Mono LP from Music On Vinyl.

This is a great way into Partch, revisiting with gusto three well-known, relatively-compact works — a highly rhythmic dance piece, a cross-cutting film score, and Barstow, with HP intoning hitchhiker graffiti.

This is the sublime, eleven-minute version, featuring vocalist Gavin Christopher.
Big Theo Parrish record.
Backed with the promo-only disco mix of Saturday Night, lavished with percussion by Sheila E.
Murders.

His neglected 1970 masterpiece.
The first side brings into focus the best things about Bitches Brew, with lethal menace; the second lays out a blueprint for Ambient and Fourth World.
Hotly recommended.

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.’

LP from Music On Vinyl.

180g.

It’s Gonna Rain is a total knockout.
Steve Reich’s first official piece is spun out of a chance encounter with a Pentecostalist preacher at work in San Francisco’s Union Square Park in 1964.
“He’s talking about the flood in the Bible and Noah and the ark, and you’ve got to remember the Cuban missile crisis was in ‘62, and this was something hanging over everyone’s head ... that we could be so much radioactive dust in the next day or two. So this seemed very appropriate…. There are two loops of his voice, starting in unison. And then one slowly creeps ahead of the other — I just did it with my thumb on the recording reel of one of the machines. And so they go out of phase. It’s like a canon or a round, like Row, Row, Row Your Boat. And you get first a kind of shaking, a reverberation, and then you get a sort of imitation and gradually you begin to hear it as a round. And that’s exactly what happens in this piece.”
Apocalyptic, riveting, banging, urgent, game-changing… it’s killer.

Including a disinterment of his great song Burial.
‘What a big disgrace, the way you rob up the place… everything you can find, you even rob the blind. Now we know the truth… taking people’s business on your head, might as well you be dead.’

‘A transcendental new music,’ wrote Lester Bangs, ‘which flushes categories away and, while using musical devices from all styles and cultures, is defined mainly by its deep emotion and unaffected originality.’