An all-time Italo Disco club classic — beloved by Carl Craig and numerous house and techno deejays — made in 1983 by three post-punks looking for a new direction, aided by the producer Mauro Malavasi (famous at that time for hits with Macho, Peter Jacques Band, Change, Luther Vandross, Ritchie Family…).
Four versions, including Frankie Knuckles’ 1987 Powerhouse Mix.

Two spaced-out, synthed-up, house tearaways; a chunk of totally fucked-up dancehall; dub techno. A guitar solo and tincture of Fleetwood Mac to boot. TTT measures.

Illmatic cultists mithered about this 1996 follow-up, but it’s aged magnificently (and they were wrong).
‘Amidst production from heavy hitters like Dr. Dre, Havoc of Mobb Deep and DJ Premier, Nas weaves evocative narratives of gang warfare, downtrodden neighborhoods, drug deals gone awry, and gangsta triumph, against a backdrop of samples from Sam Cooke, Etta James, the Isley Brothers, and even Chuck Mangione. With guest turns from Lauryn Hill, AZ, Foxy Brown, and Mobb Deep; classics like Street Dreams and If I Ruled The World.’

Nas lost his way a bit in the nineties.
Out in 2001 Stillmatic was a triumphant attempt to regain the ground charted by his debut LP Illmatic, seven years earlier. Radio friendliness went out the window: the sound of the underground was back, with songs about politics and ghetto life.
Producers like Large Professor, DJ Premier, L.E.S., and Trackmasters stepped up; AZ, Mary J. Blige and Amerie put in strong shifts.
Premier re-organizes Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack to deadly effect on 2nd Childhood. Both Large Profs are killers. Ether disses Jay-Z in fine style.

Two teenagers’ amapiano music from Gauteng province in South Africa, drawing on jazz, folk, afro, deep and tech house, kwaito, and dibacardi… but sounding like none of them.

Top-notch deep house in a limited, one-sided, numbered edition, the flip silk-screened.

‘Here, again, it’s the odder and more elemental devotion to semi-narrative, ambient, and concrète sounds that we loved in Pomegranates — though Telas is more refined, with less sudden shifts and vignettes. An hour of self-reflective music is shaped incrementally; building and collapsing across the four sides.
‘Telas evokes a kind of monastic retreat. Where Pomegranates seemed epic in its scope and shifting scales, this album conveys images of quieter moments spent tending to a vegetable patch within a cloistered garden, perhaps, or the threading of a tapestry with filigree. Nicolás moves slowly and deliberately throughout, manipulating gauzy fibres and room-tone, or fluttering around his cryptic actors, so that when bursts of clarity and emotion appear they take on a deeper character.
‘There’s a greater sense of contemplation and patience in the album’s logic, pointing to a conception of art, melody, and sound which is continuously under construction. Together with sister-album Cenizas, and recent Against All Logic material, it feels like there’s a centre being defined and meditated upon.’