in the day who called me out for my bullshit, you made me a better person.

As I look back on this thing, it’s really clear to me that this blog has three, very distinct eras. First, the early years, when I was posting like crazy, multiple times a week, often focusing on then out-of-print and hard-to-find 80s music. The writing is sloppy, with a lot of ranting and raving about random bullshit. Big time morning DJ vibes. Not a fan.

Then there’s the middle-era, covering the tail-end of my time in the states up to when I first moved to Japan. While a lot of people appreciate and love the early years of my blog, it’s this mid-period that I’m most proud of. I think my writing got better and I started covering a more diverse selection of music around that time. It’s also about the time when everyone stopped going to websites and my readership fell off a cliff, but whatever.

Finally, there’s the current era of Lost Turntable, the “I barely have time to write about anything” era, also known as the “one post a year, usually in December, hurriedly written so I can keep the streak of writing something at least once a year” era.  Although I did manage four posts last year!

Yeah, I’m not too fond of this era either. As I’ve said before, it’s just hard to find the time to write these days, between my job, social life, having a boyfriend, and my not-so-great health. Also, it’s harder than ever to find interesting music to share that’s legitimately out-of-print that won’t get my ass sued. My YouTube copyright nightmare from a few years back really scared me away from sharing a lot of major releases by mainstream artists, if you hadn’t already noticed.

I’ve said in recent years that I really do want to get in the habit of writing more. And I still mean that. And I really think that this will be the year that I finally get to…once I finally ditch the idea of this being solely an MP3 blog.

Hey, it had a good run, but it’s just stifling at this point. I want to write more about movies, new music, my life, living in Tokyo, all kinds of stuff. I’ll still share out-of-print music when I can, but it’s going to have to be incredibly rare or obscure at this point, like what I have for you today.

One thing I can say, when I do get back to writing here more often, I can promise you that it will be 100% AI free content, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say about that other vinyl ripping MP3 blog that still exists (and asks for money). I can promise you that I will never use AI for literally anything that appears on this website. The writing will always be 100% human written, warts and all. And if I ever get around to actually updating the tech behind this site, and the graphics along with it, they’ll all be human creations too (although probably not mine, my graphic editing and website creation abilities are firmly stuck in 2006, I’ll pay someone else to do it).

Anyway, wanna download some weird-as-shit MP3s? Sure you do!

I’ve never done a multi-album post before. Let’s cover these in chronological order.

250 Discojngles (right-click to download)

The boyfriend and I don’t do much YouTube, but one of our favorite channels on is Reely Interesting, which is kind of like the video version of this blog – sharing rare and hard-to-find media. Sometimes they share things like rare HD versions of music videos and live concerts, which can be amazing. Check out their rip of Peter Gabriel’s Kiss The Frog video, you’ve never seen mid-90s CGI look so good.

Recently, they shared a really curious find, an HD tape from 1994 of what was either b-roll or test footage recorded for reasons unknown. I suspect it was recorded by Sony to test out their then-new HD cameras.

Stuff like this fascinates the hell out of me. It was something done by an industry professional, most likely to show other industry professionals. But it somehow sneaked out, and we can watch now on YouTube, devoid of any of its original context. Sure, most of it is just Japanese men working in a TV studio, but it has an aura of mystery around it, since any information about where it came from or why it was recorded has been lost.

That’s kind of how I feel about the records I’m sharing tonight. These are all collections of pre-recorded radio jingles, which were made for radio stations to use. They weren’t supposed to end up in stores. And if you told someone who worked on these records that, 40+ years later, they’d be on the internet for anyone to hear they’d be like “what the fuck is the internet and who the hell are you?”

First up, 250 Discojingels.

According to Discogs (which is also where I took the art, as I can’t find my copy of this record right now), this was released in 1977 by Jumbo Records & Tapes. This was a label that was dedicated to releasing material for offshore pirate radio stations. They were one of many labels that did this, it was a whole thing, and there’s even a website dedicated to it if you want to learn even more about it. I think some of these other records might also be for pirate radio stations.

250 Discojingles was one of several jingle collections that Jumbo Records & Tapes put out, and it’s by far the most famous. Content from this collection was later used in a break and beats compilation, which was then sampled for 2 Unlimited’s all-time house classic “Get Ready for This,” which is fucking crazy. To be honest, I can’t find it on the record itself. It’s so short and goes by so fast. Someone made a YouTube video with some clips from this record and you can find it there at about the one minute and 18 second mark. If you can find it on my MP3 rip, please tell me!

The jingles on this are VERY 1970s. Most are just five second (or less) snippets of various ways to say “more music!” or “number one!” but there are also odd little musical interludes, sound effects, and even some absolutely horrible jokes. According to whosampled.com, in addition to 2 Unlimited, this record has been sampled six other artists, including Freddie Goddamn Mercury (on a remix) but I bet there are even more records out there that have cribbed from this one, it has a lot of good bits.

Jingels From USA (right-click to download)

This one is a bit more obscure. Again, using Discogs as a source (and again for the art, because I can’t find this record in my collection at the moment, either), I know that this was first released in 1981 by a Belgium label called USA Import Music, it was then re-released several times throughout the decade by other labels, all of which were based in Europe. So I have no idea why it’s called “Jingels from USA” as it’s clearly from the EU (as if the “jingels” spelling wasn’t big enough a tip-off. This is volume one, by the way, this was part of a series. I might pick up the other ones and share them here at some point.

I can’t imagine that any radio station in the states ever used these “jingels.” While this was released in the 80s, most of it has an amazing mid-70s feel to it, and all the voices are incredibly European, with some even speaking very obviously broken, bad, English with a thick accent that I cannot identify (maybe Dutch)? It also sounds really disco at times. Disco was on its last legs in the states by 1981, but it never died in Europe, it just gradually morphed into house music and a billion other sub-genres. There is some 80s-esque stuff here too though, robot voices, random synths, things like that

I like this one more than 250 Discojingles, just because it’s so fucking weird. Was this intended for offshore radio too? If so, where? No one in the UK or US would be fooled into thinking these were from native English speakers. Maybe pirate radio stations in the Netherlands grabbed onto this one. Who knows? Do you know? Tell me if you know! I want to know!

Oh, and while this technically has no credited artist, I left the artist as Charles Fonderson because he was credited as “concept by” in the liner notes. Finally, while no house classics seemed to have sampled this one, the cover art was by Patrick Gypen, who did design the original cover art for Technotronic’s “Pump Up The Jam,” so there’s that.

International Jingles For TV Radios and Dee Jays (right-click to download)

Of these three, this is my favorite. Firstly, that cover. That cover is amazing. An American astronaut man is here to deliver you specially made jingles!

It also sounds most like the radio that I grew up with. This came out in 1986, and while I’m sure some of these are recycled from older jingle compilations, it definitely has a stronger “80s vibe” than Jingels from the USA, and lacks any of the 70s cheese that 250 Discojingles is full of. The “Top 40” jingle, for example (the 10th track on side one) 100% sounds like something that the shit Top 40 station in Toledo, Ohio would have played when I was a kid.

I also like it because it’s kind of a hot mess. While 250 Discojingles and Jingels From USA throw you jingles at a non-stop, almost breakneck pace, this one gives you breaks between each jingle and even goes through the hassle of numbering all of them. But the numbering is wrong sometimes? And sometimes the man announcing the numbers stutters and stops, but they just decided “fuck it” and left those verbal blunders on the disc. Brilliant.

Also, some of these are just comically horrible. I’m sorry, Yannick Chevalier, Discogs tells me that you recorded a lot these compilations, but maybe you should have focused on quality over quality. “The Best Music In the City (Long Cut), which is the 15th jingle on side A, goes like this.

“The best music in the city! We got the B, we got the E, we got the S and the T!”

What the fuck does that even mean!? That’s not how acronyms or abbreviations work, Yannick. C’mon man.

I hope you all enjoy these weird audio oddities. I’ll probably be sharing more stuff like this in the future, but don’t worry, I still have some musical posts up my sleeve as well, in addition to the other plans I have in store for this place.

For the few of you who have stuck with me for these two decades, thanks! I’m not promising 20 more years of Lost Turntable, but I’ll do my best to keep this place going as long as my fingers can still type.

Halley’s Comet – The Complete Adventure (Click to download the album)

In 1986, Halley’s Comet made its regularly scheduled flight around the sun. I was six years old at the time and way into anything outer space, so I was pretty stoked. However, I, like most people on the planet Earth, could not see the comet that year. Read the wiki if you’re curious why. Long story short: conditions were shit for seeing Halley’s Comet in 1986. So a lot of people’s “once in a lifetime” chance to see the famous interstellar object shrank to “never in a lifetime.” Unless you were Emperor Hirohito. He apparently lived long enough to see it twice.

The closest I got to seeing the comet was watching Arnold and family on Diff’rent Strokes see it.

Anyways, I do remember the hype. The hype was real. It was all over the news, and we talked about it in school. So the fact that a record like this exists does not surprise me in the least. Halley’s Comet: The Complete Adventure is a 1985 Canadian release that was no doubt quickly cobbled together to cash-in on comet hype.

Side one of the record features some pretty threadbare narration about the comet, the history of its sightings on earth, and some overly flowery and optimistic ideas about what our planet might be like when the comet makes its next flyby in 2061, all while some wonderfully 80s synth music plays in the background

Side two of the record features the same music as the first side, but with the narration removed, so you can rock out with your comet out to the latest hi-tech electronic bleeps and blops that mid-range 80s keyboards had to offer. Some would probably write this music off as cheesy or corny, but I enjoy it quite a bit. It’s one part Yanni, one part Tomita, and one part Tangerine Dream (albeit nowhere near as good as any of them, obviously). This could easily be slowed down and distorted into vaporwave, I’m sure.

The narration on side one was by Don Francks, who was a Canadian actor, musician and voice actor. Most notably for anyone around my age, he was the voice of Boba Fett on the Star Wars Droids cartoon (and possibly on the Star Wars Holiday Special). He was also Sabertooth on X-Men. His daughter, Cree Summer, continued in his footsteps and has become an incredibly successful voice actress. She’s Elmyra on Tiny Toons, and also voiced Penny on Inspector Gadget.

His narration here is fine, as I said before, there’s not much to it. It reads like a NASA brochure about the comet, hitting all the basic points as quickly and plainly as possible.

I find the music a lot more interesting. It was composed and performed by Don Horsburgh. He has no credits to his name on Discogs, but he works as a stage music director and composer in Canada, mostly Alberta. According to this page, he’s worked on some pretty big shows too, including Canadian productions of Billy Elliot, Mamma Mia!, Sweeney Todd, and Mary Poppins. I wonder how often he takes out the keys and lets loose some newage jams.

The record was produced by a man named Jim MCKenna, a name that is far too common and plain for Google to be of any help whatsoever. There is a politician with that name in Canada, but I doubt he’s the same person.

And that’s about all I can find out about the record! Another blog shared this same record a few years back, and their copy came with a star chart that they helpfully scanned, so check that out if you’re interested (I think I enjoy the record itself more than that writer). The album has no barcode or spine number. The only identifying marks on it at all, is the stock number “PAM-080.921899” on the record label. Because of that, Discogs credits the album’s label as “PAM.” I would take that with a grain of salt, however, because Discogs also credits the album artist as “Halley’s Comet” and I’m fairly certain the comet itself had nothing to do with this release. Unless Halley’s Comet provided Don with the keyboards. God only knows how this thing was distributed. Was it solely for educational institutions? Mail order only? Who knows!

Enjoy! Maybe I’ll have another post up this year? Regardless, that’s four posts with music this year, which is the most I’ve managed to put on this site since COVID, I think. So I’m gonna take that as a victory.

As I said before, comments on this site are broken as fuck, so if you have something you’d like to share about this record, reach out to me on Bluesky!

Just Say Ozzy (Click here for a complete album download)

As I write this, it’s been a little over a week since Ozzy Osbourne left us, and it still doesn’t seem real. Ozzy just felt like someone who would always be here. And it’s not just because he was a seemingly invincible madman powered by liquor and cocaine. He was just an overpowering presence in the world, as both a musician and a media personality. I was born in 1979, so I have only known a world where Ozzy was a goddamn motherfucking superstar; the biggest name in metal for over 40 years. No one name will forever be more synonymous with “fucking metal” than “Ozzy.” Even if you removed the entirety of his work with Black Sabbath, the band that literally invented the genre, Ozzy would still be one of the most important people in heavy metal music who ever lived thanks to some of the best popular heavy metal tracks of the 80s and 90s, and even in to the 21st century; and his last two albums were fantastic.

I’ll be mourning the Prince of Darkness for a long time. Thankfully I have a lot of his music to remember him by. So far I’ve been listening to a lot of Sabbath as well as his last two albums, as well as Ozzmosis. However, I haven’t really touched most of his 80s output after his second album. Shockingly, I didn’t own any of it. I owned it at one point, but I must have sold all of it for some reason, and before I was ripping all my CDs to my computer.

Well, thankfully I fixed that problem today. I went out and bought Speak of the Devil, The Ultimate Sin, and No Rest for the Wicked. I can’t wait to dive back into them. It’s been literal decades since I gave any of them a proper listen, so it will be like discovering them all over again.

I know that Ozzy’s mid-80s output isn’t considered a highlight by most people. Metal went pop/glam in the 1980s and Ozzy went along with it for a while, that’s for sure. His hair sure as shit got big for a few videos, and the man wasn’t afraid to don the sequins when on tour with the likes of Motley Crue.But I dig this shit. In the past few years I’ve gotten really into metal, to the point where I started buying 80s glam metal albums I previously scoffed at. And it’s just so fun. So upbeat. It’s hard to hate on it too much now. Besides, it just fucking sounds great. If you’re a fan of well-produced rock music, you can’t get much sleeker than this shit. And for some that might be a negative, but I ain’t too good for pop in my heavy metal, and you shouldn’t be either.

Just Say Ozzy is a live EP that came out in 1990. I read some (all negative) contemporaneous reviews of the release, and many of them juxtapose that the album was quickly hobbled together as a way to keep Ozzy’s name in the spotlight as he took a break for rehab. I don’t think Ozzy’s ever said much about the release, so it’s hard to say what the real motivations behind the EP were. In the album liner notes, he just says that it was the label’s decision to release the mini-album and that he was initially against it; but he changed his mind because he was happy with the performance and his band.

But there’s a bit of mystery behind this one, a lot of speculation online about when this album was recorded and just how “live” it actually is. In the original US and UK releases, the back cover claims that the album was recorded at Brixton Academy in 1989, but Ozzy didn’t play Brixton Academy in 1989, so…what gives? I’ve read some discussions online that suggest it was recorded almost entirely in the studio with the audience added in post. To be honest, it does kind of sound like that’s the case. I own a lot of live albums from this era, very few sound as crisp and clean as this one.

However, in my late-90s Japanese CD re-issue there are liner notes by legendary Japanese rock journalist Masa-Itoh, and he claims that the songs were taken from a concert at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia (which is really in Upper Darby). He also says that this concert was “streamed to home TV screens using the groundbreaking pay-per-view system.” (according to Google translate, but my Japanese boyfriend confirms this translation), and that’s just crazy. Late-80s/early-90s PPV was nuts, man.

Well, that concert has been preserved in its entirety on YouTube, so it’s easy to compare and contrast the versions here with that footage. They definitely sound different, at the very least, it’s a different mix of the same recording. Crowd noise has been damped drastically during the tracks, and fake crowd noise has been added between songs, most likely to ease the transitions between the songs. Ozzy’s banter has also been removed or changed too. In the video, you can hear Ozzy saying things like “c’mon clap you hands!” during the intro, those interjections have been removed for the CD, with the intros to many songs being shortened as well.

But it roughly sounds like the same performance to me. Zakk’s first solo on “A Shot In The Dark” sounds nearly identical on both versions. I bet there were substantial overdubs done, especially to Ozzy’s vocals, but this is probably more live than not. Also, I’ve read some reviews of this online that criticize Zakk Wylde’s playing, citing various mistakes he makes during solos. My ear is not good enough to pick those up, but if those mistakes do exist, I doubt Zakk would’ve made mistakes like them during a tight studio recording.

Regardless of the album’s authenticity, it still captures Ozzy’s live energy, and I feel it’s worth a listen if for no other reason than the line-up that’s supporting Ozzy on it. Just Say Ozzy is the first live Ozzy release to feature Zakk Wylde on lead guitar, who of course would stay as Ozzy’s guitarist for most of his career from this point on. The EP is also the live debut of Randy Castillo, who played on most of Ozzy’s 80s output and on 1991’s No More Tears (he’s also on the 1993 live album, LIve & Loud, alongside Wylde).

Most notably, however, is that this is the only official live Ozzy solo release that features Geezer Butler from Black Sabbath on bass (save for one track on Live & Loud as part of a Black Sabbath reunion set). Butler would later play again with Ozzy on Ozzzmosis, but didn’t join him for the tour.

Just Say Ozzy has been out-of-print for the majority of this century. The same goes for The Ultimate Sin and Live & Loud. There’s been no official reason as to why this is, but a lot of people contribute it to a songwriting dispute over “A Shot in the Dark.” Gonna guess it involves Sharon being Sharon.

However, while The Ultimate Sin and Live & Loud are available on most streaming services; Just Say Ozzy has completely vanished from the digital realm. I’m sure there are bootleg streams on YouTube and such, but if you’re like most people who aren’t me in the year 2025 and consuming your music entirely via streaming services, you aren’t going to find this one on any of them – which is why I feel fairly safe in sharing it here.

Again, this isn’t essential Ozzy by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a solid little release. Wylde’s solo for War Pigs slaps pretty hard. The drumming is super-aggressive and gives the show a lot of energy, and I think that the live versions of “Miracle Man” and “A Shot in the Dark” surpass their studio rivals. I hope that more live releases from this era (and others, I’d love a Retirement Sucks live album) get released.

RIP Ozzy. Fuckin’ metal.

It’s been a minute since my last post, but I think this might be the shortest time between posts since 2022! So that’s something!

How’s everyone doing these days?

Sorry to hear that, yeah, me too.

Anyways, this site is still broken. If you leave a comment I’ll be able to read it but it won’t show up on the site. Sorry about that. I’m hoping to get that fixed very soon. I found someone online who said they’re willing to help. In the meantime, if you really want to reach out to me, give me a shout on Blue Sky.

I did manage to resurrect my YouTube channel with semi-regular updates! You should check it out! I’ve done some videos about records I recently bought, did deep dives on Mario and Zelda soundtracks, and even did some angry YouTube bullshit whining about AI. (Guess which video was the most popular.)

Right now, I’m doing a series where I rank literally every movie I’ve ever seen. Of all the projects I’ve done on YouTube, it’s by far the one I’m most happy about. I really enjoy making the videos. They give me a chance to talk about a lot of movies that no one has ever heard of, which is one of my favorite things to do, and I feel that it’s a unique concept that not many people have attempted before. No one is watching the videos, but I’m going to keep doing them!

Shit, no one reads this blog either but that’s rarely fucking stopped me. Remember that I also have a podcast. Some people do actually seem to listen to that, so that’s nice.

Tonight, a complete album by a band you have, without a doubt in my mind, ever heard of. Gee, for some reason I can really identify with bands that are completely forgotten and no one care about. Go figure.

Dorf – Compact Dorf (Click here to download the album)

One of my favorite record stores in Tokyo is the Disk Union in Shinjuku. It is seven stories tall, and each floor has a different theme. In my 10+ years in this country, the first floor has changed layouts multiple times. It used to be the new release floor. Then it became an ill-fated cafe that I think I never once set foot in. That was a waste of floor space, let me tell you. A couple years ago, it was renovated again into an all anime and game music store.

Have you ever seen Hostel? You know that scene where the dipshit protagonist stumbles upon the snuff house and he bumps into the Japanese guy (Takeshi Miike)?

Yeah, it’s kind of like that for me. It’s a problem, is what I’m saying. They know me by name. I’m the Norm of that store.

Last week they had a sale. I bought a lot of CDs. I bought TWO soundtracks to TWO different Space Invader games that I didn’t even know existed. I bought the soundtrack to the Nintendo DS Araknoid game. I bought the soundtrack to the original Tekken (it has dub remixes). I bought the soundtrack to something called 1997 Nostalgia. I don’t even know what the fuck that is, but I liked the cover and it was ¥500 so I was like, “fuck it who cares.” Turns out it’s the soundtrack to some MSX game and it has a real dope mid-90s MIDI vibe.

I also bought this. Also because it was about ¥500. And I liked the minimalist vibes of the cover art. Really clean 90s Designers’ Republic shit. It looks like something the art team from Bungie would plagiarize, that’s how cool it is.

This is Compact Dorf by the band Dorf.

Bad band name. Bad album name. Really good music though!

The music is a bit hard to describe. Although maybe that’s just because I haven’t written about music in a few years now and I’m out of practice, who knows. It’s very much electronic music, that much I can say. There are no guitars here. It’s all synths, keyboards, drum machines, and samples. Some of the tracks have vocals, but nearly all of them are processed through vocoders and other electronic effects. I can’t even tell if they’re singing in Japanese or English.

Tracks like “Datum” and “The Link” have big Kraftwerk vibes, with bouncy beats and robot vocals, while songs like “Zeitgeist” give me YMO energy, with an emphasis on traditional Japanese-sounding melodies. What makes the album really stand out, however, is the heavy chiptune sound. I’m sure that most of this was composed and performed on synths both modular and electric, but the whole album feels like it was arranged using sound libraries from Super Nintendo games.

And that’s really something because this album came out in 1996, and according to the one page I can find on the band, they formed in 1990! I have no idea what their earlier stuff sounds like, but if it’s anything like this I feel safe in saying that these guys were light years ahead of their time. What’s the earliest chiptune artist you can think of? Bit Shifter? Anamanaguchi? YMCK? These guys predate all of them by at least a decade. They even precede Polysics, whose chiptune meets Devo sound didn’t start to make waves until the second half of the 90s.

I was so stoked to discover this! You know how hard it is to find genuinely obscure music these days? It feels like everything’s not only been discovered at this point, it’s all on Spotify with YouTube essays about it and vinyl re-issues from Light In the Attic getting pressed. And not only is this genuinely obscure, it’s really good! It’s one of my favorite albums that I found this year! I can’t believe this has just fallen through the cracks like this. It’s probably because the album was self-released. And with the band kaput, there’s no one around to re-publish it or get it online in any way.

I am surprised that there’s almost nothing about them online, however. All I can find is on that one page, and a sole live performance from 2005 uploaded to YouTube.

From what I can gather on that page, the group went through several lineup changes both before and after this album. On Compact Dorf, they were a trio; the members being Okuno Terushige, Komaba Mikiya, and Yamazaki Yasunori.

I did a bit of digging on those names. Yamazaki Yasunori is on Discogs. Apparently after he left Dorf he went on to form an electronic duo called Uni. This was in the early 2000s. It appears he hasn’t released much music since then. He has a Soundcloud but there’s nothing on it.

I also found Komaba Mikiya on Discogs. He’s released several albums online under the name Komaba. It sounds a lot like Dorf, albeit with a bit less of the video game influence and more of a general “electronica” sound. I dig what I’ve heard.

As for Okuno Terushige, I got nothing.

Again, going back to that sole page with information on the group, I see that they have a few other releases, but a lot of them are tape only. I have no idea how to even begin a search to track those down. There are stores in Japan that sell old cassette tapes, but they don’t carry stuff like this: they’re more down to charge you $50 for a Billy Ocean tape or some bullshit. I guess I’m going to have to start scouring Japanese auction websites. I just know I need more of this band in my life. I hope you give this a listen and feel the same way.