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.
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’ve left it in, but take it with a grain of salt.
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.
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.
