Three rare recordings by this pioneer of early Danish electronic music — compelling, often dazzling, but focussed and without bombast.
‘Electronic Music was originally released in 1987 as a retrospective album, collecting three of Bent Lorentzen’s electronic works from the 70s. These clearly demonstrate Lorentzen’s close familiarity with his equipment and his great technical proficiency regarding the creation and manipulation of all sorts of electronic and recorded acoustic sounds — typically in the form of speed changes, reversed sounds, and reverb and filter effects. The music is often quite dramatic with distinct narratives and multiple dynamic layers of sound, but still with a clear sense of disposition and restraint, possibly stemming from Lorentzen’s experience with classical instrumentation and orchestration.’
Fastidiously prepared and stylishly presented by IDL, as per.

Feeling, story-telling, ranging music-making by Tara Clerkin, Sunny-Joe Paradisos and Patrick Benjamin from Bristol, where they’ve been collaborating for around a decade.
Thumbs up from The Wire: ‘Drifting from dubby minimalism to smudged acid jazz, Tara’s stark and tuneful voice acts as the vehicle for her concise poetic lyricism. The group coalesce disparate influences into a cohesive sound, reflecting a romantic view of a familiar world.’
Check it out.

Recorded at the tail end of summer 2020, in the garden behind Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio, by this collective of artists, musicians, singers, and dancers, including Angel Bat Dawid and Ben LaMar Gay.
“It was about offering a new thought,” says Locks. “It was about resisting the darkness. It was about expressing possibility. It was about asking the question, ‘Since the future has unfolded and taken a new and dangerous shape… what happens NOW?’”

A fizzing, ranging showcase of six different Italian artists, in the third of this series.
A breakbeat symphony by Modes; swingeing Acid from Train To Eltanin; hybrid footwork by DJ Plant Texture. Nothus makes a belated series debut with some fiercely bottled d&b; Marco Segato is wildly live and direct; Soreab pounds together grime and rather grumpy samba.
Clear vinyl snazzily presented with a transparent matt graphic insert, in a plastic sleeve.
A tonic for the troops.

Led by guitarist Dekula Kahanga, veteran of the legendary Tanzanian dance band Orchestra Maquis Original; also featuring Congolese singer Gaby and musicians from Kenya, Uganda, Senegal and Sweden.
Hypnotic, infectious, graceful soukous; newly recorded, channelling thousands of rollickingly good nights out. (The band plays monthly at the not so glamorous club Lilla Wien in Stockholm.)

Sisters Jacky, Denise, Dorinda, Karen and Elbernita Clark debuted in the early 1970s on their uncle Bill Moss’ Bilesse label. Bill and their mother Mattie had both recorded for Detroit’’s Westbound, at the time riding high with the Detroit Emeralds, Denise LaSalle and co; so the Clarks’ classy blend of gospel, Aretha, jazz and Motown was right at home on Westbound’s new Sound Of Gospel subsidiary.
Kicking off with their humungous gospel-disco smash You Brought The Sunshine, here is a harvesting of the highlights of four Clark Sisters’ LPs, and a handful from solo albums by the group’s leader Elbernita “Twinkie” Clark.

Deadly, seventies, New York roots. Rugged, a little wired.
The basic rhythm-track is Wackies-style. The flamboyant brass chart is jazzier. Moody organ, too. Young Roots himself goes on a bit.
The band backed The Aksumites on their first 12” (Afrika Fe De Afrikan) and gigged around the City.

I Believe this reissue is not properly licensed.

Linus plays the hommel, a forerunner of the Appalachian dulcimer, flutes and rattles; and sings.
‘The hommel has existed since the middle ages, but the earliest example still intact is from 1608. Once a staple in most households in the Low Countries, it is a true folk instrument, of the people, mainly played in the past by women who used their kitchen tables as resonating surfaces to amplify & accompany traditional religious & secular tunes. Nowadays it is seen rarely outside of museums in Brussels & other places you most likely have never heard of. It is not spectacular, its simplest version is just a long thin box with strings on top. Some of the strings are melody strings, which have frets placed underneath them, the others are drone strings that have no frets. Traditionally it was strummed with a goose feather & notes were made by sliding a hard stick with a handle, from fret to fret on the melody strings leaving the drone strings ringing openly. The constant hum of the drones is where the name of the instrument comes from: in Flemish, a bumblebee is a hommel.’
Lovely stuff from the wonderful Okraina.

Encapsulating the culmination of a joyously ambitious twelve-day jazz project mounted in 1978 at the ancient amphitheatre Tasso della Quercia, in Rome: the collaboration (in different group configurations) between key Italian avant-gardists like the saxophonists Tommaso Vittorini, Eugenio Colombo and Maurizio Giammarco, trumpeter Alberto Corvini and trombonist Danilo Terenzi, together with visiting players such as Steve Lacy, Steve Potts and Evan Parker, Roswell Rudd, Frederick Rzewski and Noel McGhee.