With ERP and Convextion remixes!
Stunning new music from Istanbul!
A twenty-four-minute wig-out you can dance to — wild baglama improvisation and mystical male-unison singing, atop the propulsive mass of a Berlin half-stepper, with turbulent detours into dub, radiophonics and psychedelia.
‘Kime Ne’ means ‘so what’, ‘what’s it got to do with you’. The song adapts verses from the seventeenth-century poet Kul Nesimi, wistfully invoking the Melami strain of Sufism as a touchstone of humility and tolerance, in dark times. ‘Insanlar’ means ‘humankind’... ‘The Human Beings’.
RV’s mixes are expert, taut and hard-grooving. 2 is the more agitated and dubwise.
Nearly an hour of music, on three sides; the fourth is etched with Katharina Immekus’ lovely artwork.
Knockout stuff, honestly.
Heartically dubwise, rugged and raw essays in classic grime, UK garage and dubstep from a new London-Berlin collaboration, with stuff like Horsepower’s In Fine Style galloping through its nervous system.
‘Combining steppy dance music, lush detail and a diaristic tone, Jack Chrysalis’ debut album dials between music that is destined to catch the ear of the club-goer and the heart of the dreamer.
‘His signature propulsive mutations of organic techno and UK garage sound strongly in tracks like Another Year and Coldharbour, but Chrysalis threads in more introspective moments, which llend a sense of atmosphere and a deeper running mood to the album’s overworld, heightening endorphin hits from the garage swing and affording a little more bittersweetness to its textures and secrets.
‘Whether in rush or retreat, each track on this album emerges with its own emotional resonance. There’s a sense of seasons turning, or a twilight quality that’s hard to fully pin down. “Owl music” became shorthand for Jack’s tunes, a way for Mana to capture a prescient, nocturnal flight within their environment.’
Up from down under, following crucial releases on his own Body Language imprint, LJ shifts gears and steers his intricate sound-world — torn between house and ambient, with Larry Heard’s Alien LP coursing through — into deeper, more techno-infused waters.
Watch out for The Centre Of Time, evoking over its twenty minutes both the arctic vapour of Vletrmx21-vintage Autechre and the expansiveness of Vangelis in full flight.
Next-level stuff from Berceuse Heroique.
A gospelized, autobiographical collage of raps, beats, modern jazz and songs, featuring the in-demand drummer alongside an expansive roster of collaborators bringing together artists from his hometown of Houston (vocalists Corey King, Lisa E. Harris, Fat Tony, Jawwaad Taylor), those he became close to over several years living in LA (Sam Gendel, Zeroh, Mic Holden, Josh Johnson, fellow International Anthem artist Carlos Niño), and other creative partners from his life-long journey in sound (Chassol, Svet, Kenneth Whalum).
‘Rooted in his faith, Jamire opens the album with Hands Up, a devotional hymn cut against the stark reality of the modern world that sounds like an apocalyptic middle-grounding of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly and Merry Clayton’s Gimme Shelter. Whether in the rousing, spiritual Just Hold On or the fluid verses of Fat Tony on Safe Travels, the music exists in the tension between higher realms and social realities — what Jamire calls the “duality of a personal thing and what I’m seeing in my community, in the Black community, as a Black man.” ‘
A stirring, percussive four-tracker. Wintry and submersible; smudged with mist, then silvered and clear as a bell, by turns. Bitten Dream is dark, atmospheric, hypnotic; Via Tekh summons vintage Objekt; Shrine despatches twisted 8-bit granularity into early Livity Sound and Carrier territory; lulling, ambient Catharsis lets go.
‘Imagine the opposite of a snake shedding its skin: slithering among the debris of 21st-century music, a porous body, its viscid skin picking up bits and pieces along the way. Rusty, discarded remnants; scraps. Amongst them the jewels of crowns, unglued and fallen from grace, now recovered by this makeshift form. Where does a body end? Does it end where these prostheses begin?
‘This Soma — ‘body’ in Greek — is a palimpsest. Up close you can trace all sorts of DNA microarrays across its surface. Bristol voices, Detroit electro hums, the amen break, an all-encompassing dub haze. As with all palimpsests, they are simultaneously one and a multitude. The body lives, its prostheses live. The body moves.’
A new label from Stefan Schwander (out of Harmonious Thelonious) and his mate, cooked up during their deejay sets at the Salon Des Amateurs in Dusseldorf.
Johenson chips in an infectious, glitchily dubwise, somewhat sacrilegious crossing of ska and Rhythm & Sound.
On the flip, Leroy Versions clops squelchingly East, bleeping and bubbling, with minor keys and stately, trombone-led brass.
Good fun and beautiful looking, too.
Bumpin’ citizen JFM knocks back some bleep before trumping his FXHEs with two sides of rough, get-loose house like we like it. Warmly recommended.
“My dad had a sound called Billy The Clown alongside Fatman Sound in the sixties. I found JTS and Music House (mastering and dubplate studios). JTS is run by Keith who owns Jah Tubby’s, a sound that started in 1971. Then you had Chris at Music House who had a band called Black Slate, he was doing dubs for all the reggae men.
“When I found Music House, it was easy. I told Chris, ‘this is the new thing coming, it’s called hardcore’. When he first heard it, he said ‘this is mad music man’. I said ‘Chris, this is the future’. He found it a bit mad because he was used to cutting reggae and this new hardcore stuff was a bit noisy for him but over time he got used to how I wanted the cut loud.”
“The first person to get all my dubs was Top Buzz, reason being Mad P is my older brother who worked with Mikey B and Jason Kaye. We started together in London. We said, ‘right, you lot run the DJ thing and I will pump you with the dubplates from Ibiza Records.’ That’s how Ibiza grew so quick and Top Buzz grew at the same time.”
A new album by one half of the mighty Pilotwings crew. Guillaume Lespinasse convenes a sublimely alluring, ambient seance, invoking the spirits of Jon Hassell and Terry Riley, as befits the soundtrack of a dreamt Jacques Rivette movie. Imagine an impossible, questing collaboration between Les Disques Du Crepuscule and deep ECM. Imagine the long-awaited return of Berceuse Heroique and pinch yourself.