The Hunt: Finding the Tracks
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Tracking down obscure tracks across digital stores, old CDs, and the occasional 12” vinyl, and the dead ends along the way.
Once I had a list of albums to purchase (prioritized by track count!), we get to the good part: hunting down the music.
Trackquisition
I was fortunate: I had for years bought CDs of Monkey Radio artists whenever I ran across them. I already had a reasonable collection of Thievery Corporation and DJ Krush, Hird, and others. To start, I pulled out my old disks and used EAC to get verified, high-quality FLACs of the albums I already owned.
That said, I had no interest in doing so for every track – for starters, used CDs are far from a sure bet. Furthermore, in some cases the artists/labels sell their tracks at higher qualities, especially if it has been remastered in the 30 years since it was released. So for anything I didn’t already own, I went about trying to find digital storefronts that sold lossless (FLAC or WAV) copies of these albums
I landed on a few storefronts that became my go-to solutions:
- Bandcamp: when possible, I purchased on Bandcamp Fridays to maximize the revenue to the artists.
- Qobuz: One of the best sources for otherwise unavailable tracks; their storefront is a little frustrating, and the music is not always available in my locale, but it’s a good place to check before doing something extreme.
- Beatport: They specialize in electronic music; once or twice I’ve bought things that are only available here.
If you review my spreadsheet you’ll also see Juno listed. This was a fantastic source early on, but came to underscore a serious problem sharing how to buy these things with others:
Links Rot
On or around June 3, 2026, Juno closed up shop.
Fortunately I had purchased most of the Tier4+ albums that I had found on Juno, and only had to find new sources for a few–but this emphasized just how rapidly some of this media might vanish from the internet: without Juno some albums may no longer have a digital storefront, forcing you to find CDs for the content.
Speaking of CDs and Lost Media
Monkey Radio’s heyday was in the early years of the internet. Many of these artists never migrated to digital storefronts (or didn’t bring their back catalog to one) meaning that the only way to acquire some content was through CDs. Discogs became my go-to for dozens of these albums…which means I regularly had to worry about damage during shipping, poor media quality, and the like. That said, some of the disks I digitized had never been seen by the AccurateRip database!
Unofficial Sources
There are also albums and tracks on this list that do not have official releases. For cases such as Flying Lotus’s July Heat and Demo 06 are unauthorized (and, I believe, unacknowledged) demo tapes passed around by fans. Listeners apparently even debate the provenance of IIOIO entirely!
In one case, Izmar - Tingeling appeared to be completely unique to Monkey Radio; the only place I found online with it was a soundcloud user that had recorded it…off of Monkey Radio. Fortunately, I was able to get in touch with the artist, who both confirmed the track was genuine, and sent an “official” copy.
Tales from The Hunt
The following are a handful of fascinating findings while Chasing the Monkey:
Music For Space Tourism, vol. 1
This is an amazing album. The CD alone is difficult to acquire, but I found out the hard way that it is also, unfortunately, incomplete: the wayback machine confirms a Visit Venus track from this album called Après Sky. Unfortunately, this track was only released on the 3xLP in 1995. Even Youtube videos of this track are uncommon (one has been newly added by a user recently) and there are no digital storefronts selling it at this time. To add this to the collection, I had to acquire the vinyl from the now-defunct label Yo Mama Records, and digitize it from my own turntable; I then mastered the track to EQ similarly to the digital extracts from the CD. This is the version you’ll hear if you’re lucky enough to be listening when it rolls by on the station!
DJ Kicks - Kruder & Dorfmeister
K&D are legends for a reason – they have a huge number of tracks on the list; one could argue that they represent a big part of the Monkey Radio sound. If you purchased their DJ Kicks from bandcamp, however, you might not have realized you missed a track.
On the original 1996 release of the album you’ll find Kama - Look Up Dere. Unfortunately, this was a miscrediting of Karma. Likely for this reason, when Bandcamp released the album digitally, they removed the miscredited track. This was corrected on May 22, 2026 when the 30th Anniversary remaster was released–the album recredited Karma correctly, enabling the track to be digitally purchased on a variety of storefronts!
1995
Speaking of K&D, the Spotify list features K&D’s “1995.” In spite of its name, this album was released in 2020…which is after MR shut down. That makes the provenance of this fairly suspect; however, the album is created based on tapes of unreleased content the duo found from 1995. Given Underwood’s collection of unreleased or rare finds, it is technically feasible he might have had access to early demos of some of this content – and it fits the vibe, of course. I originally left it in, but took it with a grain of salt.
Update (July 2026): the grain of salt won. With the rediscovery of the 2005 tracklist, not a single track from 1995 appears on any canonical source, so it’s been disabled in the rotation for now.
Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi
Thievery Corporation’s legendary album had a gotcha as well, as it turns out: the bandcamp release and the original CD had different track lists (Sun Moon and Starts, Sleeper Car on one…Mañha on the other):
Fortunately, I already owned both!
Groove Armada - Vertigo
One would think this (being one of the most popular albums in the genre) wouldn’t provoke comment – but it turns out that Monkey Radio included the track ‘Mary’ which is one of two exclusive to the Japanese pressing. If you want this one, you’ll need to import the CD. For what it’s worth, if you have the US pressing you get the Fatboy Slim mix of I See You Baby. It’s not an MR track, but it’s something I suppose?
Black Diamond
This thing is rare: for one of the disks, AccurateRip indicated the pressing had not previously been pulled. Furthermore, there’s a lot of name confusion–a HUGE number of albums by this name have been released. It appears to be a limited, fairly underground distribution, and contained a large number of MR tracks. The second disk features unnamed mixes from Felix the Dog.
Cibo Matto
These albums are easy enough to acquire, but came with trivia. Cibo Matto is a Japanese-born duo from New York recording under an Italian band name meaning “crazy food.” The big surprise for me though was recognizing one of their voices upon listening with fresh ears – Miho Hatori was the original voice of Noodle from the Gorillaz…an entirely different brand of monkey.
Lebanese Blonde
This track appears on a number of compilations, but our tracklist includes several mixes and b-sides that only appear on the Thieves’ single for Lebanese Blonde–but not any single. Specifically, we need the 8-track “maxi” single. If you decide to buy this one, pay very close attention and make sure you get what you’re looking for.
Aze2
Dutch artist Izmar actually provides his music for free via Netlabel under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) licensing. (It’s also on the Internet Archive, though the legality of those distributions can be iffy and shouldn’t be assumed to be a legal pickup.) When I ran my LLMs through my list reviewing, however, it initially believed this was test data – the album’s tracks are evocatively named things like Aze2-03 and Aze2-06. That said, fingerprinting of Izmar - Tingeling didn’t identify any known source for the mystery track Monkey Radio attributed to Izmar.
Suck It And See
The album name for Pussyfoot Records’ two-disk compilation of original material sounds R-Rated. This turns out to be extremely accurate. To quote the label (per Bandcamp):
“…we asked each of our artists to make a track with a pornographic theme, a sonic interpretation of the word and its connotations. As the motley crew began to turn in their offerings it became obvious to us that here were a bunch of psychosexual misfits whose indoor pursuits ranged from the slightly risqué through to downright debauchery.”
The final track of Disk 2 includes a full recording of phone sex. You have been warned.
Former Most Wanted
These tracks did time on the Most Wanted list: hunts that had defeated every search…until they didn’t. Proof that these ghosts can be found.
Asphaltmotherflame — “Breathing Over Kiss”
For a long while this one was found nowhere. The Wayback Machine’s capture of mp3.com confirmed the artist existed under that name (artist ID 37). Last.fm logged a grand total of 28 scrobbles (13 of them “Breathing Over Kiss,”) and most of those traced 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), and another archivist preserved “The Monkey and the Crow,” bringing the total to four surviving files…none of which was “Breathing Over Kiss.” Wayback captures of mp3.com and their website identified the band and label (StYgMa / hEADtHING) and pointed to the track as belonging to their second album, The Essential Roland and Beatrice. A capture of hEADtHING (DrJeep’s old site) even preserved that album’s page: thirteen tracks, “breathing over kiss” right at the top, released May 1, 2001, produced by The Doctor G.P. The tracklist survived; the audio looked like lost media.
It wasn’t. After tracking down the real person behind The Doctor G.P. (a.k.a. DrJeep), we eventually connected over social media. The band name changed; the music didn’t. Asphaltmotherflame lives on as Century Tuner, and the catalog is alive and purchasable on Bandcamp: “Breathing Over Kiss” is right there on The Essential Roland & Beatrice vol.1&2, alongside Shake Yourself Loose and backwards means the same. Not lost media at the end of the day: just filed under a new name.
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 insist on a track called “Pointers - Ooby.” There’s just one problem: it isn’t real. No band called Pointers, no song called “Ooby.”
The real track is Plaid’s “Ooh Be Do,” off Double Figure. So how did it end up so thoroughly mangled? The culprit was 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.
The track list was the giveaway. Alongside the mystery tune sat a pile of obvious remix references:
- Ooby (Plaid Remix)
- Ooby (Plaid DJ Mix)
- Ooby (Plaid – Futura Connect)
- 04 - Pointers-Ooby
That last entry (a raw 04 - Pointers-Ooby filename, scrobbler handle and all) is the exact string that got pulled in to tag the song. A scrobble from a Chinese-locale client makes the garbling even more plausible: a local filename, a misattributed “artist,” and a truncated title, all baked into a credit that then propagated as gospel.
The actual song is alive and well: Plaid - “Ooh Be Do” on Bandcamp.
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.
DJ Krush, Roni Size & DJ Shadow — “Freestyle”
The lists credited a “Freestyle” jointly to DJ Krush, Roni Size, and DJ Shadow (a collaboration that appears in no discography) and for a while the master list’s best guess was a bootleg of a November 1995 Leeds show.
Wrong on both counts. The file is DJ Shadow’s “89.9 Megamix”, the B-side of a catalogued, purchasable 1995 Mo’ Wax split single (Discogs). A listen confirmed it.
Basically every name on the file has an origin:
- DJ Krush + DJ Shadow: These are the single’s two credited artists, and the megamix weaves in Krush material.
- Roni Size: printed in the CD’s liner notes: “Special thanks: … DJ Shadow, Alex Reece, DJ Krust + Roni Size.”
- “Freestyle”: invented by a file-sharer, presumably because the track is a freestyle-style turntable megamix. Prior to pinning it to the CD, the only copy I found of the track was a YouTube video attributed with the same moniker found on the Monkey Radio tracklists.
One caveat for anyone chasing the audio: the circulating unofficial MP3 runs 7:44 against the CD’s official 8:48; the file was truncated (“the end is gone…”, as a commenter on the 2013 YouTube upload put it).
BONUS TRIVIA: The final track of the CD is mistakenly credited as ‘Dig this Vibe’ but the real track name is ‘Version One.’ Congratulations: that info now lives in your brain.
