50th Anniversary Reissue; ‘Igbo smoke vinyl’.

Scorcher! An all-time funk favourite of Afrika Bambaataa.
Anniversary edition, with extras.

The song Original Suffer Head — an angry homage to working-class Nigerians — presented in its full-length, 25 minutes, 24 seconds glory, restoring four minutes of ‘lost’ material, including a superb keyboard solo by Fela, which appeared on the original pressing, but has been omitted from subsequent reissues. The version used here starts and finishes with this characteristically visceral, futuristic keyboard work.
This was the first album Fela released under the name Egypt 80 (after disbanding Afrika 70 in 1979).

‘The penultimate album of newly recorded studio material released by Fela before his death in 1997.
‘Like its immediate predecessor, Beasts Of No Nation (also 1989), and its follow up, Underground System (1992), the album finds Fela continuing to campaign for human rights and social change despite the relentless beatings, jailings and general harassment he had received from successive military regimes since the start of the 1970s.’

‘Fela used the cover of Ikoyi Blindness to announce his change of middle name from Ransome, which he now considered a slave name, to Anikulapo, which means ‘he who carries death in his pouch.’ The front cover shows Ransome crossed out and Anikulapo added above it.
‘The cover also announced the Africanisation of Africa 70’s name, changing it to Afrika 70. In the title track, Fela draws attention to the economic chasm separating the haves and have-nots of Nigerian society, contrasting the get-rich-at-all-costs, self-obsessed residents of the prosperous Lagos suburb Ikoyi with the more community-minded, poor inhabitants of the Mushin, Maroko, Ajegunle and Somolu neighbourhoods.
‘On the flip, Slap Me Make I Get Money) rails against the upsurge in police and military personnel assaults on people in the streets of mid-seventies Lagos. Motorists were commonly pulled out of their vehicles and given a whipping for minor traffic offences; police and soldiers were getting away with flagrant corruption in broad daylight.’

‘*****’, The Independent; ‘captivating… Q Recommends’; ‘there is no end of exhilarating music on this beguiling album’, The Sunday Times; ‘full of heartstopping musical twists and turns’, The Beat.

‘*****’, The Independent; ‘a vibrancy and energy that make it impossible to sit still’, Metro; ‘shines from Shina to Shina’, The Beat; ‘CD Of The Week… astonishing’, Daily Telegraph; ‘incendiary’, The Observer.

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.

A rare Saravane-style lam, beautifully sung by Nang Soubane Vongath, and with rocking, virtuoso mouth-organ, with sixteen or so reed pipes, a metre-or-more long.

‘... deliciously haunting… rekindles the spirit of DIY that their British counterparts have so patently forgotten’, The Times; ‘startlingly poignant’, Metro.

‘one of the most charming idiosyncrasies I have heard all year… where truth is seized accidentally and musical shambles are sweet, virtuous and silly… like watching early Bunuel without subtitles’ (Plan B).

‘The bad influences’, from Bogota, with their third album for us: twenty-eight gorgeous variations of saudade, in a warmly acoustic, post-punk take on Tropicalismo — impromptu, snapshot and sublime.

Thirteen and twenty-two minute slices of carnival thunder and lightning from the hill above Port Of Spain in Trinidad. Lengths of steel, assorted bits of metal, African drums. An Honest Jon’s recording.

Balmily sublime bossa nova from 1971, when Nara was living in Paris.
The first LP is spare and intimate acoustic recordings, a bit like demos, but exquisitely poignant, with killing-it-softly singing over delicate guitar accompaniment (and occasional simple piano); the second gives vocals and guitar an orchestral setting, with spacious, sensitively variegated arrangements by Roberto Menescal, Luiz Eça, and Rogério Duprat.
Gorgeous, warmly enveloping music; good for the soul.
An unassuming classic.