‘As always, there is a true touch of otherness to Delphine’s voice and approach. While most of the melodies are homespun, there is an abiding oddness to the electronic squiggles, keyboard swathes and found sounds that sit behind everything. At times it sounds as though she’s reciting nursery rhymes from another planet… and there’s an lazy jazziness to Mocke’s guitar playing that sets everything off quite beautifully’ (The Wire).

‘Recorded in an old church in the village of Mauzun in the Puy-de-Dôme, L’invisible est multiforme is an invitation to let these abstract songs erase our obsessive thoughts of the day, to open ourselves to the vibrant poetry of the air and the evening, to finally forget ourselves. Each note played by these four intertwined hands is like a slight break in the fabric of time, sliding one over the other, reminding us of mortality and its beauty. Ritornellas flow out of mechanical clocks, fragile, taking care not to hurt the silence. Both seek to dig and open up new paths to enrich their duet, to open up imaginary landscapes. Sometimes the guitar cuts. through the fabric of an organ, fractures the song, just as the rain erases a landscape, redrawing it. But very quickly, both of them continue to follow this new path, improvising what will serve as a framework, a perspective, a language. There is a kind of praise for slowness in this ‘invisible’, a desire to hold back the song, not to let it slip away, to let the listener’s ear enter its course, to share the last note, its illumination. Each of these thirteen short sound pieces merge into a common colour, a vibration close to the different tonalities, which inter-penetrate, like a cubist painting. Words cannot take away the mystery of this record, words can only fail to describe the music, you must hear it’ (Michel Henritzi).
Beautifully presented, with numerous photographic inserts.

Herman Sang (from the Jiving Juniors) was at Brentford Road from the start, in the late-1950s.
This is wistful organ-combo r&b — pre-ska — with some sweet calypso jazz on the flip.

‘Amazing record,’ attests Floating Points. ‘One of my top five.’
JM’s mournful, melancholic singing creates a dark, brooding, atmosphere in stark contrast with the prevailing joyfulness and high-spirited rhythms of Brazilian pop at this time. The mood is foreboding but ecstatically hypnotic; the music complexly staggering. A lost masterpiece.
Secret weapon of Madlib, too.

Classic early-eighties Nigerian disco, fronted by Ronnie Pearl from Aktion and Jake Sollo from the Funkees.

London crew formed in the late seventies by Gus Phillips from Sierra Leone and Dominican Sam Jones. Nurtured by Grove Music; same family tree as Aswad. Just around the corner from Honest Jon’s in Ladbroke Grove, guitarist Peter Harris went on to set up the Kickin label (which put out Shut Up And Dance, Aaron Carl and Blaze).

Heavy, heavy early-eighties roots, mixed by King Tubby.

His first album simply under his own name, from 2022. ‘In a quieter, more meditative space than the pulsing, driving material found in his other groups Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, Shabaka and The Ancestors.’