Four dazzling, extended engagements with mbalax master-drumming.
The contribution from Holy Tongue is chase-the-devil steppers — thumping, clangorous, reverberating — super-charged with energy and atmosphere. From the off, drummer Valentina Magaletti detonates a hard rain of small bombs, rounds of fire, ticking fuses. Musical co-ordinates are somewhere between classic On-U Sound crew like African Head Charge, The Mothmen, and Creation Rebel, and the experimental funk of the Pop Group and 23 Skidoo, at their funkiest. Thrillingly, the two dubs are increasingly deranged.
Adjusting the same wavelengths as her superb Workaround LP, Beatrice Dillon plays spaced-out, abstract synth-work against the bodily physicality of the ancient, shifting mbalax rhythms. The music is poised, mindful, tentative; but also limber, fleet, and magical.
Phantasmagorical and efflorescent, Lamin Fofana’s one-two is simply stunning. Both excursions are wide-open, beautiful, epic, and propulsive — the first mix is banging and headlong, the second more syncopated and serpentine — teeming with freshly sublime, funkdafied updates on Jon Hassell’s Fourth World possible musics.
The two parts of LABOUR’s Etu Keur Gui engage the same sequence of drum patterns (called bakks) from different perspectives. The duo performed portions of this piece at the opening ceremony of the Dakar Biennial in 2022, at the Grand National Theater, with thirty sabar players from the family of Doudou Ndiaye Rose. This Wolof phrase for the inside-yard of a home — a meeting-place, an architectural breather — doubles here as a metaphor for inner space on a metaphysical level; and Pan Sonic, Muslimgauze, Zoviet France, early Shackleton… all ghost across the threshold.

Performing live at the Arnolfini in Bristol, on Saturday February 19.

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.

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 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.

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.

Baby Whale doses a cross between classic Chicago house and E2-E4 with a no-prisoners boogie bassline and piano chords glistering in from Rimini. JV’s signature spaced-out production assures a head-turning dancefloor banger for the 4am crew.
Adam & Eve is an intriguing mix of exotica and Arthur Russell. ‘The sound of Matisse,’ says the label.

Pure worries from Leipzig — three club burners steeped in Detroit traditions, distilling the explorations in collective, nervy hypnosis of KM live sets. As the music slowly unfurls, there he is at every turn, subtly tweaking its parameters, redistributing its weight, pricking its grooves into a state of utterly infectious perpetual movement.
The two visions of Chilazon track opposite pathways: the first is twelve minutes of gorgeous, dubwise, aquatic techno, spattered with kicks and razor-sharp hi-hats, and smeared with ghostly echoes; then a terse mesh of broken drums, escalating to a quiet yet feverishly intense peak. Lanthanum is calligraphic swordplay, its toms and bass stabs warily circling one another in a graceful steppers’ dance, spaced-out and fathoms-deep.