Weather.com is full of shit. Yesterday it was supposed to be humid and muggy, but turned out to be cold and wet, leaving me miles from my apartment throughout the day, freezing my ass off in a cold rain with a broken umbrella and a light t-shirt. Today it’s supposed to be raining, but it’s a gorgeous, sunny day, bordering on 80 degrees.

I’m not saying this because I care all that much about the weather, or talking about the weather, for that matter. I’m saying this because I have to plan the music I’m listening to throughout the day by the weather. Not solely the weather, but it’s a factor. It’s tough to listen to 70s Cuban drum circles in the pouring rain on a Monday in New York City, and it would feel just as out of place to put on some Portishead or something now that it’s balmy and sunny out.

So in a rush to find the right tunes to listen to on the train to work this morning, I loaded up Frank of the Voodoo Funk blog’s latest mix of African rarities, “Life Is A Game”, because funk and afrobeat is perfect for a bright summer day. Man, what insane sets these are. For those who don’t actively read the B&C and missed Morris’s nod to the site, Voodoo Funk a blog run by Frank, a DJ from Berlin who specializes in funk 45s (and founder of the Soul Explosion party), who gave up the spot-rockin’ DJ’s life to move to Africa and dig for rare records. He writes about his experiences traveling through Africa, and post mixes of rare tracks for the rest of us to catch up on. His mixes are fantastic and his stories are interesting. I really liked the piece about Mr. Mafa’s record store: “Record stores or “recording studios” in Africa usually aren’t places where records are sold but where you can order custom made mix tapes put together from the owner’s record collection.”

From Frank’s Voodoo Funk bio:

I used to run the Soul Explosion. A party in Berlin for those who enjoy raw hard and rare Funk 45s. Before that I hosted the infamous sleazefest Vampyros Lesbos in NYC but that would be another story… The Soul Explosion started in 2000. In the summer of 2005 I turned the night over to my friend Mark and left Europe to dig up funk records even more obscure and elusive than US Funk 45s: I moved to Guinea on the coast of West Africa where I retired as a DJ and dedicated my entire time to the pursuit of African Funk Records. This blog is about my travels and experiences in a region that despite being plagued by civil wars corrupt governments and other diseases has so much more to offer. Maybe this site will even inspire You to buy a plane ticket and come to visit where we all came from. You might even find things more valuable than the rarest records and sometimes you won’t even have to dig through dusty boxes to find them.

I know this column/blog is titled “Purveyor of Funk and Other Fine Vibes”, but I think this guy is the true purveyor of funk. So if you feel like reaching a little further out there in your listenings and blog-readings today, check out Voodoo Funk and get downloading.

As an added bonus, after chatting about Poly Rythmo with my good friend and one of Miami’s finest DJs and crate diggers, Mr. Brown, he shot me a YouTube video of a track with a sick beat and a crazy video involving puppets. It’s worth checking out for the song along, but the video might just make your day. It made mine.