Making tracks

MUSICAL JOURNEY Kon (left) & Amir

Amir Abdullah loves telling tales of his record-buying excursions through New York City. There was that time, for instance, when he stumbled upon a batch of rare Latin records while getting keys replicated in a Bronx hardware store. Then there are his visits with a Caucasian doctor from Queens who moonlights as a dealer of rare African vinyl. “When I first moved to New York from Boston in the mid-’90s, I’d just walk around all day in the summers going to stoop sales,” says Abdullah, one half of the rare-groove DJ duo Kon & Amir.

Such reminiscences lead one to assume that Abdullah and partner Christian “Kon” Taylor’s Off Track compilation series—in which each installment is titled after one of the city’s five boroughs—is composed of rare records dug up in the corresponding areas. In fact, the latest addition to the series, Off Track Volume Two: Queens, along with the duo’s previous Bronx edition (next up: Brooklyn, in winter 2009), is essentially a spiffed-up continuation of On Track, a series of homemade, subway-themed mix-tapes that established their cred in the late ’90s and the early years of this decade.

That collection, which featured obscure records sampled in well-known hip-hop songs, eventually caught the attention of London-based imprint BBE, which tapped Kon & Amir to cocurate (along with Japan’s DJ Muro) the 2006 compilation The Kings of Diggin’. The title of that release referred to the pair’s status among so-called crate diggers: hip-hop-minded collectors who seek out rare breakbeats. However, both Abdullah and Taylor bristle at the term and are quick to point out that their DJ sets are geared more toward stimulating the ass than impressing the brain. “I hate being labeled a ‘crate digger,’” says Taylor, who has produced records for Boston rappers Edo G and Rip Shop and is working on a project with British nu-disco figure Trus’me. “It’s such a pigeonhole term. What do you think, you’re gonna book me and I’m gonna show up with fuckin’ Wu-Tang samples? It’s much deeper than that.” While some tracks on Volume Two may come from rarer-than-rare private-press LPs and singles, they’re all stone-cold dance-floor heaters, from the earnest roller-rink funk of Angelo Tinsley’s “Get Down with Me” (selected by Kon) to the moody Nigerian disco of Theadora Ifudu’s “Hello There” (on Amir’s disc). While Taylor’s mix of ’80s boogie from no-names like Jay W. McGhee and the Fabulous Conti Family might not have a link to Queens, Abdullah says he associates his African-themed selection with the borough because of the aforementioned doctor-slash-dealer.

“You gotta get a reference from somebody else before he’ll let you in to look at his records,” says Abdullah, who by day manages Brooklyn magazine Wax Poetics’ recently launched reissues label. “He just loves African music; I guess that’s how he relieves stress. So that’s the Queens connection. But I also got lots of these records in Manhattan—I went into this store and some guy from Benin had literally just come in and sold all his records.”

But while the linkage between the songs and the borough is tenuous, Abdullah says he hopes to make future installments tie in better with their assigned areas—for example, acknowledging Staten Island’s hefty Italian presence with a set of Italodisco. “There were quite a few American servicemen stationed in Italy who recorded albums in the ’60s and ’70s that are super rare,” he says, suggesting another possible route to covering the fifth borough. “When we do our comps, we do a lot of research and try to make sure that all or most of the songs have never been on a compilation before. Which is hard, because everyone and their mother is putting out comps these days.”

Off Track and Off Track Volume Two are available from waxpoetics.com. Kon & Amir host a monthly party, Night Train, at APT. For news on other Kon & Amir gigs, check myspace.com/konandamir.

More in Clubs