It was waaaaaaaaaaay back in 1997 that Kerrap! made one of their greatest moves to date. Admittedly, they still knew what metal was then, but the warning signs of what was to come were there. However, this didn't stop someone in the Kerrap! offices thinking of a special tie-in with the Dutch branch of Roadrunner Records. They had planned a one-off compilation of (largely) unreleased stoner rock, designed to be released only in the Netherlands. This compilation was called "Burn One Up!", was subtitled "Music For Stoners", and featured a huge 40-ton American truck on the cover.

Kerrap! instantly thought "The people of Britain can't be deprived of this fantastic CD!" (bet you wouldn't catch them thinking that way now...), and set up a special offer where it was possibly to buy the compilation by sending an application form and some cash to Kerrap!

Instantly, I sent off for it, though I had very little experience of stoner rock at that point. The compilation arrived within days, and was stunningly brilliant - showcasing established bands such as Cathedral, Fu Manchu, Karma To Burn and Sleep, alongside the (then) emerging Queens Of The Stone Age and Floodgate, topped off with unknown but masterful bands such as Slaprocket, Blind Dog and Hideous Sun Demons.

Four years later, prompted by Carl Edlund Anderson raving about a Danish band called Gas Giant, I took a look around stonerrock.com, and found various tracks by some (by now) very well-known names. So I downloaded a few tracks by bands I'd heard of, and packaged them onto a CD, which remained glued into my CD player for a good few weeks, before the arrival of new albums from Entombed and Clutch forced it to give way... but the revolution had started.

Downloading the entire archive, which at the time was (by and large) composed of 128+ kb/s MP3 tracks, resulted in three more compilations of the highest quality. Then the archive grew so large that the whole lot had to be resampled down to 56 kb/s - which meant no new compilations from anything added from that point on.

Fear not - I am always on the look for freely available stoner rock tracks out there, and a new compilation series, under a different name, is in the pipeline.

Jimmer 8/11/2002

(Update: This new series is The Lava Lamp Chronicles...)