‘America’s greatest singer’; ‘the greatest gospel singer of her generation’; ‘the greatest singer ever’ (Pulse, Time, Rolling Stone). Check the title track for her influence on Little Richard, The Isley Brothers, James Brown and co. Stuffed with gems.

‘Lo-fi, primitive orchestral pieces for a Swedish TV-documentary series that in the end never was finished. Someone said, If the Penguin Café Orchestra would’ve used old rhythm-boxes and recorded rough demos influenced by Moondog, then this would’ve been it. That’s not true, but it’s still a hell of an album. Unique and warm. And in totally gorgeous sleeves… Old album covers have been remade and glued and etched on with the old artworks shining through here and there.’

Out of all the twelves by MN on Jamal Moss’ Mathematics label, maybe the most outstanding goes under the name Ra Toth — and true to form this is double-sided trumps for BH, slapping together bad-minded, cosmic jazz and banging, bruk-up disco.
The A sounds like a young Pete Rock giving Theo a hand with some Dirty Edits; the flip like a blend of evilous Arkestra and prime Innerzone Orchestra.

Peerless cover of the soul classic — recorded at Randy’s in 1974 with Fully Fullwood, Chinna Smith, Tony Chin, Santa Davis… and Errol T at the controls.
It’s no surprise that Carless is a soul boy, into Jerry Butler and The Dells back then; one half of the Little Roys, when they cut Bongo Nyah for Lloyd Daley.
Crucial bunny.

Stupendous rendition of a Chinese folk song over red-hot rocksteady, produced by Ronnie Narsalla in 1967. Aimed at the Chinese community in Kingston; super-rare ever since.
Pure worries. The guaranteed musical detonation of any kind of dance or party.
Cheng, evidently, not Chang. Essential reading, here.

King Ayisoba is a star in Ghana. His kologo-playing is both melodic and percussive. With his producer Panji Anoff he changed the Accra music scene by using traditional instruments together with the beats, bleeps and bass drawn from hip-hop and dancehall by the local, mid-90s ‘hip life’ scene.
‘King Ayisoba’s Modern Ghanaians is the fastest selling cassette by an artist from the northern part of Ghana. The album’s popularity started in Bolgatanga where the artist is from, but has spread through the other regions like harmattann bushfire’ (Ghana Gazette, 2007).

‘Bottling the vehemence bursting forth nightly in the downtown NYC loft scene, these 1973 recordings at Marzette Watts’s studio are furious, brutal, and poignant.
‘Mixed and mastered from the original tapes, this expanded 2020 LP edition restores sections of the original record inexplicably excised from the CD release in the nineties, adding more than double the playing time of the original LP, in fascinating variations.
‘Heavyweight vinyl; quality pressing.’

Terrific soulful Northern banger — a Wigan anthem — and classic Motor City fire from Jack Ashford’s Pied Piper Productions. Performed, written and produced by LC.

Featuring the jazz-dance classic Life Is Like A Samba… a Rinder & Lewis production from 1979.

His second LP, originally released by FMP in 1976. ‘Microtonal string investigations still beguiling and fresh four decades later.’

‘Originally released on FMP in 1973, the debut album by this legendary German guitar improviser and instrument inventor is a resonant and hilarious document of the nascent genius recording his peculiar and wondrous music alone in a studio. Acoustic and unfiltered electric guitars turned back into the supremely malleable instruments they were before they’d been firmly encoded as tools for rock or pop or jazz. Reichel uses a homemade 11-string guitar (with three pickups) for all the tunes except the first one. Reichel is like an improvising Harry Partch, investigating the genesis of lute music.’

‘Subtitled ‘some more guitar solos’; his fourth and final record of solo guitar works. Next Reichel would turn much of his attention to the bowed wooden-tongued instrument he created called the daxophone. Reichel recorded the six tracks at his home in Wuppertal in April, 1981, and in the process made what might be his masterpiece. These are not just some more guitar solos. Concentrating largely on acoustic guitar with no frets as well as his electric pick-behind-the-bridge guitar, he transforms tones into crystalline formations — patience with resonances, attention to silence, formation of symmetries around a common sonic point, jetting notes that arc and spread and then hover. One might look for other references to describe what Reichel is up to — the magic of Terje Rypdal, the aura of early William Ackerman, the eccentric multiple pickups of Fred Frith — but really this is unique in guitar repertoire. Reichel built his instruments as tools for improvised exploration, and then he dove deep into them, never so far as on tracks like Could Be Nice or the quivering Southern Monologue, or the two brilliant versions of the title track, Bonobo Beach. On Two Small Pieces Announced by a Cigar-Box, the titular box is bowed in a vocal manner that portends Reichel’s development of the daxophone.
‘A beautiful, essential document from one of the great outsider guitarists of all time.’