A compilation inspired by the fabulous sound-system, record-collecting culture of the northern cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla, where ricocheting champeta, highlife, soukous, mbaqanga, zouk, soca, and cumbia blare through stacks of hand-painted speakers, in street-corner, neighbourhood bailes.

Vivid, unflinching film of two annual Haitian Vodou pilgrimages — for Ezili Danto, goddess of love, art and passion, and her old man Ogoun, god of war, iron, healing. Ecstatic, bloody, intensely musical.

Tear-up cumbias from this mighty label’s treasure-rooms, handsomely sleeved.

The guitarist’s debut album, inspired by a road trip through Brazil, taking in a Sun City Girls show in a remote former gay club, and a visit to a spiritual healer. He leads upright bass, drums, vibraphone, saxophone and percussion.

‘I decided that I would try to forge, in my own way, from my references, from my universe and from the collective intelligence and sensibility that surrounded me, fundamental melodies, repetitive, minimal, hypnotic rhythmic and harmonic patterns that would be crossed by some sort of improvisation, something that referred to a reality that existed before my individual history, that linked to the life of other places and other times.’

‘unique and beguiling…evocative and profound… music of rare depth’ (The Wire).
‘taps into the common ground between meditative, ambient and trance musics… delightful’
(Chris May, All About Jazz).

Headlong, monster guagancos, descargas and cumbias, with pumping electric bass, Joe Arroyo at the mic, badarse metal percussion, tumbadora and timbales, trumpets, guitar, piano, Michi’s sax and clarinet. Rough!

Funkdafied, discofried, cosmic soca-boogie from 1984.  Let’s Get It Together is a monster.

Wonderful, previously-unheard recordings by the legendary Bahamian guitarist, at his peak in 1965, made at his only New York concert, at home in Nassau, and in a Manhattan apartment. Gripping, one-off playing, continuously stepping out of line, or surprising you with accents, like Monk; rough, enraptured singing in the age-old tradition of local sponge fishermen, with startling irruptions of humming, babble and scat.

Bangers drawn from the bootleg compilation LPs — ‘pirata’ — which were all the rage in 1980s Mexico City, The hottest, rarest hits from Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and beyond — edited, tweaked, EQ-manipulated and pitched-down, to suit the sonideros running the city’s mobile soundsystems.

A Brooklyn-1973 brew of Compas — carnivalesque Haitian party music — and other Carib styles, mixed with funk, soul, psych. Treated guitars, ain’t-no-stoppin’ percussion.

Chicha is the late-sixties, in-thing scrambling of traditionally-demented cumbia dance music. Uncouth electric guitar and organ join the mix, with other electronic debauchery.

The master accordionist of Colombia’s Musica Tropical movement.

The joropo, pasaje and tonada (with roots in sixteenth-century Spain) played on the bandola, a pear-shaped, four-stringed guitar, made from cedar — with maracas and cuatro accompaniment.

From the Central Coast, afro music for rites and festivals, sharing with salsa drums like the cumaco (using the heel of the hand to vary pitch) and redondo, besides cow horns, car wheels, plates, sea shells.

Soul Jazz back in Port-au-Prince after twenty years, to record again with the Drummers of the Société Absolument Guinin. Mesmeric rhythms and beats traditionally used to induce spirit possession in the Vodou religion — ‘dynamic and riveting in their intricacy and power,’ said the Quietus about the first volume.