RnB from Bristol, freaked, chopped ‘n’ screwed, but with its sensuality and slickness intact, for maximum dancefloor worries.
Four anonymous, strongly individual commissions from around the world: A1 is dubwise; Hit It Tool runs bumping 2step drums into Bmore breaks; B1 floats pitched-up vocal samples and misty-eyed rave chords, up and away; 2ON calls time with a wan club shuffle.

Four more contagiously skewed re-rubs from the mysterious maestros.
Mais Que Amor is a failsafe dancefloor re-animator, slinkily teasing out a screwed trap intro dotted with pitched vocals. Next level Next. Ride With Me is wild and bruk, with dirty south samples. Ize Kashmir keep things rolling for the heads-down crew on the flip, with its dank, bare-bones dub to close.

Another irresistible instalment of reanimations.
Brandy Tool is ambient but hypnotic; Miss You Anymore patches angelic, stone-cold-classic RnB straight through to the G-Phone; Babylon is melancholic, slo-mo grime; the stripped Girls Need Love Too is equal parts sweet and spooky.

A fourth quartet of masked mongrels. First up, a slo-mo heart-melter, spiked with scraps of misty-eyed soul; then Soul Seeker keeps things rolling with swinging 2-step drums and bittersweet vocal snippets. On the flip, the outer limits of the LA beats sound get nasty with foundation dubstep — a mid-tempo slugger from another planet, on a mission to scrunch rude boy’s bass-cones into the dust — before U & I draws the EP to a close, in an anthemic haze of vapour-wave synths and skeletal percussion.

Ghost Phone is back! Blowing in from Bristol with another hand of anonymous aces. Glossy R&B in flagranti and off its tits in a dank, heaving basement session.
The opener Hologram is characteristically greened-out: a 160bpm g-funk odyssey for the autonomic massive. Then it’s back to earth with Want U, a nectar-sweet, stripped-back dancefloor heater, complete with tongue in cheek nods to the Jersey Club sound.
Tough, loose jungle breaks revitalise a 90s classic on the flip, in So Gone; before Darkness Finds Home With U wraps things up with dense, heady atmospherics and ethereal vocals.

His third LP, fronting a septet in 1996. The women’s extra percussion keeps things bubbling; and AACM stalwart Shelton Salley brings a new edginess, on guitar.
Try the Latin groove of the opener, Psalm 37.

A second volume of Charles Brooks’ magical recordings from central and southern Madagascar. Polyrhythmic rug cutters through stately Kabosy ballads.
Says Brooks — ‘The musicians on this album are storytellers and much of their craft is improvised and has a strong foundation of expertise in their respective cultural traditions… Seeking, recording, and sharing the intangible experience, the best of all of this, is to catch a ghost.’

Riding in resplendently on the cassock tails of The Gospel According To Budgie mixtapes and The Good Books (with Alchemist): still deeper, giddier blends of nineties gospel and nu bounce. Back in.

Digging yet deeper and more devastatingly in the gospel bins of the Black Atlantic, HGZII has its genesis in work undertaken for Kanye West and the Sunday Service in Wyoming, before enfleshment and fine-tuning back at home in the City of Angels.

Two long-form pieces of modular minimalism. Both sides unfurl fifteen minutes of urgent, high-octane loops, repeating patterns, and distorted vocal frequencies, drawing on Terry Riley, Suicide, no wave and synth pop — not to mention the history of modern Lebanon. (Hush, hush.) Enter Ghost, a wonderful novel by Isabella Hammad, also comes to mind.

No-one else makes music like this: devilishly complex but warm and intuitive, stirring together a dizzying assembly of outernational and outerspace influences, whilst retaining the subby funk-and-hot-breath pressure of Shackleton’s soundboy, club roots.
The result is an evolutionary, truly alchemical music — great shifting tides of dub, minimalist composition and choral song (Five Demiurgic Options); ritual spells to ward off the darkness (Before The Dam Broke, The Prophet Sequence); radiophonia and zoned-out guitar improv (Seven Virgins); even the febrile, freeform psychedelia of eighties noise rock (Sferic Ghost Transmits / Fear The Crown).
Over the five years since Music For The Quiet Hour, Vengeance’s vocal and lyrical range has rolled out across this new terrain. Throughout these six transmissions he’s hoarse preacher, sage scholar and ravaged bluesman; blind man marching off to war, and exhausted time-traveller warning of impending socio-ecological catastrophe.
Six dialogic accounts of our conflicted times, then, expanding beyond the treacly unease of the duo’s early collaborative work into something subtler and more emotionally shattering — its shades of brightness more dazzling, and its darkness even murkier.
“We almost didn’t hear it when the foundations went.”