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Within the demographic loosely defined as “people who take music way too seriously,” there’s a broad range of record-collecting freakiness. I’m probably at the shallow end of the pool–my collection of 45s has enough eBay potential that I could eat off it for a minute if I had to, and I own more than a couple records in the Japanese import versions with the bonus tracks. Frank Gossner is so far off in the deep end that I can’t see him from her, though–like for instance he recently took a three-year trip to West Africa to buy records. (He claims he moved there to follow his girlfriend, but I suspect that is a ruse.) Lucky for us he is a generous man, and along with the kind of wild stories you’d expect a three-year-long record-shopping trip to Africa would generate, his blog is also packed with MP3s of some of the primo picks he’s accrued. His passion is for West African funk, but he got over his bias against disco for long enough to put together a few mixes of insanely good African disco that I’ve been pumping loudly while trying to work.
