Alasdair Roberts, Nancy Elizabeth, Michael Hurley, James Yorkston, Victoria Williams, Richard Youngs: six ravishing, luminous new interpretations. Short-run vinyl sampler, fine pressing, silk-screened sleeves.

‘folk album of the year’ (The Observer); ‘*****  ... not a note is wasted’ (Time Out); **** Mojo; **** Uncut; ‘Compilation Of The Year’ (The Guardian).

Originally released by Epic in 1953.

From the 1950s, when Moondog was homeless and busking in NYC. ‘His later records may be better known, but this is the real shit’ (Byron Coley, The Wire).
Startlingly remastered at Abbey Road.

Originally relelased on the Moondog label in 1955.

A kind of intimate scrapbook of the startling collaboration between the techno maestro and this long-standing musical collective based in Bishkek, devoted to the roots music of Kyrgyzstan. Loose-leaved but balanced, lucid and intimate, it sets out from stunning a cappella and virtuosic komuz and kylak, mouth harp and traditional percussion: not field, but expert studio recordings, using marvellous vintage microphones, made over several days in Berlin. Further, a few of these are deftly treated by Moritz, using Reichian de-synced double-tracking, and discreet effects. Also two ten-minute dubs: a deadly, signature Berlin steppers, plus its version; and an echoing, mystical drum session, recorded live on stage in Bishkek. And a side-long, dream-like summation: the locomotive, oceanic, clangorous, dread Facets.
Ravishing, rooted, searching music; beautifully presented.

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.

At its darkest and most driving. The group is clear and unanimous — this is their best yet.

At its most open, shifting and expressive to date. For all the music’s complexity and deep coherence, freedom is the key. At times it grooves hard; at others it’s lush, romantic.
With Tikiman and Marc Muellbauer.

A handful of LPs signed by Moritz!

Tony Allen, Max Loderbauer and Moritz von Oswald; mixed by Ricardo Villalobos.

Moritz from Basic Channel and Rhythm And Sound, alongside Vladislav Delay (Chain Reaction) and Max Loderbauer (Sahko): a dream crossing of classic Berlin techno, On-The-Corner Miles, Larry Heard, and Can.

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.

Though music journalists made a big deal recently about the release of a 1965 rehearsal tape by Derek Bailey’s Joseph Holbrooke trio with Gavin Bryars and Tony Oxley, those early efforts were mere tentative steps along a cliff edge wearing a line safely attached to Coltrane. There’s still a whiff of jazz to Bailey and Parker’s work with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble up to and including 1968’s Karyobin.
But with the addition of Jamie Muir — the first great free improvising percussionist who didn’t start out as a jazz drummer — and the way-leftfield electronics of Hugh Davies, the MIC leapt right off that cliff.
These six tracks — tight, electric, pointillistic, brilliant, uncompromising and exhilarating — sound like nothing else that came before.
In a word, seminal.

‘***** beautiful, deeply affecting… hard to beat as the year’s most worthwhile reissue’, The Guardian; ‘magnificent… wonderfully austere’, Time Out.

Top-quality AS long-sleeve tees, expertly printed. The colours zing.
‘Heavy weight, 240 GSM, 16-singles, 100% carded cotton. Dropped shoulders, side neck ribbing with twin stitching, cuffed sleeves, side seamed, shoulder to shoulder tape, double needle hems, garment dyed, preshrunk to minimise shrinkage.’
Relaxed fit; very generous sizing. Click through the image for a size guide.

‘The AS Colour Heavy Faded Tee, crafted from 100% carded cotton for durability and comfort. With a heavy 240 GSM weight and garment dyed finish, it features a boxy relaxed fit, dropped shoulders, and twin-stitched wide neck ribbing.’
Click through the image for a size guide.

This is lovely.
Brand new, rambunctious, rootsy, spiritual brass-band music from Lagos, with singing, drums and home-made percussion. 
Obadikah is a group of old friends who play together in the Cherubim & Seraphim and Baptist churches of the Ikeja and Isale Eko districts. A couple of them were founder-members of the Eko Brass Band; they’ve played with pretty much all the key Nigerian reggae artists.
The tunes are mostly traditional Yoruban melodies, often sung at bed-time. The songs are mostly original, sung in Yoruba (though Jomido is an Egun song from the Badagry area of Lagos state).

Fiercely brilliant, slashing, whooping dance music from Oni — all-original, no samples — and a stonking Detroit thumper from the master.

Forgotten masterpieces, out-of-this-world improvisations from the 1920s; and dazzling commissions by Sir Richard Bishop, Six Organs Of Admittance and co. ‘Dextrous, frenzied, fearless… awesome’ (Plan B).

A dazzling survey of the last, bohemian flowering of the so-called Golden Era of Ecuadorian musica national, before the oil boom and incoming musical styles — especially cumbia — swept away its achingly beautiful, phantasmagorical, utopian juggling of indigenous and mestizo traditions.
Forms like the tonada, albazo, danzante, yaravi, carnaval, and sanjuanito; the yumbo, with roots in pre-Incan ritual, and the pasillo, a take on the Viennese waltz, arriving through the Caribbean via Portugal and Spain.
Exhumations like the astoundingly out-there organist Lucho Munoz, from Panama, toying with the expressive and technical limits of his instrument; and our curtain-raiser Biluka, who travelled to Quito from Rio, naming his new band Los Canibales in honour of the late-twenties Cannibalist movement back home, dedicated to cannibalising other cultures in the fight against post-colonial, Eurocentric hegemony. He played the ficus leaf, hands-free, laying it on his tongue. One leaf was playable for ten hours. He spent long periods living on the street, in rags, when he wasn’t in the CAIFE studio recording his chamber jazz-from-space, with the swing, elegance and detail of Ellington’s small groups, crossed with the brassy energy of ska — try Cashari Shunguito — and an enthralling other-worldliness.
Utterly scintillating guitar-playing, prowling double bass, piercing dulzaina, wailing organ, rollicking gypsy violin, brass, accordion, harps, and flutes. Bangers to get drunk and dance to. Slow songs galore to drown your sorrows in, with wildly sentimental lyrics drawn from the Generacion Decapitada group of poets (who all killed themselves); expert heart-breakers, with the raw passion of the best rembetica, but reined in, like the best fado.
Fabulous music, like nothing else, exquisitely suffused with sadness and soul. Hotly recommended.

Sumptuously presented, in a gatefold sleeve and printed inners, with a full-size, full-colour booklet, with wonderful photos and excellent notes. Limpid sound, too, courtesy of original reels in Quito, and Abbey Road in London; pressed at Pallas.

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.

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.

Open-hearted, fresh, lovely, bumptious recordings of women’s singing, from Rang’ala village in southwest Kenya. ‘Dodo’ is a type of traditional Luo music mostly used for entertainment at weddings, drinking parties and wrestling festivals. Songs in praise of the happy couple, the hardest drinkers and the best wrestlers.
Try the magical fourth song, Arum — about barking like a hornbill.

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.