Not for the faint-hearted — dark and dirty psych improv from Chie Mukai, Eric Cordier and Seichi Yamamoto (Boredoms). Moody, subterranean squalls and drones, blowing up like a bad-tempered Fushitsusha.
A four-tracker nodding to the Revolutionaries’ late-seventies instrumental EPs out of Maxfield Avenue.
A double whammy of knockout dubs.
First, a head-turning brace for all darker-than-blue massive. A down-to-the-bone version of Pam Hall’s haunted Lovers take on The Stylistics’ Children of the Night; and the startling dub of Junior Moore’s lovely cover of The Isley Brothers’ Voyage to Atlantis. In both the scraps of singing are deadly.
Then two evilous dubs of classic Hopeton Lewis roots, saturated in classic Channel One hard-grooving intensity. Like the opener, never released before now.
Sweet, heavy lovers, with Perry’s genius touch, from early 1978 — concluding the singer’s illustrious accomplishments at the Black Ark, recently including backing vocals on Chant Down Babylon Kingdom, for Yabby You, Travelling, behind Deborah Keese, and the classic Freedom, under his own name.
Hymning the power of reggae, over a re-licked, surging Conquering Lion, with worrisome Tubbys bass. The dub is here.
Soulful, rootical early set from the great man, with rich, brilliant backing from percussionists Trio Mocoto.
All-time-classic Stalag excursion.
A suitably outrageous picture disc.
‘If it is the radical edge of uncompromising hardcore minimalism that you are after, this reissue of Four Organs and Phase Patterns delivers two key examples.
‘‘I am interested in perceptible processes’ Reich had written in 1968. ‘I want to be able to hear the processes happening throughout the sounding music.’ Four Organs is a radical realisation of this goal. Against the steady rattle of maracas, individual tones within a single chord are gradually lengthened. No changes of pitch or timbre occur, and the drawn out nature of the process provoked outrage at some early performances, when audiences found themselves caught up in a decelerating loop, being dragged towards stasis. Phase Patterns, composed a month later, relies on a phasing technique developed during Reich’s earlier experiments with magnetic tape recordings, which he allowed to drift out of sync. Identical figures initially in unison shift out of phase, generating unexpected patterns.’
‘Obviously music should put all within listening range into a state of ecstasy’ (Steve Reich).
Vinyl from Aguirre.
Aka Georgia Ann Muldrow.