The saying 'everyone and their mother is releasing records' is equally often used now as the number of records it criticizes. And as the amount of records that is being pushed to customers is beyond anyone's overstanding, it's inevitable, that eventually one can't know everything out there. This is as valid for the US as it is for most other markets with a healthy hip hop scene. Now in Australia, one Draino of the Puah Hedz, started to continuously taking notes and writing down the information he was able to get on what's happening in the OZ, back in 1994. First it was only for his personal use, as it was him that wanted to have a resource about all Australian artists he heard of, and the records they released. After years of tedious updating, a website, the plan was to stop the project. But eventually and luckily Draino found that the time was right to give this encyclopedia to Australia, as much as every hip hop head around the globe, that is interested to find out what happens and happened in the down under.

What Draino releases with "The OZ Cella Version I", is a unique gallery, that tries to do a roll call of the momentary status, capture it as much for the future as well as it's a contemporary guide and overview of the active Australian artists, for the present fan. And what this CD-Rom is giving you is short profiles on those, including a pic, discography and most of the time a short mp3 snippet of one of the artists tracks, as well as a huge flyer gallery, or in numbers: 370+ artists discographies; 100+ profile pics; 90+ official releases and their credits; 80+ shows flyers with line-ups; 100 mp3s (20 second snippets); as well as statistics on Australia's most productive hip hop artists.

Benefiting from the simplicity of html programming, there are links throughout the 'site', that allow the reader to jump from one crew member to the crew's page, to the flyers, to another member, to..., well, you get the idea. The audios are short but allow a glimpse that make one eager to hear more. And with a list of all the appearances of the artist on other people's tracks, you get the means to do research, as well as a reference to see if your collection is complete.

However, this is called the Version 1.0 for some reasons too. There are a couple of thirsts, that we hope will be satisfied on a hopefully coming up Version 2. What is missed are things like contact information on the artists and labels, a history of Australian hip hop. These are the main things. Other things that could be added, like artists and label profiles, short write ups on the albums, more snippets, these things demand an editorial staff, that hopefully can be found, enabling this Cella to go further.

There's an ocean of content to be discovered on here, and we hope that this idea inspires other countries to do something similar, with obviously the effort being the more enormous, the bigger the local scene is. However, Draino shares something with us, that is not just showing his love for his homeland scene, but that can maybe, in one way or the other, bring it closer together.

"The OZ Cella Version I" is available directly from Draino, for AUS$10 / US$7. If you are interested in picking it up, send a self addressed envelope to : Draino; PO BOX 1148; Surrey Hills North, 3127; Victoria, AUSTRALIA