Wicked EP!
Lloyd Parks’ soulful sufferers, beautifully sung — a worthy reggae answer to Joe Bataan’s sublime Ordinary Guy — plus a deadly dub, with mad effects; then a melodica outing by Augustus Pablo, with clavichord; and finally the gob-smacking leave-the-studio-sah excursion.
Trumps trumping trumps.

Consummate Berlin dub science by the maestro.
Beautifully textured, shuffling Lagos funk, on home-made percussion… militant horns… and a walloping, filthy-stinking kick-drum like the bucking, hairy hind-most of the Devil himself.
The Dub is Warrior Charge, 2016.
What a record. Bim squared.

Three excellent, diverse vocal excursions on a heavy, mid-eighties, Channel One-style rhythm by The Gladiators Band. The dub follows Frankie.

Ed Sanders founded a magazine called Fuck You (in 1962), a radical bookshop on the Lower East Side of NYC, named Peace Eye, and The Fugs.
This is a kind of incantatory left-anarchist history lesson, with interjections on a small keyboard called a pulse lyre, which he invented and built himself. It’s droll, epic, engaging, stirring; warmly recommended.
Presented in a beautiful gatefold sleeve, with lyric sheet.

‘Many mayhemic forces were set against the socialist zone…’

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.

Dedicated ‘to the United Nations and especially young people’, this is slow-burning, steeply screwed, early-seventies Atlanta funk by James Conley and co, spun out of a line from Eliza Hewett’s nineteenth-century hymn, When We All Get To Heaven.
The flip is deadly, too: a super-soulful blend of Sly & The Family Stone with Kool & The Gang, movingly confused and sincere in its pleading (without threats or machismo) to be loved back.
Both sides come with instrumentals. Check part two of Get Together.
Beautifully sleeved.

‘A strictly-rockers intermingling of dubstep and d&b, with heavy bass and darkly atmospheric strings. DJ Sotofett falls out of line on the flip, heading off into acidic and 3D soundscapes.’

Horse Sacrifice was performed on Danish TV in 1970, as a protest against the Vietnam War.
It hinges on a haunting, fragile song entitled My Dead Horse, with Lene Adler Pedersen accompanied by Bjørn Nørgaard on piano, and HC on violin. This beautiful, sad lullaby is as simple, precious and unusual as anything in Christiansen’s output. Previously unreleased.

Originally out on Joe Morgan’s Fish Tea in the mid-eighties, reprising his classic Basement Session for the digital era. Extended mixes, with mean electro bass on the dub.

Compositions from 1969/70, when Forti was based in Woodstock, New York — ‘stoned in the woods,’ she recalls — around the time of the Festival, just before moving to California, and working and performing with Charlemagne Palestine.
The seven songs here were recorded in 2012 during her exhibition Sounding, at The Box gallery in Los Angeles. The blue vinyl carries an etching of Forti’s Illuminations Drawing on the flip; accompanied by a sixteen-page colour book with images of the original sheet music scored by Charlemagne Palestine.

Three murderous steppers dubs on a propulsive, rat-tat-tat rhythm, combining mystical spaciousness with detail and ferocity. Angry-lion bass and smears of brass, fusillades and explosions, scares and shocks, oriental pentatonics, clattering percussion and synthy transcendence… the business. The second mix is nastiest; the third is the wildest and most discombobulated (and our favourite).
Bim bim bim.

Precious, timely, moody reflections on migrating from Côte d’Ivoire to Moss, in Norway, over ruff breakbeat funk supplied by the nimble bass-playing of Maimouna’s old man (from Kambo Super Sound), and the expert conga and kit-drumming of Stliletti-Ana (from Jesse, in Helsinki). Even in their delirium, b-boys and girls will savour traces of the Incredible Bongo Band, in the chorus. Over the eight minutes, and going deeper on the flip, the mix lifts off into a cosmic steppers dub, featuring Gilb-r alongside Sotofett on keyboards, with no let up for the dancefloor in energy and vibes.

“It was in 2001 / I got the letter / A letter that said / I would travel to a cold world / Not knowing what would happen / I was full of loneliness / No country / Everyone was different / Not only skin colour / The way people spoke / The way people behaved / That’s the adventure / Obey / This is the story we’re told / The key to success / So we can do everything for our parents / Who need us / Desperate for a better life / That’s the adventure.”

Three knockout EPs, in hand-stamped, poly-lined sleeves.

The ‘un-muting’ or ‘sonic restitution’ of African instruments held in Western museum collections, this project began with a recording session in October 2023 at the British Museum in London, when Hoyt was granted access to instruments from the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. These recordings were then developed in his studio, blending in African and Western instruments from his own collection.

‘This record is not an album but a diagram, a blackground score for a people who have never stopped dancing. Instruments exiled into the vitrines of empire, their voices stilled by taxonomic theft, now murmur and hum again. This is restitution by vibration, and the sounds you hear refuse to be forgotten, to be fixed, to refuse to die. You won’t find Western time signatures here; you’ll find time folding, spilling, catching fire. His compositions bespeak an afro-sonic-philo-sophy, more drastic than gnostic. These desperate times call for desperate pleasures.’

Interpretations of the Soul Vendors’ Swing Easy on melodica and clavinet; plus a dub, and a toast by Dillinger. Hot stuff is right.

A droning, slo-mo Leonard Cohen cover, and a collaboration with violinist Jessica Moss, from A Silver Mt. Zion; both around twelve minutes. Grouper’s a big fan.

Hebi is tough, stomping, mesmerizing romany funk, riding Far East from the Baltic Sea on clopping hooves of uranium, with synths from spaceways further out still. Weakheart deejays will scatter, but Sotofett has road-tested this on dubplate for six months, tearing up parties and dancefloors.
Deeply meditative, desolately beautiful, Haru will stop you in your tracks. Osaruxo’s violin could be a rebab or a shamisen, a reed instrument or a voice. Ravishing music.

Plus the melodica instrumental and three dubs.