‘An overview of his earliest works, gathering selections from his 1978 debut Celestial Vibration and six additional studio sessions from the era. Full of discovery and wonderment, Glimpses of Infinity is a miraculous chronicle of new age’s most fabled artist.’

The greatest British writer of literary fiction during the last couple of decades, by miles. So bound up with issues of voice, being and truth, it’s thrilling to hear the stuff read in person. Listen to Acid.

Treasurable 78s about sex, booze, marriage — the original Yidl Mit Seine Fidl, a wild Simchas Torah — from the first Yiddish theatre in Europe. Patrons like Kafka, Joseph Roth and Chagall were knocked sideways.

No-shame housey Tsonga-disco and hands-in-the-air rave banged out on Korgs and Ataris in 1994 South Africa. It sold tons, rocking stadiums from Liberia and Sierra Leone to Namibia and Mozambique.

For a moment the room appeared to darken, as it used to do when he was about to perform some singular experiment, and in the darkness the peacocks upon the doors seemed to glow with a more intense colour…

The title track is monster jugga jugga rare groove, proper rudeboy two-step. A 1976 special outing for the Hodges Bros and co, house band at Hi, where they backed Al Green, Ann Peebles and everyone.

A new suite, freshly introspective and personal. CC’s cosmic beeps and boops are home to roost, a kind of pointillism come mesmerically alive, studding surreal juxtapositions and industrial miasma across nine tracks.

Four unhinged, starkers dashes through the outernational dancehall by Saam Schlamminger (aka Chronomad) and Burnt Friedman. Ace.

Anthony Maher’s 1988 dub album, an Australian commingling of JA science and UK post-punk and Industrial.

Of this Jamaican pianist’s whole heap of recordings — running all the way back to Clue J and the Blues Blasters, at Studio One — here is one of our clear favourites: a quartet date (including Montego Joe on congas) in 1972, kicking off with a scintillating go at Richard Evans’ Montevideo, copped off Ahmad Jamal, and featuring an unmissable, funked-up commandeering of the title track.

The bullion-clad masterpiece of these pioneers of Nigerian Funk and Afrobeat at their deepest and heaviest — tearing, wailing, mid-70s funk, heady with spirituality. Superbad from start to finish, no let-up.

Rrrrufff and gruff EP by the In Paradisum old boy. Better humoured, nervier and more reined-in for his long break. Ace.

‘Just over half an hour of Luke Wyatt nattering — talking over, against, and to himself — interspersed with slyly deployed SFX, and quotes from his own musical recordings. A wild, uncannily cohesive, funny-sad excursion, issuing from a childhood memory, and somehow taking in the ’86 Mets, WIlliam Rehnquist, and Boy Scout regalia, amongst much else, in a hilarious, poignant affirmation of the spiritual prequisite of self-expression.’

Singles from 1971-75, the dental Istanbulite well over his teething phase of Beatles and Dylan knock-offs, by now electrifying pastoral visions of modern Turkish folk with metropolitan jolts of proggy flash.

Superb Memphis soul LP, originally out on Hi in 1972.
Rawly soulful across a range of styles, with strong songs — many co-written by Peebles and her old man, Don Bryant — in excellent arrangements by Willie Mitchell for the Hodges Brothers and Hi Rhythm, and exceptional singing.
Crucial stuff like I Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody’s Home Tonight.