On the road. We watch, we listen, we dig, we recount. Telling stories is how we sort out what we've lived, make sense of the world around us and figure out who we are: on paper, out loud, cut into vinyl or onto tape. Here you'll find our books, and the stories we pick up along the way.
It started as a pebble and turned into an avalanche: the big economic crash of the early 2000s came down on us and took everything we thought was solid. We were still alive, if nothing else, so we kept moving.
We headed for America and drove it end to end, through the backstreets of New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago and dozens of other cities. Life on the road: cheap motels, dusty diners, studios shut down since forever, public libraries, private collections, and shady characters who let us in on the dirty secrets of the old record business. A crazy world full of artists, poets, dreamers and crooks.
That's how our ragtag crew of researchers, the Funk Investigators, was born.
And that's how our little family of record labels was born.
The print editions sold out a long time ago and are waiting for a reprint, but you can get your free digital copy by sending us an email. It's available in Italian and English (Tesla Groove, Bexhill, 2021) and Spanish (Colectivo Bruxista, Barcelona, 2023). The foreword to the Italian edition is by Antonio Bacciocchi.
New York, filthy and crooked. The DeVonne brothers, Black outlaws locked in an endless turf war with the Italian mob, cross paths with Jalon Perry, a young Black Panther who slips through an FBI dragnet run under a secret programme with a sinister name: COINTELPRO, set up by the Bureau to choke the civil rights movement before it could spread.
It all kicks off in April 1969, with the case that went down in history as the 'New York 21'. Hoover's agents tear the Harlem Panthers' HQ apart, but three activists get away. One of them is Jalon. With the DeVonnes' help he vanishes into thin air, and nobody hears a word about him until the winter of 2021, when the Funk Investigators get the call to dig up the truth.
This one's sold out too and waiting for a reprint. Want to know how it ends? Get your free digital copy by sending us an email. It's available in Italian and English (Tesla Groove, Bexhill, 2022). The foreword to the Italian edition is by Carlo Babando.
The first trace of Lee turned up on a quiet, snowed-in night in Pleasant Ridge, Michigan, while we were spinning acetates and tapes at Brad Hales' place, a guy who spends his life to keeping the Detroit black sound alive. The melody and the voice on that demo were pure magic, so we set out to find whoever made it. First Michigan University, then the back rooms of the Detroit Public Library archives, then the Bronx branch of the New York Public Library, then Queens, for nothing. In the end we found him, old and near the end of the line, in a care home off 47th Street in Manhattan. The whole story is in our first book, Funk Investigators.
On one of our runs through the Rust Belt we stopped in Detroit for a few days to see a legendary rare-record dealer. Waiting for us was a very old man sunk in a beat-up armchair, a coffee table in front of him buried under yellowed notepads and empty coffee cups. Before we left he said: "Take these with you son, they'll do you company along the way", and pressed into my hands six little homemade books of the poems he'd written through the city's long, snowbound winters. From Vol. 1:
I didn't say anything (Detroit, 1979)
I wonder how my life would
have changed
Times when I should
have said what was on my mind
Of the things I would have gained
if I would have made myself
understood
And didn't say anything
In stead of remaing still and
letting other things decide.
You can later see what you missed
when you're looking back.
You can't call back the moment,
When you didn't say anything
