Stories — Updates

  3 We've come a long way as a label, and continue to learn various lessons along the way. Earlier this week, we closed up our Los Angeles storage unit.  For the last 10 months, our storage unit in Greater Los Angeles has served as a convenient locale for shipping orders to US mainland customers. Our LA counterpart, Vinyl Don, has lovingly been holding it down in the City of Angels by receiving pallets of records and shipping orders out to customers and distributors. It's saved us some time and resources, and for a while it made sense to ship part of our pressings to...

Sometime in 2020, @djvinyldon got in touch with a man named Mitch Padeken, the bassist for a local group called Moondance. It was a cold call (like many of our efforts are when searching for artists), and a pleasant surprise for Mitch. Few people have reached out to him in decades about their back-in-the-day band from North Shore, Oahu. After making initial connection (Don currently lives in Los Angeles), me (@rogerbong) and #OliverSeguin drove to Waimea to meet Mitch in person. He invited us to hang out on his lanai out back, overlooked the open ocean just east of Waimea...

It's been a long time coming.  For the past 6 years I've been running the label from the comfort of my home (or homes, considering we've moved apartments a handful of times in the past several years).  And with each passing year, as the label's operations grew — things like pressing more releases, fulfilling more orders, meeting more artists and producers in person — the need for a dedicated physical space became apparent.  I can't tell you how many fans, folks, and friends have asked us where our shop is, only for me to tell them that we run Aloha Got Soul...

Some positive news during uncertain times — two of our releases from 2019 have been nominated in the upcoming Na Hoku Hanohano Awards. The Anthology of the Year category includes a nomination for our compilation of sun-tinged folk and psych music, From These Shores. This record took about three years to fully license and restore/remaster for release. A good deal of effort went into making FTS possible — not to mention the enthusiasm and trust each artist gave us in re-presenting their music to the world. If you haven't heard From These Shores yet, you can stream in on all...

The hope for every project on the Aloha Got Soul label is to create a lasting document of timeless music that reaches a new crop of listeners in Hawaii and the world. For a place like Hawaii, so isolated from the rest of the world, it is invaluable to create an exchange of knowledge and ideas between these islands and distant destinations.