‘Classic Vinyl.’

Chocolate Mena leading three lineups — featuring Joe Henderson, Jerome Richardson, Alfredo Armenteros, and co — through Lalo Schifrin and Duke Pearson arrangements of core Latin and Jazz classics.

Electrifyingly intense Chaoui music from the Aurès region of Algeria, booted into the future, with drum machines, phased gesba flute and reverbed-out vocals.

‘Their first collaborative recording: four beautifully recorded excursions, threading crystalline drum-work through a sparkling haze of guitars and electronics.
‘The opener Dessus begins with Reidy’s distinctive just-intonation guitar figures, shimmering over a delicate substratum of Befli’s brushwork and bass drum accents. As in all of Reidy’s recent work, the guitarism evades cliché via unfamiliar tuning and electronic processing. Hanging almost inaudibly in the background for much of the piece, a rush of synthetic tones surges into the foreground to end it. Oben is built from kinetic patterns of picked guitar arpeggios, locking into irregular grooves with Belfi’s drums, which move from elegant rolls and cymbal patter to driving closed hi-hats and explosive rock interjections. Around the traditional instruments and across the stereo field, electronic sounds swarm and swirl, fizzing and popping in a sun-drenched soundscape that at points suggests both vintage analogue synth destruction and glitching harmonies. Alto begins in similar territory but turns proceedings up a notch, eventually settling into a propulsive 6/8 groove of shifting drum accents, manically strummed 12 string acoustic, and burbling synth chords.
‘The B side is dedicated to the fifteen-minute Up, where the strategies adopted on the other pieces are put in the service of a more relaxed, slowly unfolding epic. Anchored by a steady pulse throughout, the piece combines chiming guitars, dubbed-out bass lines and constantly adjusted percussive details into a complex flux of sound. Change is at once so subtle and so ever-present that, at any given moment, the listener can never be entirely sure quite how they got there.’

An invigorating sampling of the prodigious output of this joint in Matariya, Cairo. Mahragan, or electro-shaabi, stripped down Sardena-style: auto-tuned, maxed-out vocals, thumping beats, synths, wild effects.

Warda Ftouki is one of the great Arab divas of the twentieth century.
Aka Warda Al-Jazairia, Warda the Algerian was forced to leave Algeria in 1956, when FLN guns were discovered in her dad’s nightclub. (Warda was a lifelong, unflinching supporter of independence.)
Aged twenty, now singing in Beirut cabarets, she became the protege of Mohammed Abdel Wahab. Returning to Algeria after independence in 1961, she took a ten year break from singing, because this was forbidden by her new husband. She left him in 1972, moving to Egypt, where she married Baligh Hamdi.
Here she is in 1973, singing a composition by Hamdi, backed by a full Egyptian orchestra, including electric guitar and organ, in front of a euphoric, adoring crowd.
Wonderful music — swirling and grooving with dazzling virtuosity; imperiously funky and giddily soulful.

The second LP of the mainstay of modern Caribbean/Antilles music, released in 1975 on a small Parisian label, La Voix Du Globe. It maintains the pressure of his debut Cosmozouk Percussion, incorporating African, Latin and West Indies styles like Gwoka, Mazouk, Biguine, Bel-Air and Bomba, together with swirling cosmic synths and intense roots percussion. Bomb.

‘One of the all-time great records of improvised music from Europe. Period. Blisteringly hot. Uncompromisingly inventive. Staggeringly beautiful. And insanely rare. Originally issued in the mid ‘70s on FMP, featuring the legendary Schlippenbach Trio — with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens — joined by Peter Kowald.
‘Just the first track, an incredible twenty-plus-minutes burner called Range, is worth the price of admission — as punk rock as free music gets, it shows Parker’s spectacular capacity for high-octane blowing. Kowald adds a chewy, molasses bottom to the group, offsetting Lovens’ flinty metal, stick and skin and Schlippenbach’s hyper-focused intensity.
‘A stone cold classic of creative music. Remastered from original tapes.’
LP from Cien Fuegos.

A treat for those of us who like their Alasdair Roberts straight-up and hardcore. A pointed, deep selection of mainly Scottish folk songs, recorded live in the studio; beautifully sung, with minimal, exquisite accompaniment by acoustic guitar, or sometimes piano. Sexual oppression, Scottishness, political resistance; stray cows, mystical horses, waterbird royalty. Stiff shots of rapture, fighting talk, heartbreak, and tragedy. Terrific.

A fourth LP of spiritual jazz by this feted nine-piece from Australia.
‘A stunning work, full of integrity and class… Essential’ (Echoes).
‘Wonderful record, full of some great Kamasi/Donald Byrd/even Art Blakey moments.’ (The Guardian).

‘These recordings are traces of something I have come to love to do in large resonant spaces, which is to set up sustained chords on multiple organs and then move slowly through the sound. The instruments are usually far apart, which makes for the emergence of large fields of continuous change, spaces of harmonicity that can be passed through layer by layer and which contain within them points of both clarity and overwhelming complexity. The organ pipes are tuned and retuned, though sometimes I leave them just as they are. What I’m searching for is the moment when a particular kind of sounding texturality is revealed – it is rough, focused and yet strangely transparent.’