With an Actress.

The Bristolian bad boy, ex of Skudge and R-Zone, touting a blazing cocktail of acid mayhem and Wormhole-era Ed Rush. Other bad influences, by turn: Bunker and mid-90s Metalheadz; the tension and darkness of Torque; the Vangelis whoosh.

‘One of the greatest rappers ever to rock a mic, the legendary Ultramagnetic MC touches down in London for a one-away collaboration with We Are The Horsemen, featuring the one and only Kaidi Tatham.
‘From his days in the seminal 1980s Bronx unit Ultramagnetic MCs, through his pioneering development of new conceptual characters and styles in the 1990s (Big Willie Smith, Dr. Octagon, Dr. Dooom, Black Elvis), to his continuous run of radically independent recordings in the 2000s and beyond, Kool Keith defines rap longevity and artistic originality. No one else in hip hop has a comparable record of continuous reinvention, conceptual boldness, and stylistic panache.
‘And after four decades in rap, Keith is still one of the hardest working rappers in the game, perpetually seeking new sounds to spit on and new collaborators from across the musical spectrum. Fresh off the acclaim for his new Black Elvis 2 release, London Is The Place finds Keith riding the Horsemen’s atmospheric, break-toughened riddim and reaching back in time to drop kaleidoscopic, stream-of-consciousness impressions of the Ultramagnetics infamous 1989 tour, before flashing forward to the present in order to namecheck London city, Honest Jons, Nubiya Garcia, and master keyboardist and broken beat pioneer Kaidi Tatham, who contributes trademark jazz keys and bruk steez to the AA side remix. The 12” is closed out by a third version, the Horsemen’s own Kool Jazz Mix, bringing see-sawing organ stabs and a neck-snapping Ultras-sampling hook.
‘Kool Keith, Kaidi Tatham, and We Are The Horsemen, taking it higher and overcoming the pressure with ‘music so progressive’, to quote Keith himself!’
A limited edition.

On vinyl at last, this was originally issued in 2006 in two volumes, as a CDr and a CD respectively, in tiny, numbered runs; now impossible to find, and the stuff of legend.
Kool Keith at his most rawly unhinged, vivid, and strange.

Some nice low-slung electro-funk in amongst a cheerful smorgasbord of styles from Milo Smee, who runs Power Vacuum; ‘all brought together with the clear and succinct Kruton sound. Choppy rhythms, synth solos, medieval samples and a whole lot of history is poured into this release. So grab your goblet and slurp down some Kruton.’

Four DJ Spider remixes for his own imprint, including a Joey Anderson and an Innerspace Halflife.

Right on for the darkness. Twelve minutes of shifting, sunken drones, massive kicks, shimmering veils of free-jazz drums, bells, synths. Warehouse runnings scared witless by Unit Moebius and Shitcluster on the flip.

The Compton rapper nailing it on his major-label debut — brilliant story-telling, intimate and natural, but ruminative and densely rhymed — with blaxploitation-style settings by Dre, Pharrell, Just Blaze and co.

Epic, grooving, extravagantly creative, perfectly attuned blends of complex mbalax drumming, field recordings, thumping kick-drum, and cosmic, bubbling, jamming synths and electronics.
The opening is suitably liminal, haunted by a diachronic sense of times past, present, and to come: ancestral ghosts, scratched playback, scraps of old recordings, voices strangulated or just out of range; puttering drums; futuristic, kosmische keys. Part II picks up the pace; III gives the drummers some, and heightens the atmosphere of enchantment. Jon Hassell’s Fourth World music courses through a kind of Dream Theory In Dakar.
Toco SOS, the second side, is a thumping, throbbing, mesmeric future-classic; perfect for fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n on the Autobahn… in a spacecraft. Expert hand percussion, call-and-response singing, bin-trembling foot-drum, spaceways keys. Sleekly funky as prime Popol Vuh.
Both sides range expansively by way of Berlin, where Lamin resided for a few years: you can hear something of T++’s brilliant, landmark HJ record on the A, and elements of Mark Ernestus’ crucial Ndagga project, on the B.
Half an hour of stunning music; in a beautiful sleeve, with mirror lettering, and an intricate spot-gloss rendition of salt crystals, laid over a photograph of the salt mines at Lac Rose, outside Dakar.