Most Wanted
The handful of Monkey Radio tracks that have so far defeated every search — station exclusives, lost media, and ghosts with no album behind them.
Much of the rotation has been tracked down. These haven’t.
These are the tracks for which I only have a story: no label, no Discogs entry, no storefront, sometimes barely a confirmed name. They’re station exclusives, lost media, or both….and every lead I’ve chased has so far hit a wall.
If you recognize any of these - know the artist, remember the release, or (best of all) have a copy - please ping me on Reddit. Even a half-memory might be the thread that unravels one of these. Here’s everything I’ve managed to dig up so far.
LeBlioux of sacreBLIOUX — “Pimpin2k1 Soundtrack” (San Francisco)
A San Francisco? DJ, circa 2001, who turns up in old trip-hop forum threads but has no formal release data anywhere I’ve found. The track lived as a custom mix at monkeyradio.org/pimpin2k1/ for a bit.
As far as I can tell, this was never a commercial release at all. It appears to be a station-exclusive DJ mix (specifically, a recording of the DJ playing the station creator’s party in 2001). For a while it was mirrored on the station creator’s personal website, badmotherfucker.org, but that’s long since gone. No album, no storefront, no sourcing path.
Asphaltmotherflame — “Breathing Over Kiss”
Not found anywhere. The Wayback Machine’s capture of mp3.com confirms the artist existed under that name (artist ID 37). Last.fm logs a grand total of 28 scrobbles (14 of them “Breathing Over Kiss,”) and most of those trace straight back to Monkey Radio listeners.
IUMA archived three of the artist’s tracks, pointing to an implied 2000 album called Shake Yourself Loose (on archive.org). Wayback captures of mp3.com and their webiste identify the band and label (StYgMa) and point to the track as belonging to their second album, The Essential Roland and Beatrice…which has escaped capture. This particular track? It may simply be lost media.
Got something on any of these? Reach out on Reddit. I’ll update the hunt notes (and the station) the moment a lead pans out.
Former Most Wanted
Solved hunts retire here. Proof that these ghosts can be found.
Samelico — “Pepper Sweet”
This one was a phantom. Tagged downtempo / dream on Last.fm, where “Pepper Sweet” is Samelico’s most-listened-to track (202 listeners), but there was precious little other information and Discogs turned up zilch for the artist or the track.
My working theory was that the artist name, the track name, or both had been mangled: that “Samelico” was just a scrobbler handle (as with Pointers - Ooby, which turned out to be Plaid - Ooh be do, another former Most Wanted), and the real track was something like Art Pepper - Sweet Love of Mine (1976)..even if straight jazz felt out-of-band for this station.
The truth was simpler: the artist and track were correctly named all along. After I found the originator, he sent me a copy of the file…though he prefers to remain anonymous, so that’s where the paper trail publicly ends. The track itself is built on samples of LL Cool J’s “Going Back to Cali,” Boney M’s “Ma Baker,” and others.
Trivia: Samelico was a friend of another Monkey Radio artist, Izmar, whose solo work was also a station staple. The two of them sent their tracks in to the station, and the DJ added them to the rotation.
🎧 Listen: Samelico — “Pepper Sweet” (8:13, 160 kbps MP3)
Pointers — “Ooby”
The master list and the station’s “now playing” both insisted on a track called “Pointers - Ooby.” There was just one problem: it isn’t real. No band called Pointers, no song called “Ooby.”
The culprit turned out to be a phantom Last.fm page: a Chinese-locale artist page for “Pointers” where the “artist” was actually the handle of the person doing the scrobbling, and a raw 04 - Pointers-Ooby filename got baked into a credit that then propagated as gospel. The real track is Plaid’s “Ooh Be Do,” off Double Figure, alive and well on Bandcamp.
The full detective story, phantom track list and all, is in The Hunt: Finding the Tracks.
DJ Krush — “Kanji”
The lists all agreed the station played a DJ Krush track called “Kanji” …but no such title appears anywhere in Krush’s discography (though as he was a Japanese artist, kanji were common in the titles). With a catalog that deep, guessing which track had been mislabeled was hopeless.
The answer came from the 2006 stream dump: a redditor’s full recording of the stream, complete with the extracted MP3s. That archive included the actual file, DJ_Krush-Kanji-.mp3, and a listen settled it: “Kanji” is DJ Krush - Toki No Tabiji (Journey of Time), off The Message At Depth.
Nude Vol 1 — “AudioTrack 03”
As track names go, this one gave nothing to work with: Nude_Vol_1-AudioTrack_03 is just a raw rip of an unspecified CD track: a default filename standing in for whatever the song actually was. Unsearchable by design.
The 2006 stream dump broke it open the same way it did “Kanji”: the recovered MP3 gave us a clear picture of Björk’s voice, and a Shazam fingerprint confirmed the track as The Verbrilli Sound - Levee Breaks.
