Five years into the project, Yermande announced a thrilling new phase for this Dakar-Berlin collaboration; a giant step forward.
The group of players was boiled down to twelve for recordings, eight for shows; sessions in Dakar become steeply more focussed. ‘This time around I was better able to specify what I wanted right from the initial recording sessions in Dakar,’ says Ernestus; ‘and further in the production process I took more freedom in reducing and editing audio tracks, changing MIDI data, replacing synth sounds and introducing electronic drum samples.’
Right away you hear music-making which has come startlingly into its own. Rather than submitting to the routine, discrete gradations of recording, producing and mixing, the music is tangibly permeated with deadly intent from the off. Lethally it plays a coiled, clipped, percussive venom and thumping bass against the soaring, open-throated spirituality of Mbene Seck’s singing. Plainly expert, drilled and rooted, the drumming is unpredictable, exclamatory, zinging with life. Likewise the production: intuitive and fresh but utterly attentive; limber but hefty; vividly sculpted against a backdrop of cavernous silence.
Six chunks of stunning, next-level mbalax, then, funky as anything.

Whoa this record is totally killer.
Intensely concentrated, but with a fresh spontaneity; super-charged with expressivity.
The singing is riveting, diva-esque; the mbalax rhythms are dazzling.
At every turn there are sensational, thrilling injections of Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound.
Hotly recommended; it’s a must.

Khadim is a stunning reconfiguration of the Ndagga Rhythm Force sound. The instrumentation is radically pared down. The guitar is gone; the concatenation of sabars; the drum-kit. Each of the four tracks hones in on just one or two drummers; otherwise the sole recorded element is the singing; everything else is programmed. Synths are dialogically locked into the drumming. Tellingly, Ernestus has reached for his beloved Prophet-5, a signature go-to since Basic Channel days, thirty years ago. Texturally, the sound is more dubwise; prickling with effects. There is a new spaciousness, announced at the start by the ambient sounds of Dakar street-life. At the microphone, Mbene Diatta Seck revels in this new openness: mbalax diva, she feelingly turns each of the four songs into a discrete dramatic episode, using different sets of rhetorical techniques. The music throughout is taut, grooving, complex, like before; but more volatile, intuitive and reaching, with turbulent emotional and spiritual expressivity.
Not that Khadim represents any kind of break. Its transformativeness is rooted in the hundreds upon hundreds of hours the Rhythm Force has played together. Nearly a decade has passed since Yermande, the unit’s previous album. Every year throughout that period — barring lockdowns — the group has toured extensively, in Europe, the US, and Japan. With improvisation at the core of its music-making, each performance has been evolutionary, as it turns out heading towards Khadim. “I didn’t want to simply continue with the same formula,” says Ernestus. “I preferred to wait for a new approach. Playing live so many times, I wanted to capture some of the energy and freedom of those performances.” Though several members of the touring ensemble sit out this recording — sabar drummers, kit-drummer, synth-player — their presence abides in the structure and swing of the music here…

At his best in this call-to-arms, originally released on Black Art in 1977; but it’s all about Lee Perry’s genius at the desk. Stunning dub.

Four lost works by the electro-acoustic pioneer and GRM stalwart: Electrucs!, a synthesizer soundtrack to an imaginary film, from 1974; Foliphonie, a kind of postscript to his own La Grande Polyphonie, the same year; Cinq Dessins En Rosace, from 1973; and Marpège, dedicated to Bernard Parmegiani, from 1995.

Outstanding, laid-back gospel from 1979 — possessed by the sublimity of Bobby Womack — originally issued on its own S&K label by the Sanders family, from the Witness Of Jesus Christ church in Fresno, California.
The opener is the killer shit; knockout soul music about dying. We could listen to it for days on end.

A second volume of ‘the best and rarest Chicago blues of the early postwar era.’ Little Walter, Muddy Waters, Sunnyland Slim, Floyd Jones, Snoooky Pryor, Roosevelt Sykes… all present and correct.
You need it for Johnny Shines’ Living In The White House, about setting society to rights, over the rocking saxophone of J.T. Brown. ‘I want to live in paradise, make servants out of kings and queens / Now don’t shake me please darlin / This is one time I want to finish my dream.’

It’s a one-man-band evocation of the traditional accordion sound of his youth, adding a Moog, Rhodes and beat box. Light and fleet-footed, but questing and utterly heartfelt.
Switched-on Ethiopiques, refreshing and lovely as anything. No doubt insufficiently solemn and inauthentically-authentic for World Music plod, but hotly recommended by us.

Taking a break from cabbing duties back home in Washington DC, for his first LP in fifteen years. Ethiopian standards and originals; his unmistakable melodica, accordion and keys, in the same double-bass-and-drums setting as recent live shows.

‘Primarily the work of Southern born bluesmen who immigrated to Chicago before the Second World War, but whose careers endured into the postwar era,’ this was the first Nighthawk release, with the label taking its name from a Robert McCoy recording featuring Big Joe Williams and Sonny Boy Williamson, included here. (‘I have prowled so long / Till it made my knee bones sore.’) With Big Bill Bronzy, Tampa Red, Washboard Sam, Johnny Shines and co.

Still a blast of fresh air. Profoundly influential late-50s, early-60s recordings of rare southern English harmony singing from the Copper Family, which can trace its roots in traditional song back at least two hundred years. Gems about labour, nature, sex, beer, the weather, wandering… Hard Times Of Old England is here.

The 1973 soundtrack for René Laloux’s philosophical tale of anticipation, where men are used as domestic toys by blue giants, the Draags.
The orchestral expansiveness recalls Goraguer’s sixties projects with Serge Gainsbourg, but teleported to a psychedelic spaceway of its own, mapped out in a series of vignettes — moody, baroque, wasted, hypnotic, out-there — with funky wah-wah guitars, flutes, Fender Rhodes, breaks-n-beats drumming, and haunting effects.
Demonstrably beloved by Dilla, Madlib, Air, and co.

A new deluxe edition, mixed from the recently discovered multi-track tapes, including seven previously unreleased tracks and three alternate mixes.

Triumphantly reviving all-time-classic Jammy’s. Proper dub, too.

Johnnie ‘Who’s Making Love’ Taylor, Jimmie Outler, Paul Foster, S.R. Crain and James ‘Love Is a Five-Letter Word’ Phelps; the albums Jesus Be A Fence Around Me and Encore!!, plus seven tracks recovered from singles and a label compilation, and four previously unissued — all recorded between September 1959 and July 1964. With an excellent essay, which traces the Stirrers’ story to their formation in 1926.
Stealin in the name of the Lord… this is a terrific bargain.

Bobby Womack, with brothers Curtis, Harry, Friendly Jr and Cecil; produced by Sam Cooke between June 1961 and September 1964, for his own SAR label. Gospel as the Womack Brothers; R&B as the Valentinos, including the original version of It’s All Over Now. With seven previously unreleased tracks, and excellent notes, drawing on interviews with several members of the group.

The classic digital destroyer, recorded at Aquarius in 1987.
Cyaan be no loefah.

Ndikho Xaba was born in 1934 in Pietermaritzburg, KZN, South Africa: for thirty-four years —  1964 –1998 — he lived in exile in the US, Canada and Tanzania. Originally issued by Trilyte Records out of Oakland, California, this 1970 recording is bracing, freewheeling Now Thing, suffused with SA idioms, and focussed by a political urgency wiring together US Black Power, Black Aesthetics and the anti-apartheid front-line like nothing else. You can hear Trane from the off — ‘a spiritual offering to my ancestors’  — and plenty of Sun Ra, with whom The Natives several times shared double-bills. Freedom is a gutbucket-soul rendition of the people’s anthem; that’s Plunky from the Oneness Of Juju playing saxophone on Nomusa; the thunderous finale features drummer Keita from the West Indies, and Baba Duru, who studied percussion in India, before winding up with Xaba blowing eerily through a horn made from a giant piece of tubular seaweed.

Guaranteed to put a beam on your bean and a glide in your stride, the DVD here compiles moments from a local 1982 TV show, broadcast live from a club called The CopHerBox. It’s pleasurable enough just watching people get down so naturally, in a real-life club… but you also get ventriloquists, contortionists, body-builders, impersonators, ‘the full-figured ladies fashion show’, comedy sketches, android group-dancing to techno, rubber chickens… and bands like Universal Togetherness miming to their latest records. There’s also a mini-documentary, complete with Phil Cohran section; and twenty-three full musical performances. (Finally the Dingwalls posse gets a glimpse of Luba Raushiek in action.)
The CD and vinyls are culled from a trove of self-released 45s and small-time twelves; a die-cut cathode-ray jacket and six in-package stills are your tickets and souvenirs.
Great fun.