Spiritual jazz fusion from San Francisco, impossible to find soon after it was privately pressed in a tiny run back in 1983, and highly collectible nowadays. ‘If you like John Heartsman, Aposento Alto or Minority Band, don’t miss a true killer record.’

‘From recording for Brian Eno’s Obscure Records imprint in 1975 and co-publishing the radical music magazines Musics and Collusion, to developing music programming for the BBC and releasing his own recordings of Yanomami Shaman rituals — from working with artists like Bjork and Prince Far-I — Toop has experienced one of the most interesting careers in contemporary music. Musician, listener, scholar, reporter, humanitarian, parent, iconoclast — David Toop brings his own life in music to focus in a remarkable, engaging read.’

The Clarks’ fourth, pivotal album for Westbound’s Sound Of Gospel label, from 1979, hustling them firmly towards the dancefloor. Traditional soul-based gospel like My Cup Runneth Over alongside disco-influenced gems like My Life Is Complete With Jesus and ‘Everything Is Gonna Be Alright.

Upsetters magic from the Black Ark, circa 1976. The story goes that only thirty copies were pressed, back in the day.

Heart-broken, body-rocking, mid-tempo ska. Ace.

Perhaps you remember the French music producer Coni’s record for The Trilogy Tapes.
For the inaugural release of his own label, he presents the debut of a new alias.
‘Inspired by dramatic modern landscapes, and suffused by haunting memories, the record is an attempt to seek beauty in the midst of a chaotic and saturated present. Running over with intense rhythms, flicking hi-hats, fierce voices, melancholic pads and abject distortion, Transperce whips up a kind of industrial catharsis.’

‘Four years after a first album on the Futura label in 1971, Jacques Thollot returned, this time on the Palm label of Jef Gilson, still with just as much surrealist poetry in his jazz. In thirty-five minutes, the French composer and drummer, who had been on the scene since he was thirteen — recording Gilson LPs when he was just sixteen — established himself as a link between Arnold Schoenberg and Don Cherry. Resistant to any imposed framework and always excessive, Thollot allows himself to do anything and everything: suspended time of an extraordinary delicacy, a stealthy explosion of the brass section, hallucinatory improvisation of the synthesisers, tight writing, teetering on the classical, and in the middle of all that, a hit, the title-track — which Madlib would one day end up hearing and sampling.
‘In a career lasting half a century, centred on freedom, Jacques Thollot played with a roll-call of key experimental musicians (Don Cherry, Sonny Sharrock, Michel Roques, Barney Wilen, Steve Lacy, François Tusques, Michel Portal, Jac Berrocal, Noël Akchoté...) who all heard in him a pulsation coming from another world.’