Ants From Up There

Amazon Review by Stuart Jefferson
54 minutes in length approximately. The tracks,from the original analogue tapes,have been remastered. The sound is fairly crisp and open. The booklet contains some good info on the bands,producers,and the era.
This collection does contain some rare West Coast surf music,from the small Titan Records label. This was one of a myriad of small,independent record companies in the late 50's/early 60's that released surf music hoping to cash-in on the surf/instrumental craze (which only lasted a short time),then coming into vogue. Usually the vast numbers of these groups (THE SURFMEN,THE STRANGERS,THE STORMS,THE PLAYBOYS,among others), sold their records only locally,or at best,regionally. Very few of these groups made it to the national level in sales. It's interesting that (the late) Gary Usher (heard here),who was responsible (and famous) for dozens of teen records (both instrumental and vocal),made his first recordings for Titan.

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra (PCO) was a collective of performing musicians created by classically trained British guitarist, composer and arranger Simon Jeffes. The Penguin's sound is not easily categorized, but has elements of exuberant folk music and a minimalist aesthetic occasionally reminiscent of composers such as Philip Glass. The Penguin Cafe Orchestra recorded and performed for 24 years until Jeffes died of a brain tumour in 1997.

A powerful, emotional memoir and an extraordinary portrait of three generations of Tibetan women whose lives are forever changed when Chairman Mao's Red Army crushes Tibetan independence, sending a young mother and her six-year-old daughter on a treacherous journey across the snowy Himalayas toward freedom.

The Magic School Bus is a series of children's books about science. They feature the antics of Ms. Frizzle, an elementary school teacher, and her class of eight children (in the original books, the class population was at a larger and more standard amount), who board a magical school bus which takes them on field trips into the solar system, under the Bed, into the American Flag, or to other such impossible locations. The books are written in the first person from the point of view of an unnamed student in "the Friz's" class. The class pet, Liz, an anthropomorphic lizard, accompanied the class on their field trips.
Since the Magic School Bus books present scientific facts in the form of stories in which fantastic things happen (for example, a bus turns into a spaceship, or children shrink to the size of blood cells), each book has a page at the end detailing in a humorous manner which parts of the book represented scientific fact and which were fanciful storytelling. In the books' television adaptation, this was replaced by the Producer Says segment at the end of each episode, in which the producer of the show (voiced by Malcolm-Jamal Warner of The Cosby Show fame) receives phone calls from kids complaining about how some things that happened on the show couldn't happen in real life. This allows the show to explain the specific facts in question and why they had to be disregarded to a degree because of the need for dramatic license.

NOW Music is very proud to present the second of our ‘Now That’s What I Call An Era’ releases. ‘The Albums 1980 > 1984’ celebrates 72 iconic albums that were released between 1980 and 1984, featuring a magnificent track from each - and none of them UK hit singles! Most of the albums being highlighted produced huge hit singles that have become both synonymous with the decade and enduringly popular – but these albums are of such a high quality – forever part of the artist’s legacy - that other tracks could have equally become hits – and some have become as well-loved by fans as the singles, and have for many artists always been an established part of their live shows.

NOW Music is very proud to present the second of our ‘Now That’s What I Call An Era’ releases. ‘The Albums 1980 > 1984’ celebrates 72 iconic albums that were released between 1980 and 1984, featuring a magnificent track from each - and none of them UK hit singles! Most of the albums being highlighted produced huge hit singles that have become both synonymous with the decade and enduringly popular – but these albums are of such a high quality – forever part of the artist’s legacy - that other tracks could have equally become hits – and some have become as well-loved by fans as the singles, and have for many artists always been an established part of their live shows.

NOW Music is proud to present the newest addition to the ‘Yearbook’ series: NOW – Yearbook 1981. 4 CDs of 85 tracks that defined the charts in 1981. This special edition CD is housed in ‘hard-back book’ packaging, including a 28-page booklet with a summary of the year, a track-by-track guide, a quiz, and original singles artwork, and as a standard 4-CD package.