The greatest gospel bluesman; one of the very greatest bottle-neck guitarists.
Almost overwhelmingly intense and gripping.
Classic banjo-fiddle-guitar-vocals combos, plus instrumentals featuring twin-fiddle and piano. All the Highlanders gear with Roy Harvey, Lucy Terry, and twin-fiddlers Lonnie Austin and Odell Smith.
The first reissue anywhere of this fine sixties Detroit soul LP, treasured by the Northern Soul scene.
Late-60s, minimal, ambient classic, with Riley’s lovely synth and organ-playing deftly elucidating seven phases scored here for large orchestra with extra percussion and electronics.
Perfect condition.
Digging in Burkina Faso by this lovely label. Plenty of aces on parade. Some of the originals sound a bit knackered, but so what, we’d much rather hear them than not.
No let up by the Drum And Bass crew — just check the sound samples — more rock steady treasures unearthed.
‘Not a Best Of, but a reflection of Tori Kudo’s evolution as a composer, from playing with seasoned musicians, to playing with people just starting out, from playing with meticulous scores, to playing call & response melodies written down, to the songs here — instant improvisations based on keyboard compositions that Tori plays for the group. Yes, that is it. He plays a recording of himself on the keyboard, with singing or humming sometimes and he leaves it to the band to interpret this on the spot. Sometimes, you can make out the melody, other times it is quite obscure, as if a sort of common shyness flows out of the collected instrumentarium. And other times, well, it is a big party.’
With Eno more the guiding hand for this second collaboration with Cluster. Open, airy, ambient, unhurried. Originally released in 1978, but still fresh (except for Eno’s singing).
Released by Stax in 1973 — a massive rare groove album, sampled by Digable Planets and Jay-Z (amongst others) — Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth was a brooding, deep-funk admonition to the new black middle class, with no prospect of commercial success.
For its follow-up, Dale Warren cut out the rhetoric, and for political consolation dug deep into his musical roots, and his time in the mid-sixties as a songwriter at Shrine and Motown.
But Stax closed in 1975, and the tapes were abandoned. Now, miraculously retrieved from a Chicago basement, here’s a precious taster: hurt, disillusioned, beautiful, pure, sensuous Windy City soul music ,jazzy but street, musically sophisticated but emotionally direct.
The sleeve is all-black, with black-on-black text, and an embossed silhouette of the group — ‘probably the nicest single LP we’ve ever made’, says Numero.
Hurt, disillusioned, beautiful, pure, sensuous Windy City soul music from the mid-1970s, never out before.