Militant jazz, fusion, funk and soul from mid-seventies Manenberg, outside Cape Town, with a set of roots in club dance traditions like ballroom (‘langarm’), Khoisan hop-step and the whirling ‘tickey draai’ (‘spin on a sixpence’) of the mine camps; others in jazz-rock and the New Thing.

Wonderful recordings of Armenian piano music composed in 1906 — featuring imitations of the ‘dap’ tambourine, plucked tar, shiv reed-pipe and dhol drum — performed last year by Keiko Shichijo on a Steinweg Nachf piano, built in 1880.
Lovely thing, warmly recommended.

Choice sides from the recent LP reissue.

Something really special.

Juddering bangers and hypnotic body-rockers, dazed spells and rootical wig-outs spun from early Detroit techno, West African field recordings, soundboy dub and beatbox hip hop; rough as fuck and clatteringly percussive, but shot through with a gritty numinousness. Stokey worries.

Gorgeously sleeved in midnight-black art-paper, intricately printed in silver with the visionary photography of Katrin Koenning, folded by hand and packed into Japanese cellophane envelopes.

Very warmly recommended, unsurprisingly.

Up from down under, following crucial releases on his own Body Language imprint, LJ shifts gears and steers his intricate sound-world — torn between house and ambient, with Larry Heard’s Alien LP coursing through — into deeper, more techno-infused waters.
Watch out for The Centre Of Time, evoking over its twenty minutes both the arctic vapour of Vletrmx21-vintage Autechre and the expansiveness of Vangelis in full flight.
Next-level stuff from Berceuse Heroique.

‘Eighteen dedications, each hybrid and different, but driven by an utterly personal approach to bebop, Brazilian jazz, Africa and Brazilian roots; thronged with his signature battery of whistles, screams, scales, keyboard, kettles, spoons, squeeze toys, children’s voices, prepared piano and geese calls; with the band adding native instruments like pandeiro, surdo, caixa, apitos, bonecos and agogos, besides saxophones, flute, electric piano, electric bass and so on. Musicians and genres such as Terry Riley, Frank Zappa and Weather Report, Javanese gamelan and Indonesian kulintang come to mind, but there is no real overlap: Pascoal has his own special brew.’
His first recording with his band in fifteen years. “My music is not commercial; it’s not like selling bananas or soap. I’m not in a hurry to record.”

Stone-classic country blues album recorded by Pete Welding for Testament in 1970. Just singing and slide guitar, still crackling and luminous with the time Shines knocked around with Robert Johnson in the mid-30s.
“Blues is like death. Blues is when you are lost. Blues is when you are depressed but don’t know why you are depressed.”
It’s a must.

Gibson semi-acoustic and double-bass duets — a Fats Domino, a Konitz and a Motian, various originals, Goldfinger, Carter Family Americana — recorded live at the Village Vanguard in 2016.

Originally self-released in 1993 by Peter Mekwunye as a small-run cassette, soon after his arrival in the US from Nigeria. Moody, personal, moving, freeform afro-pop, or DIY soul, using just a Casio keyboard and a microphone, with a rawly naked message of love, struggle, spirituality and hope, ‘dedicated to all Nigerians all over the world, and to all freedom fighters around the world.’ Strange — a bit like eavesdropping on someone talking to himself — and warmly recommended.
We got these from Mississippi.

‘Classic Louisiana swamp soul / R&B, recorded in the early to mid 1960s. Includes the popular dancefloor fillers I Got Loaded and Stop, as well as some real beautiful obscurities. Ballads and stompers to make life better. Old school tip-on cover.’

The dub is tough, funky drum-and-bass business, with stiff shots of guitar and brass.

‘Further adventures in Organic Electronic Music by this rigorous magician of vaporous, oscillating patterns, sidereal frequencies, nebulous dust; explorer of inter-zonal paths, new dreamlike dimensions, undiscovered planets. Marrying the momentum of Kraut-Kosmische with a personal, gentle minimalism, DSR Lines specialises in rare atmospheres of rhythmic pulsation, with enveloping, spiralling sounds, luminous and radiant in their hypnotic aura, or magnificently ecstatic and ascending.’

Originally released in 1975, from Milan, a one-away blend of Marco Rossi’s bluesy, free, spiritual jazz-guitar (evoking Pharaoh Sanders and Alice Coltrane); middle-eastern winds; and the masterful African percussionists Nick Eyok and Mohammed El Targhi, ranging from northern Saharan to Yoruba styles. Experimental, but warmly grooving, rootsy and accessible.