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Sweet, sweet sufferers on Tommy McCook’s lovely Schenectady’s Shock rhythm, featuring Augustus Pablo on glockenspiel. (‘Shock probation’ is an alternative to prison in Schenectady County, New York.)
Amazing, psychedelic, engagé afro-disco from the same milieu as William Onyeabor, with Gaspar Lawal on percussion. Very warmly recommended.
Kikuyu ‘liquid soul’, Luo benga with its rat-tat-tat beat and layered guitars, Swahili afrobeat, Congolese rumba, plus influences from SA and Zambia, disco and funk, coastal rhythms like chakacha. Mostly from 45s.
Central Asian art music — derived from the Shash maqam of Bukhara — performed by the singer Jurabeg Nabiev, with the Ensemble Dorrdane.
A master of the sato (a bowed tambur or long-necked lute held vertically) joined by Tajik singer Ozoda Ashurova in this beautiful, haunting, little-known court music. Plus doyra drum and dotar lute.
Infectious songs and rootical instrumentals — the fifth SF album presenting Laurent ‘Kink Gong’ Jeanneau’s amazing documentation of the vanishing indigenous music of the rural Asian frontiers.
A late-70s Nigerian blend of Kool And The Gang, Mandrill, and the Ohio Players… with a Moog synthesizer thrown in for good measure.
The second of two records issuing from 1962 sessions with Big Joe Williams, Memphis Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, and Lonnie Johnson (and Bob Dylan on harmonica). Originally released on VS’s own Spivey imprint.
Heartically dubwise, rugged and raw essays in classic grime, UK garage and dubstep from a new London-Berlin collaboration, with stuff like Horsepower’s In Fine Style galloping through its nervous system.