On Sunday, May 6th 2007, we are were organizing a sort of "Boemle Day" in Basel. From 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. you can there was the opportunity to obtain memorabilia from Boemle's estate on our public Boemle Flea Market (page in German only). From 6 p.m. on the private Boemle Farewell Party for Daniel's personal friends will take took place at the Kuppel club. If you were one of his friends and you aren't weren't invited, then it's most likely because we don't didn't know your address in the first place. You can still let us know that you'd like to come you exist.

By the way, Boemle's site www.editionovembre.ch is for unknown reasons not available at the moment. Possibly the hosting service has timed out... I will move the site to my server soon. Daniel's farewell card as well as our press communiqué (in German) are still available here though:www.machata.ch/boemle

Dänu Boemle's farewell card
Saturday 24 February 2007, 17:30

Dänu has designed a farewell card for all of us shortly before he passed away. I have uploaded a web version to my site: www.EditioNovembre.ch

Dänu "Sleepy Dan" Boemle
Wednesday 21 February 2007, 17:00

7.11.1960-21.2.2007
Old friend, I'm going to miss you!

Record store updated
Thursday 18 January 2007, 16:00

Today I have made a significant update to my Shop. Besides of updating the lists of records for sale, I have finally completed my new grading system: instead of my custom grading I'm now using the well known record grading system according to the Goldmine Standard. Also completed is the inclusion of the original catalogue numbers for each record. The New Arrivals HTML page now contains cover artwork as well (unfortunately it will take much longer to load on slow internet connection). And of course, other cover artwork has been added or updated in the WebShop, in many cases now the actual photo or scan is available instead of an inaccurate one. Last but not least, the prices have been reduced. Oh, one more thing: I plan to auction selected records on eBay in the near future.

News from the record covers gallery
Thursday 30 November 2006, 18:00

Today I have updated the record covers gallery. There are lots of new compilation images, mostly old vinyl soul and disco sampler. Also there is the new section for Czechoslovak records. It will grow quite fast, analogically to my Funky Czech-In blog.

Apropos blog: it's seems to be quite a success, considering its special topic; in fact it's not a "weblog" in a sense of a diary at all, it's rather an ever growing archive of my knowledge of Czechoslovak pop and jazz music of the last century. The November statistics report an average of 73 visits or 139 hits each day.

The Funky Czech-In blog
Wednesday 6 September 2006, 20:00

A new MP3 blog has gone online: Funky Czech-In, conceived and executed by yours truly. As the title hints, it's all about funky music from former Czechoslovakia. I plan to post weekly updates so you might want to subscribe to one of its RSS feeds. Happy fonk-in!

The new arrivals have been supplemented with another 50 200 records: jazz, rock, funk, classical music, Czech oldies...

It seems that the gallery is quite a success. It generates a lot of traffic and I have received some positive feedback via e-mail or personally.

Now the time was right for an update. Instead of the cryptical record titles generated from the image file names, the AppleScript which writes the HTML code now fetches the real record titles from my database. It also recognizes if a record is available for sale. (Credit for the original script goes to Optima System, the makers of PageSpinner, my favorite HTML editor. There may exist various "more elegant" shareware HTML editors out there, but none of them is as flexible as PageSpinner because of its AppleScript possibilities! If you know how to use it, that is.)

While we're at it, I'd also like to recommend another "gallery generator" called Galerie. While it wasn't the right tool for my record covers, it's great for creating photo galleries from full-sized images. Galerie is freeware and runs only on Mac OS X (in fact it's also based on AppleScript). It's compatible with iPhoto, GraphicConverter, iView Media and Extensis Portfolio.

Other news

Recently I went "shopping". Additionally to machata.ch, this site is now available under the domains machata.eu, machata.biz, machata.info and machata.org (and in case you didn't notice yet, you can also view it as loukash.com since 2005).
I have also set up a subdomain frans.machata.eu for my father who's living in Danmark. For now you can see only a few family photos there. I'm waiting for my father to send me some more content. In fact I'd like him to present some of his artwork.
By the way, my wife has a subdomain, too: rita.machata.ch

Next, I'll be adding some info about my most recent musical activities. This is the beginning.

Recently I have been contacted by US rapper Chill E.B. via e-mail. He found out that I have posted a picture of his record cover from 1994 in my record covers gallery and he was very pleased about that. Although in fact I don't even own that whole record, only the 12 inch maxi single "Menace To Society". Nevertheless, this is still one of my favorite hip hop records.

Chill E.B. has a new web site: chillebentertainment.com
Obviously he is also working on a new album, the first one since 1994 "Born Suspicious".

The record covers gallery has been updated. I have corrected a few typos, added a couple of new images and on the other hand removed a couple of rather irrelevant ones.

Additionally, the favicon should be finally visible in the URL field of compatible browsers now (e.g. Safari). (If it still doesn't show up for you in Safari, quit Safari, go to folder ~/Library/Safari/ and delete the folder "Icons". Of course, you will be deleting all other favicons that you have collected over time as well, but that's not so dramatical...)

The chronological history of the legendary Swiss group Ugly Bluz ...ected is now online (German only for now!).

I have created a simple RSS Feed (XML). To be informed about changes on this web site, especially when the Records New Arrivals page would change, you can subscribe to it using a special RSS reader. The feed doesn't display the complete content of a page though, only a short text message that something has changed.

Get an RSS reader: Safari 2 (part of Mac OS X Tiger), NetNewsWire Lite (Freeware for Mac OS X) or any other one for Mac or Windows.

Holy moly! It was over four years ago since I have uploaded the first "beta" version of this site and even six years since creating my very first world wide web "homepage" over at homepage.mac.com. In the meantime I was coding hard (er, sometimes) and I have learned a lot. So now please let me present machata.ch version 1.0.

That's right, this site is finally in a state like it was meant to be from the very beginning, and even more. Sure, there still might be some content missing here and there, but basically all links have been linked, all images loaded and all sections translated to English.

Of course, that's not all there is. I'm planning to add more text content to the music and to the "other" section soon, albeit mostly in German for now; it was hard enough for me to actually write all that stuff in German, folks... I'll also continue updating the design section while I'll be scanning more of my older artwork or converting old documents to PDF (some are even over 15 years old, originally created with PageMaker 3 or MacDraw!)

Thanks to the larger web space capacity of my new hosting service provider I'm now able to upload more files to the download section. More mp3 files and useful small AppleScripts will be added eventually.

I'm also playing with that idea of launching an mp3 blog, in order to introduce the world to Czech and Slovak jazz'n'funk music of the seventies. Although there were not too many great tunes records back then, there's sho'nuff of that funky stuff to feed a weekly music blog for about one year. We'll see. Let me know what you think.

And now: enjoy the "new" web site, and thanks for your visit.

(Oh, and don't forget to check out the new arrivals and buy some old jazz and soul records.)

Lukas (a.k.a. Lou Kash)

Due to the host switch I have finally enough web space now, so I have uploaded my "collection" of record cover thumbnails (128x128 pixel) and created a temporary gallery. There are about 3000 images. Have fun!

After a longer break for health reasons, I have added a couple of new arrivals again. Enjoy the shopping! (The WebShop itself still remains in German language as it is a limitation of the software.)

By the way, since the beginning of October I have moved this web site to a new hosting service. Which opens up completely new web design possibilities. (if I will have time to work on it, that is...)

The English pages of the Shop section are now finally online!

About the half of the new arrivals from last winter has been catalogued and is now available for sale. There are lots of jazz and latin LPs from the seventies and the eighties. Another 100 LPs will be available within the next few weeks, as well as dozens of funk, soul and oldie 45s.

Enjoy the shopping! (The WebShop itself remains in German language as it is a limitation of the software.)

Alternatively you can always download the PDF list for offline reading and printing.

I have retired my DJ-crate. But only the crate and nothing but the crate. Since several months I have been digitalizing my vinyl records and converting them to mp3 and AAC format. Since December 2004 I'm deejaying with my iBook only. Actually now I should call it "mp3J Lou Kash".

Well, I'm getting older and more comfortable. Still, let's keep that "DJ"...

This page is now a kind of a diary, also known as "blog".

Well, due to a lot of graphic design orders (which is of course a great thing in the first place) we didn't get very far with the planned updates of this website. Let's see if we will make it until November...

The whole web site has been completely rebuilt.

Some parts are not finished yet, especially the English version, but we are working on it constantly. Updates will follow almost daily. We might be ready by September 2004...

Absolutely groundbreaking new feature is our new Online Record Shop (aka "LouKaShop"). Please note that it is available only as a "germenglish" hybrid, due to software limitation.

You can look at more color in the graphic departement.