Thank You!

Soundscapes will be closing permanently on September 30th, 2021.

Open every day between Spetember 22nd-30th

We'd like to thank all of our loyal customers over the years, you have made it all worthwhile! The last 20 years have seen a golden age in access to the world's recorded music history both in physical media and online. We were happy to be a part of sharing our knowledge of some of that great music with you. We hope you enjoyed most of what we sold & recommended to you over the years and hope you will continue to seek out the music that matters.

In the meantime we'll be selling our remaining inventory, including thousands of play copies, many of which are rare and/or out-of-print, never to be seen again. Over the next few weeks the discounts will increase and the price of play copies will decrease. Here are the details:

New CDs, LPs, DVDs, Blu-ray, Books 60% off 15% off

Rare & out-of-print new CDs 60% off 50% off

Rare/Premium/Out-of-print play copies $4.99 $14.99

Other play copies $2.99 $8.99

Magazine back issues $1 $2/each or 10 for $5 $15

Adjusted Hours & Ticket Refunds

We will be resuming our closing sale beginning Friday, June 11. Our hours will be as follows:

Wednesday-Saturday 12pm-7pm
Sunday 11am-6pm

Open every day between September 22nd-30th

We will no longer be providing ticket refunds for tickets purchased from the shop, however, you will be able to obtain refunds directly from the promoters of the shows. Please refer to the top of your ticket to determine the promoter. Here is the contact info for the promoters:

Collective Concerts/Horseshoe Tavern Presents/Lee's Palace Presents: shows@collectiveconcerts.com
Embrace Presents: info@embracepresents.com
MRG Concerts: ticketing@themrggroup.com
Live Nation: infotoronto@livenation.com
Venus Fest: venusfesttoronto@gmail.com

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thank you for your understanding.

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Tuesday
Nov052013

WILLIAM ONYEABOR - Who Is William Onyeabor?

While Luaka Bop recently stated that this compilation was five years in the making, it's been more like an eight-and-a-half-year stretch for anyone whose interest was initially piqued by the inclusion of "Better Change Your Mind" on the label's 2005 compilation of West African funk rarities, World Psychedelic Classics, Vol. 3: Love's A Real Thing. While the label's clearly been biding their time, since Who Is William Onyeabor? is still only Vol. 5 (with the Tim Maia anthology Nobody Can Live Forever the only other addition to the slim but immaculately-selected series in the interim), getting to finally hear such strange, synth-lead-laden Afro-disco dancefloor-filling workout warnings as "Atomic Bomb" and "Why Go To War" properly mastered at last has been well worth the wait. 

If Fela Kuti was a child of James Brown, fellow Nigerian William Onyeabor is something like the next-generation musical offspring of Parliament-Funkadelic. His songs are extended call-and-response disco-funk jams driven by the space-age sound of synthesizers and drum machines—very new tools when Onyeabor was recording in the late '70s and '80s, especially in Africa. After years of existing mainly as secret grails passed between electronic music DJs and other crate diggers, Onyeabor's handful of studio LPs have been licensed and boiled down to a killer compilation.

So, who is William Onyeabor? Part of the album's conceit is that even the compilers don't fully know. The liner notes, by veteran British journalist Vivien Goldman, note that Onyeabor is a crowned chief in his hometown village of Enugu, Eastern Nigeria, where he lives in 'a hidden palace in the woods' and is a booster of the local Christian music scene. But he essentially left his own music career in the '80s, in the wake of the recordings collected here, presumably when he became a born-again Christian—indeed, you can hear a moral, preacherly spirit on a lot of the tracks here." - NPR

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