An extensive, sumptuous survey of surely the mightiest Gospel label of them all.
Sixty-one gems of stomping, rollicking, desolate, ravishing gospel music, intermingling with soul, blues, doo-wop, jazz, r&b, disco and boogie.
Presented as a sixty-page mini-book, with CDs suspended in card sleeves; perfect-bound, exorbitantly expensive to produce, lovely.

Seventeen gems of fierce funk, rapturous soul and transcendent disco and boogie, super-charged with celebration and affirmativeness, loaded with roaring choirs, rocking horns and popping bass guitars, from the years leading up to Savoy’s acquisition by Malaco.

The second of three volumes presents sublime crossings of gospel with the soul, funk and jazz of the Black Power era. Twenty cuts dot dazzlingly between Muscle Shoals soul, screwed breakbeat, Mizells-style fusion, disco and proto-house. Triumphant re-workings of Sly Stone, Donny Hathaway and Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters will have listeners throwing their pew cushions into the air.

Fresh, funky and expertly percussive, troubled but warmly engaging — a trio of upful, atmospheric house excursions to mark the debut of this collaboration between Bristol luminaries.
‘Planet Spanner itself is acid-edged, with radiant chords, layers of rolling percussion and psychotropic FX unfurling from a nasty bassline. Things go deeper on the flip in two solo productions, moody and dubbed-out, with tough drums.’
Hand-stamped, in silk-screened sleeves.
Deep Street round three.

Limberly pulsating, dubwise and warmly intimate, open to the heavens but twinkling with avian detail, deftly shuffling melody and dissonance, rhythm and pause — and lit up up by the woody, breathy timbres of Clive Bell’s shakuhachi playing — this is life-affirming, smart, deeply pleasurable music, easy to dance to, with everything from Lee Perry to Noh Theatre via Karlheinz Stockhausen and King Sunny Ade in the electro-acoustic mix.

Benjamin Kilchhofer’s artwork peers through the vacuum of space, catching a rare glimpse of the mysterious alien biomes, fossils and silhouettes generated by dwarf planets, asteroids, Kuiper belt, and other trans-Neptunian objects.
Buckle up… needle to the groove… take the tour!
Warmly recommended.

‘Smalltown Superjazzz was a free-jazz subsidiary label of Smalltown Supersound from 2005-2012. Dormant then till 2019, it is now reborn as the AFJ-Series, named after a recording by Don Cherry & Krystzof Penderecki’s The New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra.
‘AFJ-Series is proud to release this compilation of music from forty releases, spanning almost twenty years of Smalltown Supersound, Superjazzz and AFJ. The idea is to bring the Superjazzz era into the AFJ-Series, but also to leave it behind — and start fresh. A requiem and rebirth combined, inspired by the 1964 ESP Disk sampler (also by its hard editing).
‘Lasse Marhaug spent months ploughing through the entire catalogue. Whilst the main goal was to survey Smalltown’s wide range of releases in the improvised/jazz/free music field, his choices and juxtapositions almost play as a new piece of music.
‘So here it is — forty tracks of total freedom. The universality of improvised music, as Derek Bailey called it.’

Even at the age of eighty — Nation Time is fifty years old — Joe McPhee refuses to stand still or bask in nostalgia. For all its lovely strangeness — for a start, besides playing, he sings and recites — this LP elaborates lineages in his oeuvre initiated with John Snyder in the seventies, and sustained with Pauline Oliveros.
Lasse Marhaug is an old hand, young at heart, too. After thirty years of making electronic music — hundreds of releases, collaborations and projects — his name is synonymous with Norwegian noise music.
A one-of-a-kind, highly enjoyable, compelling mixture of free jazz and electronics, inspired by science fiction and early electronic music.

Andaleeb Wasif was a self-taught singer and harmonium player, born in Hyderabad, India, in 1928.
Here are six ravishing ghazals, setting some of the greatest Urdu poetry of the twentieth century, about love and longing.
Enigmatic, filled with pathos, timeless.

Soulful UK-roots bomb from 1980.

Olive ‘Senya’ Grant makes Horace Andy’s Please Don’t Go her own.
Family Man at the controls, on Clive Chin’s ticket.

‘What would happen if Erykah Badu, DJ Screw and Sa-Ra had a baby? You’d get Liv.e’ (NPR).
‘Martian soul music’ (Fader).

From the mid-eighties, when he was lining up with Barry Guy and Paul Rutherford in Iskra 1903.
Spacious, detailed excursions layering violin, vocalese and electronics, Bach and a little dub.
Lovely, captivating stuff.

This saxophonist came through with the likes of Roy Ayers and Joe Henderson in the sixties, before hooking up with Steve Lacy in Paris in 1973. In this soundtrack composed for a film by his friend Joaquin Lledó — entitled Le Sujet Ou Le Secrétaire Aux Mille Et Un Tiroirs — he was joined by members of the group around Lacy, and diverse co-conspirators including friends from the funk outfit Ice, French accordionist Joss Bassellion, and none other than Jef Gilson at the mixing desk. It’s a dazzling, intensely entertaining blend of modal, cosmic and spiritual jazz, free funk, dirty grooves, heavy jams, bistro boogie and Javanese wah-wah.

Highly sought-after French jazz fusion — blending in West Coast funk, gentle blues, sketches of Andalusia — with John Hicks, Jerry Goodman from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Jean-Marie Fabiano from the Fabiano Orchestra.