Collection
of vocal poems recorded in Europe in 1993, which had been completely
lost until being rediscovered in early 2017 (on a damaged cassette tape
in a Los Angeles garage). These are the companion works for the iconic,
So Get Up.
https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ithaka2
Californian-born
writer and vocalist Ithaka (aka Ithaka Darin Pappas) relocated from his
native Los Angeles in 1992 to Europe where the artist entered of six
year period of hyper-creativity. There he wrote, vocalized, created
sculptures and photographed among other activities.
In 1993 he
wrote a collection of poems for a daily audio segment he hosted on a
program called Quatro Bairro on Rádio Commercial, Lisbon. After reciting
some these poems live on Rádio Comerical in 1993, he later recorded
them as a collection of demos with a producer friend in the UK.
The
next year he recorded one of these poems, So Get Up, with the
progressive-house project Underground Sound Of Lisbon who achieved
massive international success with the track via distribution by
Tribal/I.R.S. Records in New York.
Between a series of moves and
career developments, the original 1993 vocal poem demos recorded in
England were lost. Neither studio technician or artist could find the
original, or copies.
So Get Up went on to become an international
EDM anthem remixed by greats such as; Miss Kittin, Fatboy
Slim. Mert Yücel, Dave Seaman etc.
Later
in 2013, the song saw yet another chapter of fame when top DJ's both
Hardwell and Armina Van Buuren endorsed a new version of the So Get Up
rleased by German trance music stars Cosmic Gate using Ithaka's original
lyrical/ vocal acapella)
Ithaka himself went on to record a series of critically acclaimed hip hop albums.
Here
together on this disc are two new vocal recordings of Ithaka's iconic
poems "So Get Up" and "We Are The Players" (recorded in Mexico - 2017)
along with the complete collection of vocal-poem acapella demos made in
1993, some with their original proposed instrumental sketches. Please
note: These are not intended to be finished songs, but instead are
included to demonstrate Ithaka's early musical direction prior to both
Underground Sound Of Lisbon's version of So Get Up (1994) and his own
solo album, Flowers And The Color Of Paint (1995).
In
early, 2017, Los Angeles-based independent music label, Sweatlodge
Records will release the seventh album by the Californian songwriter, Ithaka, entitled, So Get Up & The Lost Acapellas.
The record will include thirteen of Ithaka's vocalized poems (without
music), many of which were written during 1992 and 1993, two of the six
years the artist lived in Lisbon. Also, as a bonus track, the original
1993 demo-version of So Get Up will appear.
There in Portugal, Ithaka was
regularly invited to recite his texts and rhymes for the daily program,
Quatro Bairro on the national station, Rádio Comerical. Ten of the poems offered
on the Lost Acapellas release were written specifically for the
radio program and
later (in mid-1993) were rerecorded as voice-over and musical demos on a
visit to England. These recordings were lost for 23 years until
recently being discovered in a Los Angeles storage unit on a antiquated cassette tape.
Among these early acapella poems is So Get Up,
most recently re-popularized by Armin Van Buuren and Cosmic Gate, which
today (twenty-four years and more than a thousand releases and
adaptions later) is considered The Most Remixed Vocal Acapella In Musical History (by Guinness World Records - 2016, 2017).
So
Get Up was originally written and recorded by Ithaka for Quatro Bairro (Rádio Comerical),
unfortunately this very first recording has never been
recovered. He did however, as mentioned, record it a second time in the U.K - to
present to radio producers and possibly record companies.
There
working at Rádio Comerical, Ithaka met DJ Vibe (Portugal's most prominent DJ),
who played an hour of progressive house music immediately following
Ithaka's segments. There Vibe usually heard the end of Ithaka's vocal slots and was intrigued by the poems. Some months later, he invited
him to participate as a guest vocalist on the first release by Underground Sound Of Lisbon
(an EDM duo consisting of Vibe and Rui Da Silva) for Kaos Records.
They recorded Ithaka's vocal in the early hours of a rainy winter night at the
garage studio, 1 Só Céu,owned by the Portuguese rock band called, Os Delfins.
Ithaka
was told by the label that they would make 200 white-labels vinyls for distribution
within Portugal only. They paid him $70 dollars for his participation,
with a verbal promise to discuss any future distributions and
manufacturing that would possibly follow. And just weeks later, from just that single white-label pressing, the song
exploded into an almost instantaneous national blockbuster.
Although
open-minded musically, Ithaka was more associated with hip hop and street art than
dance music and only infrequently appeared at the clubs his apocalyptic
poem had literally become an anthem for an entire generation of club
goers, inspiring even people who never liked dance music to get
involved.
Ironically, Underground Sound Of Lisbon themselves never
made a point of explaining who the mystery prophet was and nobody
seemed to ask, the press included - even though Ithaka owned 50% of the
publishing and was indeed the actual performer.
"I
remember specifically on a couple of occasions trying to get into
Lisbon-area night clubs, which is always a chore, and there in line, two different times, I
could hear So Get Up playing on the dance floor...The first was at Frágil in Bairro Alto - and I said, hey man,
that's me...let me in. And the doorman said, if that was you...I would
know who you are AND I DON'T! - And the other time..was at Alcatara, when I again declared that
was my voice muffled behind the thick curtains out the dance floor..and that doorman said, Yes, my friend, and Elvis is still alive too!
In
late 1994, Ithaka left Portugal for four months back to Los Angeles for
an art exhibit - and during that short amount of time, Kaos Records had
licensed So Get Up, without consulting him, to several international parties most notably Tribal
Records (USA) a sub-subsidiary of Stuart Copeland's IRS Records (EMI).
Although
Rob Di Stefano, the managing director of Tribal Records had met Ithaka
on a previous trip to Portugal, and obviously understood he was from
California and only temporarily residing in Portugal, he realized the
marketing potential of
an exotic 100% Portuguese house music product arriving in the U.S. for
the first time and made no attempt to publicize the vocalist's true
origins. No featuring Ithaka credit was ever included on
any of the
releases, even though he is both the author and the vocalist. Yes, this
is dance music, but no matter how good or bad the production is, no one
can deny that the vocal-poem and
adjoining hooks are the primal guts of the entire So Get Up experience.
How else could it possibly appeal to such a large musucal spectrum of DJ
and producers?
The
first 1994 release of So Get Up on Tribal was a double-vinyl set with
ten-mixes, including several versions by New York superstars Junior
Vasquez and Danny Tenaglia. The early international
popularity of So Get Up was undoubtfully manifested by
these interpretations by Vasquez and Tenaglia. Two New York all-stars creating
music around the words of a California hip hop wordsmith. To call So Get Up,
even at that point, a 100% Portuguese release, was inaccurate at best.
The first release by Tribal, which sold upwards of 50,000 copies, also
included an uncredited acapella of Ithaka's raw poem - which paved way
for a vast multitude of remixes and samplings over a huge cross-section
of electronic musical genres.
With the exception
of
Stretch & Verne's legally licensed rerecord "Get Up, Go Insane!" in
1997 and (subsequently Fatboy Slim's remix of that), every other
international release of So Get Up has essentially been unauthorized. It
is fair to say that every (of the more than a thousand mixes released)
house, trance, techno, electro, drum & bass, big beat, dub step, and
art rock versions - under their varying titles of "So Get Up", "Get
Up", "Forget The Past", "the End Of The Earth", "Have A Blast",
"Headcharge", "Hardaventure" have been issued illegally. No record
royalties or
performance royalties have even been paid to the vocalist/lyricist
although all have been made using Ithaka's 1994 recording in Cascais,
Portugal. By the most recent estimates of Ithaka's publisher attempting
to recoup his writing shares, So Get Up has been either sold or
downloaded more than 30,000,000 times and approximately 250,000,000 have
at least heard the poem. Whether payment ever falls into the right
hands, time will only tell.
Ithaka
himself has had an unusual career (and life) to say the least. He
came to recording not thru music itself, but via music photography, visual
arts....and reading books. For nearly three years, among his many
other sporadic occupations, Ithaka was the principal photographer for
Priority Records gangster rap icons, NWA and Eazy E , but that's a story
for another day.
In 1992, attempting to expand his boundries outside of the Los Angeles area, the half-Greek, Ithaka Darin Pappas, set off
soul-searching. He first relocated to Athens, Greece for six months and
then spent a year in Tokyo, finally landing in Lisbon where he spent
more than six years.
During this six-year period in
Portugal, Ithaka was hyper-productive. He recorded So Get Up (and many other poems), made two award-winning hip
hop albums, published
translated poems and short stories in Portuguese magazines - and also
had several large scale sculpture exhibits. He also photographically
documented much the early and mid-nineties Portuguese music scene,
shooting record covers for rock, hip hop and EDM projects.
