Ravishingly beautiful, achingly precious songs and instrumentals, sumptuously presented: the Royal Court Orchestra in 1906 through to a hauntingly soulful Hafez setting by Moluk Zarrabi of Kashan, from 1933.
Meditative, absorbing dance music in true Moritz style — at times seemingly transfixed by its own elements, and minimal almost to vanishing-point, but quickly back ticking, kicking and amassing.
Two sick techno killers, stalking the perimeters of noise; and generous excerpts from a soundtrack to Dreyer’s Vampyr, with Sun Ra in its marrow, alternately driving and motorik, off-the-wall, lost in space.
Stefan Schneider and Sven Kacirek’s scintillating recordings of the Mijikenda tribes, made in different spots in and around Mukunguni village, coastal Kenya: spiritual and healing music, and love-songs.
More open-hearted, bitter-sweet, mash-up postcards to the here and now, from young black London.
Proper Brit Pop.
Cold-sweat compounds of art-funk, baglama high-life, horrorama, yacht.
At its darkest and most driving. The group is clear and unanimous — this is their best yet.
‘The bad influences’, from Bogota, with their third album for us: twenty-eight gorgeous variations of saudade, in a warmly acoustic, post-punk take on Tropicalismo — impromptu, snapshot and sublime.
Brand new recordings, this is majestic, surging, scintillating music — with swing, jump and shout, Sun Ra, Mingus and Gil Evans, Arab-Andalusian music, hip hop and New Orleans funk all coursing through.
‘An album of cathartic intimacy, built around electronic textures and sparse percussion, with White’s gently yielding, half-spoken vocals pitched pleasingly between Laurie Anderson and Joni Mitchell’ (Mojo).
‘Hair-raisingly good… incandescent’ (The Observer).
‘Inventive, fresh and melodic’ 4/5 (The Guardian); ‘bound to be underrated… impeccably edited and segued’ (The Onion); ‘may be the most forward-looking music you hear all year’ (Rolling Stone).
Three deep funk instrumentals — HBE on the opener. Sound-wise, doubly lethal, as alive as vinyl gets. Silvered, silk-screened sleeve.
Two exclusives: Erykah Badu’s irresistible do-over of the euphoric album instrumental There, with Malian synth-freak Tidiane Seck; and a dub by Mark Ernestus. Lovely silk-screened sleeve.
Entirely exclusive music, unique to this release, with a radiant silk-screened sleeve: four from The Marble Downs sessions with Will Oldham, a Scott Walker to start; and a side of unaccompanied folk singing.
An immersive, slashing, ecstatic thumper, just about getting Mars on the radio; and a kind of unhinged marimba and thumb-piano variation, grubbing around manically in half-memories of African polyrhythm.
Lethal footwork from three originators. The A is dancefloor murder, honed and nasty, vintage Chicago and Detroit gone clear across the SA border; the flip is a fierce, futuristic juke vocal collage, hard as nails.
Extra to the LP, with a magnificent, epic, head-scrambling remix, more spaced and spooked than the original. Shackleton’s dream liturgy fully unfolds — an eerie, garbled sublimity, a kind of black-magic plainsong.
The implacable, alien Son Of Sleng Teng — a beast of of a tune, lumbering and snuffling, one-of-a-kind — bleeping, buzzing, knocking, dripping, reverberating… and unresolved in nine minutes.
The two dubstep pioneers at the top of their game. Truly an album, the music is multi-levelled — dark as anything at times, but engrossingly varied and emotionally shaded, always on the move.