The three main genres of Labë polyphony, all aiming for maximum emotional impact: vaj, lamenting life’s dramas; dashuri, love songs; historical epics.

Startling 1975 excursions into Tarantism — a kind of hysteria ostensibly triggered by spider bites, for which dancing is the only cure, with its own set of cultural traditions based in Basilicata, Apulia, Sicily.
Obsessive, hypnotic chants, rhythms, and drones, mixing together folk, avant-gardism, and psych, with shots of Dylan and North African drumming.

Mainly female vocal ensembles performing seasonal, child-bearing and wedding songs, with instrumental dance excursions by violin, reed-pipe, cymbalum, accordion and drum.

The key fifties recordings of the great anarchist songwriter. For Alex Kapranos — ‘his lyrics were more subversive than Dylan or the Sex Pistols and he wrote better tunes than either.’ Tremendous.

From 1969, the complete works of this collaboration between members of the mythical Babs Robert Quartet (Belgian spiritual jazz pioneers) and the jazz/rock/funk unit COS, closely affiliated with Marc Moulin, Kiosk and Placebo during the 1970s.
A holy grail of a jazz 45, musically bifocalising another two masterpieces in this format: Krzysztof Komeda’s Cul-De-Sac soundtrack and François Tusques’ Le Corbusier souvenir, with Don Cherry.

Great-fun, expertly-assembled, well-presented collection of ye-ye girl pop, featuring Francoise Hardy (of course) alongside BB, Anna Karina (from the Godard films) and co.

In Anton Chekhov’s last play The Cherry Orchard, written just a few years before these Gramophone Company recordings in Odessa (mostly), the character Gayev hears off-stage ‘our famous Jewish orchestra… four violins, a flute and a double bass.’
In this period, klezmer music was venturing beyond its original role as Jewish wedding and celebratory music. It was proliferating in secular settings; sometimes disreputable, even underground. In the Odessa Stories, Isaac Babel mentions a bar with a house-band of ‘old Jews with dirty beards playing Romanian and Jewish tunes’; and klezmer would have been the soundtrack of the local brothels, pretty much all Jewish-owned. (One track here celebrates a new treatment for syphilis, Preparation 606… even lavishing a trumpet on proceedings.)
Tangy, exuberant, life-affirming music, high and low, mostly for dancing, featuring virtuosi like violinist Jascha Gegner and clarinettist Titunshnayder, presented with excellent notes.

The lyra viol in heart-tugging, rug-cutting songs from the eastern Mediterranean, brilliantly performed by Stelios Petrakis.

Lullabies, carnival, work, wedding, shepherds’, bandits’ — music for singing, flutes, bagpipes, guimbards, fiddles and cymbalums.

Jarvis Cocker’s thrilled to bits — ‘Here, at last, is the the soundtrack to maybe THE underground film of all time in all its crazy daisy glory’. A mental cut & paste of Czech orchestras, folk, jazz and experimental sounds.

Library music by the Madlib favourite, originally released on the legendary Italian label FLIRT in 1975: sweetly naive pop exotica.

Startling, brilliant, minimalist experiments for percussion and electronics. Issued by Ayna as a tiny private pressing in 1972; re-mastered now from EM’s own master-tapes. Daring fun; warmly recommended.

Created in collaboration with Walter Branchi from the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, this soundtrack to Mino Guerrini’s 1968 film is among the most strikingly experimental of all Macchi’s music for cinema. A suspenseful, jet-propelled fresh mix of
psychedelia, jazz, and improv, threaded with beautiful melodies.
The first time out; from the master tapes.