Stories

YouTube is a near endless universe of music discoveries waiting to happen. I've spent quite a bit of time surfing through hour-long mixes of latin grooves, channels that specialize in unearthing ambient gems, and users who've been digging up old video footage from the 1980s and 1990s of local musicians in Hawaii. There are also a few channels from Japan that almost exclusively share music from Hawaii. This is not surprising, especially when you consider that one of the reasons I started this blog was because the only information available online (at the time) about rare, collectible Hawaiian records were...

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...

Last year on our quest to find Liz Damon in hopes of securing permission to reissue her band's underrated funk gem, "Woota (Feelin Good)", we discovered that Liz had been living and working in Las Vegas for several years now. No one I knew had her contact info, so I took to the Facebook fan page and asked if anyone could put me in touch. Thankfully, someone did! And soon enough, I was hearing from Liz Damon herself. She'd recently retired and, although keeps a low profile herself on social media etc, was pleasantly surprised to hear from us about...

Things have been moving rapidly in our world today, with uncertainty. Every day, new updates alert us to stay safe, stay healthy, and for many of us: stay indoors. Except that so many of us want to be outdoors at a time like this, breathing in fresh air, walking unguided through forests, solitarily striding along ocean shores... So to aide such desires, we're releasing a multi-part series of field recordings captured in Hawaii. It's called Aloha ʻĀina. In other words: Aloha Got Soul is bringing you the sounds of Hawaii, literally. In the five years of the label's existence, I...

As with most artists whose careers spanned more than a decade, Liz Damon's Orient Express left behind a handful of unexpected obscurities in their catalog — most notably, "Woota" or "Feelin Good", a bright yellow-labeled 45 of original funk on Doncey Records, penned by the band's bassist Dennis Osurman and drummer/arranger Randy Isaki. For those unfamiliar, Liz Damon’s Orient Express was the de riguer pop music group in Hawaii, from 1969 to the mid-1980s. Visitors to Hawaii in the early 1970s fell in love with Liz Damon’s Orient Express for its enchanting renditions and captivating stage presence — and, of...