Three murderous steppers dubs on a propulsive, rat-tat-tat rhythm, combining mystical spaciousness with detail and ferocity. Angry-lion bass and smears of brass, fusillades and explosions, scares and shocks, oriental pentatonics, clattering percussion and synthy transcendence… the business. The second mix is nastiest; the third is the wildest and most discombobulated (and our favourite).
Bim bim bim.

Lethal footwork from three originators. The A is dancefloor murder, honed and nasty, vintage Chicago and Detroit gone clear across the SA border; the flip is a fierce, futuristic juke vocal collage, hard as nails.

Spherical collections of stars form around black holes in situ; that is, locally to their cosmic neighbourhoods. It is said that future space colonization will rely on sourcing supplies in situ. Construction in situ uses raw materials at the site: colossal sculptures such as Naqsh-e Rustam, the Leshan Giant Buddha and Mount Rushmore were built in this fashion.
Wild, organic machine grooves, with a mind’s eye on naked treetops and an early sunset. Melody breathes out from dubwise fx, percussion by turns sinewy and floating, sub blasts and stripped synth arrangements. Keys on air.
Spacious, witty, melancholic, deadly.

The two dubstep pioneers at the top of their game. Truly an album, the music is multi-levelled — dark as anything at times, but engrossingly varied and emotionally shaded, always on the move.

Extra to the LP, with a magnificent, epic, head-scrambling remix, more spaced and spooked than the original. Shackleton’s dream liturgy fully unfolds — an eerie, garbled sublimity, a kind of black-magic plainsong.

‘Hair-raisingly good… incandescent’ (The Observer).

‘Inventive, fresh and melodic’ 4/5 (The Guardian); ‘bound to be underrated… impeccably edited and segued’ (The Onion); ‘may be the most forward-looking music you hear all year’ (Rolling Stone).

Two exclusives: Erykah Badu’s irresistible do-over of the euphoric album instrumental There, with Malian synth-freak Tidiane Seck; and a dub by Mark Ernestus. Lovely silk-screened sleeve.

Three deep funk instrumentals — HBE on the opener. Sound-wise, doubly lethal, as alive as vinyl gets. Silvered, silk-screened sleeve.

Brand new recordings, this is majestic, surging, scintillating music — with swing, jump and shout, Sun Ra, Mingus and Gil Evans, Arab-Andalusian music, hip hop and New Orleans funk all coursing through.

Three brilliant re-routings of Detroit machine funk — Moodymann in particular — into deep mid-Atlantic co-minglings with raw, old-school hiphop and house.
Str8 Crooked is clattering, chugging jack, holding something like Paisley soul under the water; Build Back Better Sweatshops is more driving, riven with breakdowns and horror-show vocal samples. With an uptempo downbeat which nonetheless sounds like a tolling bell, the epic, immersive, sixteen-minutes-plus Episcopi Vagantes pulls off the deadly combination of a kind of stifled, timeworn, melodic wistfulness and percussively restless, passing-through urgency.
This is killer dance music, run through with swingeing, parping bass and ruff b-boy drum-machine rhythms: encrusted and detailed, mangled and nervy, but intensely hard-grooving; wired with punk insouciance, edginess, and free spirit.
Bim bim bim.

Visceral, elemental, electronic funk, conjured from scraps of sound, breath, mutterings, dubwise remembrances, scuffling, sweat and blood, thin air — ‘crawled out of the slime’, as the opener puts it, self-engendering like the baddie in Terminator — all harnessed to cruelly grooving earthquake bass and b-boy drum science.
Rhythmically it has ants in its pants and it needs to dance, with an improvisatory, streetwise nervous energy and uninhibited, purposeful rapture — akin to this guy, say, eighteen minutes in — crossed with on-song Pepe Bradock and stripped-to-the-bone, mongrel hip-hop.
It’s unruly and edgy, a bit off its rocker, emotionally ranging — typically anxious, often nostalgic — and riveting dance music.
Judge-dread mastering by D&M; first-class Pallas pressing; stunning gatefold artwork by Will Bankhead.
Ruff ruff ruff.

Entirely exclusive music, unique to this release, with a radiant silk-screened sleeve: four from The Marble Downs sessions with Will Oldham, a Scott Walker to start; and a side of unaccompanied folk singing.

Cold-sweat compounds of art-funk, baglama high-life, horrorama, yacht.

Stefan Schneider and Sven Kacirek’s scintillating recordings of the Mijikenda tribes, made in different spots in and around Mukunguni village, coastal Kenya: spiritual and healing music, and love-songs.

Ravishingly beautiful, achingly precious songs and instrumentals, sumptuously presented: the Royal Court Orchestra in 1906 through to a hauntingly soulful Hafez setting by Moluk Zarrabi of Kashan, from 1933.

The tussling vegetables in Mal Dean’s cover-sketch somehow befit perfectly this extraordinary duo of Bailey and the great Dutch drummer Han Bennink. Recorded in London in 1972, Incus 9 was their second record (after an ICP in 1969), becoming a blueprint and inspiration for generations of free-improvisers. It is paired here with a brilliant session from the following year, with the same power and friendly combativeness, and oodles of creativity, technique and humour. It’s obvious how much they loved playing together.

Open-hearted, fresh, lovely, bumptious recordings of women’s singing, from Rang’ala village in southwest Kenya. ‘Dodo’ is a type of traditional Luo music mostly used for entertainment at weddings, drinking parties and wrestling festivals. Songs in praise of the happy couple, the hardest drinkers and the best wrestlers.
Try the magical fourth song, Arum — about barking like a hornbill.

Refreshing, rootedly odd, mostly unaccompanied four-part-harmony singing recorded in Govan Old Parish Church, Glasgow, by members of Trembling Bells and Muldoon’s Picnic. Elements of Sacred Harp, Gregorian chant, medieval madrigal and English folk, with poetic influences including Maya Deren, Saint John The Divine and Dennis Potter — a unique blend of the visionary and the earthly, the intimate and glorious.
Silk-screened sleeve.

Utterly magnificent, sublimely soulful survey of the Gospel Roots label, subsidiary of the mighty TK Records at the height of the Miami Sound.
A&R was co-ordinated by Gospel legends Ira Tucker — from the Dixie Hummingbirds — and Ralph Bass, veteran producer with Savoy, King and Chess. The label was run by Timmy Thomas, who had recently smashed with Why Can’t We Live Together, for another TK spin-off, Glades. Operations were overseen by Henry Stone himself, unlikely King of Disco, who had recorded a young Ray Charles, and pushed forward James Brown. They drew in artists from all over the US, from St. Louis, Columbus, Memphis, Brooklyn, Cabrini Green in Chicago: unknowns like Camille Doughty, reluctant to jeopardise her job at GM (‘Generous Motors’) in Detroit, and huge-sellers like the revered Brooklyn All Stars, who started out on Peacock in 1958.
Choral belters, deep ballads, harmony quartets, epic city-blues, gritty funk, powerhouse female soul… Killer-diller Philly like a scorching version of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ Wake Up Everybody; and Jean Austin’s raw Spirit Free, co-written by Ronnie Dyson, produced by Jesse James at Future Gold. Chicago Sound like The Fantastic Family Aires — named after the family’s furniture store on North Cicero, but reminiscent of the Staple Singers at their best — through to the full-blown glory of The Fountain Of Life Joy Choir, led by Marvin Yancy from The Independents, and featuring Natalie Cole… Singers like Versie Mae Gibson, from the Jordans, by rights up there with Irma, Etta and Ree… Bangers 100%-guaranteed to find their way into Theo Parrish sets; and mortal delirium for the prissiest of soul and gospel purists.
Beautifully presented… the LPs with a 12”-square, full-colour, sixteen-page album of photos and original artwork, the CD with a forty-page booklet — and truly outstanding notes, including insightful new interviews across the board; mastered at Abbey Road.
Dread and civitas, grit and transcendence.

Stunningly beautiful, poignant music from Bilād al-Shām — ‘the countries of Damascus’, known nowadays as Syria, Lebanon and Palestine — including performances from the very first recording sessions in the region.
The legendary, moody Beirut singer Būlus Ṣulbān is here — some historians have him singing before Egypt’s Pasha Ibrāhīm Bāshā during his military campaign in Syria, in 1841 — and Ḥasība Moshēh, Jewish ‘nightingale of the Damascene gardens’. Thurayyā Qaddūra from Jerusalem; Yūsuf Tāj, a folk singer from Mount-Lebanon; Farjallāh Baiḍā, cousin to the founders of Baidaphon Records… Musical directors like the lutist Qāsim Abū Jamīl al-Durzī and the violinist Anṭūn al-Shawwā (followed by his son Sāmī); such virtuosi as the qanun-players Nakhleh Ilyās al-Maṭarjī and Ya‘qūb Ghazāla, and lutist Salīm ‘Awaḍ.
Even at the time, notwithstanding such brilliance, public music-making was frowned upon as morally demeaning, especially for women. Musical venues were generally dodgy. Ṣulbān once cut short a wedding performance for the Beiruti posh, after just one song, he was so disgusted with his audience.
‘If I had to tell you about the catcalls,’ one commentator wrote about the musical theatre of the time, ‘the stomping of feet, the sound of sticks hitting the ground, the noise of the water-pipes, the teeth cracking watermelon seeds and pistachio nuts, the screams of the waiters, and the clinking of arak glasses on the tables, I would need to go on and on and on…’