Review: A fantastic dub disco, funk and electro record straight from the heart of North London. First released in 1986, 'Soul Of Haringey' emerged as the sole release on the ultra-rare Advance Level Enterprise imprint, information on which is, even now, extremely difficult to track down and source. Among the featuring artists on the release are Pip Archer, Andrea Lynn, Jennifer Viban, The Curruthers Brothers, and Boss, all of whom are almost equally obscure, and only a few of whom ever went on to release anything else. It's these kinds of records, seemingly unassailed by the material urgencies of working life or careerism, that beguile us the most. 'Time To Boogie' is as raw and uncut as can be, its trilling synth bells and double-claps revealing some early stirrings of UK grime in the track's latter half. Then there's the downtempo soul of 'Hold On To Your Heart' by Lynn, as smooth as smooth can be, while Viban's 'Miracles' is an equally blissful prayer to the electro-disco-funk tutelary god, with its numinous snare bursts and adhesively soft pad divans swearing fealty to the belief in miracles. Boss' and The Curruthers Brothers' contributions are just as creamy, offering two further authentic, homespun falsetto'ers for assuaging heartbreak and redemption.
Review: This EP is the first collaborative work by Andrea Belfi and Jules Reidy. Berlin-based and hailing from Italy and Australia respectively, the duo blends compositional precision with improvisational freedom. During a residency at Berlin's Callie's-a 19th-century factory turned arts space-they and engineer Marco Anulli crafted four expansive tracks in which Belfi's masterful drumming interlaces with Reidy's shimmering guitars and electronic textures. The opener layers just-intoned guitar figures over delicate brushwork and climaxes with a synthetic surge and tracks like 'Oben' and 'Alto' explore shifting grooves, propulsive rhythms and dynamic soundscapes.
Review: Burnt Friedman and Joao Pais Filipe's collaborative efforts began back in 2018. The former using synthesis and electronics to paint subtly but incredibly specific aural pictures, the latter focusing on the drum and rhythmic end of things. At times their music feels entirely designed for the dancefloors of underground electronic clubs, in other moments it's something very different indeed.
This latest EP lives up to those broad brushstrokes. '21-30' is a lush, almost tropical sounding workout that offers a complex percussive pattern, and combines these with gentle shades of melody, harmony, hook and distorted note. '22-105' brings elements of glitchiness and robotics into the mix. Meanwhile, '18-140' would work well as a brooding building tool (or section) of a 'proper techno' mix, with '23-130' bridging gaps between the lot.
Review: Deep house on a 7" is a rather rather thing but this 45rpm certainly is worth your while. It is the first we have heard from Jazztronik, all producer and keysman Ryota Nozaki, since his Universal Language album last year. He has been at this now for 24 years and brings all that know how to these two jams. 'Evoke' is a lively broken beat workout with squelchy bass and improvised jazz keys that are restless and energizing with rich leads. 'Beat Hopper' (The 3rd Session) appears on the flip with more innovative keys and party-pumping broken beats. A tasteful duo for sure.
Review: Richard Barratt aka Parrot aka Crooked Man is one of those artists with an indelible sonic fingerprint yet a diverse array of sounds in his arsenal. Here he offers up a pair of different remixes of the same tune, namely Jim v Crooked Man's 'Phoenix' on Vicious Charm Recordings. His Goth Edit is the one for us - a haunting tune with eerie guitar strings slowly unfolding over swirling electronics and smudged vocal sounds. It's perfect for this time of year when Halloween is just around the corner and is another master stroke from the Sheffield wizard.
Masambakatu (Telephones Sambalearic Street Jam) (8:29)
Coco De Pista (Jogada remix) (6:05)
Cavalo (Audrey Danza remix) (5:52)
Ohne Coco (bonus track) (6:29)
Review: Released last year but recorded back in 2020, Jogada's debut EP, 'Cavalho', fused authentic Brazilian percussion, vocals and instrumentation with musical motifs more associated with Balearica, deep house and saucer-eyed nu-disco. As the title suggests, this belated follow-up sees tracks from that EP get the remix treatment. Norwegian-in-Berlin Telephones steps up with a typically breezy, sun-soaked, tactile and loved-up 'Sambalearic Street Jam' rework of 'Masamabaktu', while Jogada re-animate 'Coco De Pista' as a hybrid Balearic nu-disco/deep samba workout with added sunrise-friendly vibes. Audrey Danza then delivers a trippy, EBM-and-acid-inspired revision of 'Cavalho', before we're treated to a previously unheard cut: the immersive, sun-down ambient bliss of 'Ohne Coco'.
Review: The ninth release from Worst Records finds Jonnah asking, "what makes a being? What tends to be, always, and yet remains never achieved?" across the five adventurous tracks of his limited Mental & Physical EP. It is rhythmically loose, with tough broken beats, dark dubstep and new age infused ambient designs all magian this a glimpse into the future of our world. The mood ranges from uneasy to contemplative, the energies from blissed out to dark and oppressive. It is a well realised sound world that draws you in deep and has you questioning everything.
Noriko Kose & Haruka Nakamura - "I Miss You" (3:31)
Joachim Kuhn - "Housewife's Song" (4:35)
Review: Insense Music Works finished off 2024 on a high by serving up this brilliant pair of wonky jazz sounds. Noriko Kose & Haruka Nakamura's 'I Miss You' pairs pensive piano playing with alluring vocal sounds and raw beats into something heady and beguiling that almost seems to shift space and time with its smeared designs. Joachim Kuhn's 'Housewife's Song' on the flip is a busier sound with mad jazz keys, cascading piano chords and a vibrant sense of energy that flourishes ever brighter as the track unfolds.
Review: 'Incense Music for Dining Room' is the third release in the acclaimed Incense Music compilation series curated by Toru Hashimoto, with artwork by Jiro Fujita and mastering by Calm, who is one of Japan's leading figures in jazz, chill-out and Balearic music. The 7" comes with two standout tracks: side-A features a beautiful reinterpretation of Yusef Lateef's 'Love Theme From Spartacus,' famously sampled by Nujabes on 'The Final View,' while Side-AA delivers a mellow, jazzy take on Joe Thomas' 'Coco' which also known as the basis for Buddha Brand's 'Buddha's Holiday.' It makes for a refined blend of nostalgia, jazz and chillout for discerning diggers.
Review: Sensory Blending is a new collaborative album from Italian collective Aura Safari and Finnish musician Jimi Tenor, born from an impromptu studio session after a Hell Yeah party in Perugia. Despite never having met, their synergy results in a vibrant record brimming with musicality and indelible melodies. Tenor, a psychedelic space-jazz-funk virtuoso, joins forces with Aura Safari's skilled musicians, known for their label regularity and sublime Island Dreams album. From the seductive opener 'Bodily Synesthesia' to the dramatic finale 'Indigo,' Sensory Blending offers a seamless fusion of talents, hinting at potential live performances later this year.
Review: Sensory Blending hears Finnish artist Jimi Tenor and Italian group Aura Safari team up for an impromptu studio shebang in Perugia, Italy, after Tenor's storied but clandestine performance at a Hell Yeah party. Despite no prior connection, the musicians quickly found common ground, forging a vivant fusion of jazz-funk, tropicalia and soul. Tenor's psychedelic style gelled Aura Safari's faster, intuited approach, resulting in such tracks as 'Bodily Synesthesia,' 'Bewitched By The Sea' and 'Lunar Wind', each of which connect seductive grooves and ghost noted keys. Possibly performed live at select events later in the year, the record is a perfect storm of recorded "live feel" Balearica.
Review: Generations of modular might fold in on themselves as legendary Buchla pioneer Suzanne Ciani patches into accomplished French synthesist Jonathan Fitoussi for this outstanding album on Obliques. The title is clearly a tribute to Morton Subotnick, whose own Silver Apples Of The Moon is a true ground zero for West Coast synth albums and as you might surmise Ciani and Fitoussi opt to create something more shapely and inviting than the wild, brilliantly alien tonal mutations Subotnick conjured up back in the 60s. If you're familiar with either artist's work you won't be disappointed, as exquisitely rendered melodic flourishes, delicate spatial processing and subtle textural shifts unfurl around your ears across these eight beautiful pieces of synth perfection.
Review: After an initial collaborative album released in 2019, French instrumentalist-producers JB Dunckel and Jonathan Fitoussi have reunited for a twin rumination on memory, and its necessary dialogue with the present moment. Namechecking such musical memories as the motorik beats and kosmische builds of the 70s, all the way through to Detroit house's signature 4x4 march, the pair offer a starkly minimal, Parisian, post-punky dance record here, mixed in with layered, industrial atmospherics. Active recalls of marimba minimal ('Marimbaloum') and Moogish doom liturgy ('Atlantica') also lay among the memory traces here, just waiting to be rediscovered by both listener and interpreter.
Review: Now here's a rarity for you. Not even many of the most committed megafans know that Brian Eno, Holger Czukay and J.Peter Schwalm, accompanied by Raoul Walton and Jern Atai, performed a secret live music show, outside the esteemed Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, situated in the city of Bonn, in August 1998. Forming a part of the opening party of Eno's Future Light-Lounge Proposal multimedia installation, this furtively-recorded album hears an exclusive slice of incidental "high-altitude food music", of course made during Brian Eno's airborne ambient era. Now reissued via Gronland, this five-piece cut of sophisti-ambi-krauttronica makes for a welcome surprise.
Review: 813251-01
Several music critics have previously described the Allman Brothers Band's At Fillmore East as one of the greatest live albums ever recorded. First issued in 1971, it breathed new life into the band's stalling career and projected them as versatile, energetic live performers with a passion for providing extended, jammed out takes of their own songs. By and large, these heavily bluesy, freewheeling excursions were far superior to anything they'd recorded in the studio, with some going through multiple changes over 10 or 20 minutes. As this audiophile vinyl reissue proves, the album is as impactful, addictive and musically intense as ever, providing an aural snapshot of three famous nights at one of New York's most infamous rock venues of the early 1970s.
Review: Originally released in 1998, Mixmaster Morris & Jonah Sharp's Quiet Logic surprisingly flew under the radar when it came out.- perhaps because of the huge amount of electronic music being released at the time. The pair have some of the most important albums and tracks in their respected genres and are arguably two of the most important figures in the electronic music chill out scene from the 90s, and when you add the input of Haruomi Hosono from Yellow Magic Orchestra on two tracks, it becomes an even more essential listen. Chill out heads unite!
Review: Manchester scene stalwart Martin Fisher AKA Martin Brew has been recording on and off as J-Walk - for a long period alongside Martin Desai, but in more recent times as a solo artist - since way back in 1996. The J-Walk sound has evolved in that time, but throughout he's been devoted to the kind of melodious downtempo sounds that sound perfect when you're weary, blazed or simply in the mood for something laidback and lovely. Mellotronique, his latest album, is synth-heavy, sun-splashed and joyously melodious in tone and sound, with the Mancunian sashaying between mid'80s style Balearic reggae, Rimini-ready post electrofunk cheeriness, sunset electro, sub-heavy electronic trip-hop and slow-motion, sunrise-ready soundscapes. In a word: gorgeous.
Review: Stockport's very own J Walk delivers 'Broken Beauty', a wise musical meditation on the crucial need for beautiful things - people, works of art, you name it - to incorporate some element of ugliness or brokenness. With all tracks in tow produced by Walk aka. Martin Fisher, who controls a massive foundry of instruments and gear - the entire list of over 20 machines has been published online, curios among them being the Boss SYB-5 bass synth pedal, Pocket Operator PO-32 drum machine and even a stylophone for good measure - the resultant Broken Beauty is a fractious but infectious class of tunage; its ten tracks adhere to essential golden means of downbeat chug and cold-waved Balearics, and yet allow such natural beauty to shine without much fuss over polish. If titles like 'Janky Waltz' and 'Botox Fomo' are anything to go by, we may deduce that the attitude going into this one must've been one of gleeful ludicrousness, a key trait to channel if you want to let phaseout guitar pedals flow and freak filtrations wail.
Review: In 2020, Nicolas Jaar composed Piedras for a concert at the Museum of Memory & Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, which honoured the many victims of Pinochet's dictatorship. The project evolved into Archivos de Radio Piedras, a radio play shared via Telegram between 2022 and 2023. In 2024, it became a 24-channel installation at MUAC in Mexico City. The music, partly attributed to the fictional Salinas Hasbun, explores themes of memory and identity. The play unfolds in a future with an internet blackout, where characters use DIY radio to mourn Hasbun's disappearance, with the unstable radio frequencies symbolising shifting truths. Now served up on vinyl, the album is a blend of ambient, found sounds, experimental rhythms and eerie synth design.
Review: Bristol has a lot to answer for when it comes to atmospheric downtempo stuff. The birthplace of trip hop is still commonly associated with the genre decades after its inception, but this shouldn't make anyone think for a second the city has sat idly by gorging on the fatted calfs of Massive Attack, Portishead and the like without pushing further experimentations in the art of sombre, slow, emotional electronica. Jabu are a great case in point, and if the world were different, fairer, and less overwhelmed with band names you can bet your bottom dollar this South West England trio would be household treasures by now. Having released a number of genuinely mesmerising albums packed with meditations on loss, landing on exalted labels such as Blackest Ever Black, here they present a generous helping of unreleased and previously unheard bits and pieces that led to the back catalogue we now have. Tellingly, everything here was always worthy of release, so it's great this has finally happened.
Review: Sydney-to-Vancouver dance debonair Jack J presents Blue Desert, his second album for Mood Hut. Friends of the label will know J's sound - warming house musical pumps come deep future Balearics - and yet on Blue Desert, we hear the sound tempered by a newfound indie vocal performance by J himself, and that's not to mention its expansive tracklist-trajectory, which, when followed in full, details a head-hung but still hopeful tale of rue and recompense. Of the highlights, opener 'Wrong Again' opts for the true-blue choice of a DX7 organ blearily blent with an open chorded jangle guitar and a sequencer-gated trance line, as J muses on taking a past life too seriously; 'Down The Line' brings impressive Oort clouds of reverse reverb and desert new wave; and 'My Other Mind' even echoes Squeeze, as J continues to lyricise over misunderstandings and perspectival shifts on life. Sight of the dance is not lost, however; 'Pink Shoes (part III)' ends things on a gushing iso-stab, rendering the beach disco in clear-as-day clarity, just over the dunes, at the foreshore's end.
Only You Know Why/If You Don't Know Why (Perspective) (bonus track)
Only You Know Why (Taupo mix - bonus track)
Review: It's taken a while, but Mood Hut regular Jack Jutson - the man behind pleasingly hippyish deep house gems 'Something On My Mind' and 'Thirstin' - has finally got round to recording his debut album. Opening the door naturally comes from a similar sonic headspace, though musically his inspirations are a little hazier and more AM radio friendly. There's no attempt to pander to dancefloors; instead, the Vancouver-based producer leisurely escorts us through a range of sunset-ready tracks informed by blue-eyed soul, yacht rock, city pop, ambient and mid-'80s Balearic synth-pop. It's a genuine treat for the senses all told, enhanced on this rare CD edition by the addition of two bonus mixes of 'Only You Know Why': a gorgeously expansive, extended 'Perspective' version and Taupo's woozy, immersive, almost ambient take.
Review: Legendary Norwegian eight-piece Jaga Jazzist always mixed up post-rock, jazz and psychedelia influences in their own unique way. Never more so was that better exemplified than on The Stix. It was the band's third album released back in May 2003 on Ninja Tune with all songs produced by Jorgen Traeen as well as plenty of musicians playing saxophone, flute, clarinet, acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards and viola amongst much more, which means it is a texturally, melodically rich album with plenty of soaring highs and emotional themes that ebb and flow in captivating fashion. This special anniversary reissue comes on orange and red double gatefold vinyl.
Review: From his beginnings as the bassist in John Lydon's post-Pistols band PiL, to collaborations with The Orb and Sinead O'Connor, Wobble is a musician deeply steeped in dub and experimental soundscapes. Crafted in a bedroom studio - as the name would suggest - it blends dub fusion, ethereal wave and global beat into a mystical and introspective journey. Tracks like 'City' show a spectral dub-pop aesthetic, while 'Fading' leans into kosmische abstraction with an ethnic flair. 'Long Long Way' brings an atmospheric mood, contrasting with the minimal, haunting dub of 'Sense Of History' and the organ-driven dirge of 'Hill In Korea'. The industrial textures of 'Journey To Death' add a stark, musique-concrete edge, while the Middle Eastern influences of 'Invaders Of The Heart' create a hypnotic stroll through uncharted sonic terrain. The album crescendos with the hallucinogenic 'Desert Song'. A daring, sombre work that defies easy classification - but demands repeated listening.
Review: For the very first time on vinyl comes Presents The Light Programme, Jah Wobble's extraordinary 1997 descent into downtempo and beat science. Released on his now-defunct 30 Hertz label, The Light Programme showcased an excellent cast of musicians, including Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit, Wire's Clive Bell, conga player Neville Murray, guitarist and synthesist Mark Ferda and the harpist Zi-lan Liao. The Light Programme is an intensely effulgent but at times vitreous record, with Wobble seemingly embracing the worldbeat vogue of the time with a keen, albeit naive fervour. When the tracks aren't so clear cut or obviously mixed, things get more interesting; 'One In 7' is the oddball of choice here.
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