Four experiments in Pisan beat science — fleet and swirling at the limits of its dancefloor idioms, but faultlessly grooving with the hypnotic charge of classic techno, and flashing a precious combination of exquisite, confident melodicism and ruthless intensity.
Beautifully presented in stickered yellow sleeves with PVC covers, inserts and stamped inners.

Luigi Pirandello provides the conceit for the tenth Baroque Sunburst: his thinking about masks, duplicity, and ensnarement; the idea that ‘self’ and ‘identity’ are unattainable plenitudes; that we are all trapped behind masks and other concealments.
Hence each of the four tracks is designed for playback at either 33 or 45 rpm. Maschera itself is a half-time stomper with the slithering grace of a snake, intricate IDM refrains, and riddling drum patterns. Trappola is melodic hide-and-seek, with a stately, captivating tribal rhythm which slowly gathers intensity. The snake returns in Specchio, biting its own tail in an endless birth-death infinity mirror… before KRSLD brings the curtain down with a dubwise, dancehall rework of the opener, teasing the snake into the open. Or does it?

Her landmark rewiring of Zulu maskanda, in 1999. Tough, grooving sufferers about heartbreak, abuse and money worries, from a woman’s point of view.
‘Unlike many African music albums produced at the time, Urban Zulu is tight, with every inch of the vocals worked over to powerful, husky perfection. Rarely pretty but exquisitely detailed, Urban Zulu is intense, angry, and bewitching.’

An early seventies South African expression of the London Beat scene, mixing in R&B, funk and moon-stomping, organ-led reggae. The 45s Reggae Shh! and Reggae Meadowlands were big underground hits on the Mod scene.
Featuring top-notch South Africa session musicians like guitarist Johnny Fourie and keyboardist Zane Cronje.

The multi-faceted genius of Eugene ‘Yonachak’ Cline, producer, multi-instrumentalist and singer from St Lucia, beautifully presented by Hornin’, with top-notch, live-and-kicking sound, in a gorgeous sleeve.
It’s a gripping, crazy mix. Deep, mid-seventies roots, Half Moon style, extended, with an instrumental, and ace dubs; nuts but banging late-eighties digi; off-the-wall rasta-soca fire.
Great stuff.

From 1974, featuring knockout rare groove like I Don’t Need Nobody Else and What Do You Want Me To Do.
Limber, feeling and introspective, with full horns and strings setting fine songs and frankly soulful singing.
Lou came through in Detroit as a writer and producer with Barbara Lewis, before signing in his own right to Epic, via the Rags label run by legendary producer Jerry Ragovoy. Hereafter he was briefly a member of The Fifth Dimension.
One of the greatest of all modern soul albums.

The return of the AACM flautist to the visionary, Afro-futurist science fiction of Octavia Butler, alongside theremin-player Harris, together with fellow Chicago luminaries like cellist Tomeka Reid and trumpeter Ben LaMar Gay.
Tumultuous, visceral musical reflections on Butler’s ideas about Apocalypse, power, hybridity-versus-identity, race and feminism. ‘Writing myself in,’ she called it.

Legendary Harlem soul and funk from 1973 — the RAT was the house-band at the Apollo —  with bags of lo-fi charm and sublimated Isaac Hayes to its ‘unabashedly sincere songs that perfectly encapsulate the era’s heady milieu of black pride and cultural awareness, and the plaintive emotion of struggling to realise dreams whilst navigating a city and neighbourhood in decline.’
Painstakingly prepared according to the remit of this series; with excellent notes.

Amongst the greatest sitar players in history, recorded in Japan in 1974, accompanied by Manick Das on tabla, and Namita Chatterjee on tambura.

‘Earl is on another level. The way he deploys his skill, humor, and encyclopedic knowledge of hip-hop has made him one of the most effortlessly deep and cool rappers alive’ (Pitchfork).

‘Mind-melting West Javanese gong pop, recorded in 2007 at Jugala studios in Bandung, based on a Javanese secular village music and dance tradition known as ketuk-tila, which was transformed into a popular studio music in the early 1960s by the producer Gugum Gumbira, founder of Jugala. With vocals by Idjah Hadidjah, one of the key historic voices of jaipongan, the situation here is disorientatingly heavy, low bpm gong pressure coming straight from the originators. It is a much less dainty affair than classical Javanese gamelan, and less febrile than the fully automatic Balinese variant. Hadidjah’s golden voice sews together shifting polyrhythms that would baffle a watchmaker; the whole is embroidered by rehab and underpinned by Mariana Trench level bass drops. A second disc features a set of thoughtful electronic reworkings’ (Frances Gooding, The Wire).

This is terrific.
Brazilian post-punk, art rock and DIY from 1988, released here for the first time, by the duo Celso Alves and Kodiak Bachine (whose records with the band Agentss are desperately sought-after nowadays).
Dubwise and rhythmic, percussive and synthy, with tangy Brazilian roots, and a droll humour to its reflections on embalming, LSD and zombies, the music freewheels roughly and vividly from the truffling, chattering, tropical atmospherics of the opener, through to the machine-funk, Romeroesque terrors of the Greenhouse Massacres, to close. 
Sung in Portuguese and English, studded with Spanish, French and German, the lyrics are reproduced on an insert. Pressed at Pallas.
Ace. Check it out.

Superb, fat, classic roots production by Michael Forbes, with full horn section, organ, expert percussion and drumming. Strong, heartfelt, resigned singing by Mike Anthony (not to be confused with the much more prolific Lovers singer from Lewisham).