Fragile, deep, melancholic, enthralling home recordings from Beirut; lost in memories, worry, grief, rapture, love.
Very warmly recommended.

‘Highest recommendation’, Foxy Digitalis; ‘evanescent bliss, an invitation to a safe space both isolated and welcoming’, The Quietus; ‘a sweep of introspective, breath-catching moments of beauty’, Pitchfork. ‘The combination and contrast of highly familiar and highly alien elements give Asmar’s music a quality not quite like anything else I can name. The way she channels found voices into her surreal mix of sounds is particularly striking’
(Byron Coley, The Wire).

Her first two cassette releases remastered and presented in a gatefold sleeve featuring new art-work by Yara herself.

‘Eleven pieces recorded over the past year, moving between the small town of Alfred in upstate New York, and Beirut; stepping out, as if onto ice, into a new life on a new continent during a time of tragedy, turmoil, and upheaval.
‘Unfamiliar instruments, new materials and new sounds delicately build on Yara’s intimate style, with its backbone of homemade mechanical music boxes and personal archive of family recordings. She explores the peculiar resonance of the metallophone, and delves into her collection of deconstructed toy pianos, guiding her music into ever more surreal territories… dreamlike, fragile, fragmentary, and strangely timeless.’

‘Returning from Paris home to Côte d‘Ivoire in 1974, Ernesto began looking for like-minded musicians to form the mighty Ziglibithiens. Diabo Steck (drums), Bamba Yang (keyboards & guitar), Léon Sina (guitar) and Assalé Best (saxophone) would become the core of the group and together with Ernesto they began thinking of ways of combining the rhythms and chants of the Bété people together with makossa, funk and disco. He called his experiment Ziglibithy and his first two albums — recorded at the EMI studios in 1977 in Lagos and released on the Badmos label — took West Africa by storm, turning Ernesto Djédjé into an icon overnight, and one of the all-time legends of African music.
‘The song Zighlibitiens, brought to Colombia by an aeronautical mechanic in the early 1980, would become a huge hit on the Caribbean Coast. Renamed El Tigre by locals soundsystem operators, it attained holy-grail status in Barranquilla and Cartagena. Setting fire to innumerable local parties, it has become one of the most sought-after albums in that part of the world. And so while Ziglibithy has mostly disappeared from the airwaves of its country of birth, on the other side of the Atlantic, its fire continues to shine bright.’

‘Multiphonic trills and yodels, loops of ululations, sudden percussive outbursts, warbling glissandi… sculptural, oscillating, swirling tone-colours… the human voice dissolving into the sounds of birds, machines, electronics, scraps of otherworldly language.’
Ute was a student of Henning Christiansen and Allan Kaprow; she is a collaborator of Rhodri Davies and Phil Minton, amongst many others.

Wonderful stuff; original, naked, visceral, transfixing, fun. Check it out.

Half price.

A lavishly illustrated and elegantly designed hardback; full of gorgeous gear. Early days but a lovely Christmas present.

‘The design, history, and cultural impact of turntables and vinyl technology… the early decades of turntable design and vinyl technology from the late 19th century to the 1940s will set the scene, followed by chapters dedicated to the best turntables of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s… includes 300 illustrations from the world of turntables, from affordable to high-end, and everything in between.’

Jubilant eighties cumbia from Peru. Scorcher.

One of the unsung movers and shakers of 1970s reggae, Ivan Smith worked as in-studio producer and record promoter for both Bunny Lee and Channel 1, whilst quietly producing and releasing his own catalogue of high-quality 45s.
Here is the first ever compilation, pure classics, all taken from master tapes, in a lovely silkscreened sleeve.
Ace.

Hurting, heartfelt sufferers about youth unemployment in hard times.
Our favourite of these three new Jah Lifes from Digikiller.
All three run the same ruff digi rhythm, stripped and venomous on the flip.
All three are previously unreleased.

‘It’s not of my own will to idle on a corner.’

“The traditional songs of the UK are rich with storytelling, and you can find songs with examples of almost any kind of situation or person you can think of. While people of the African diaspora have been present in these islands since Roman times, their histories are little known – and these histories don’t tend to appear in the folk songs of these islands.”

Angeline about her song Unknown African Boy (d.1830): “I learned that slave ships regularly passed by the Isles of Scilly and several were wrecked. A local newspaper article of the time listed some of the items washed up on shore: palm oil, elephant tusks, boxes of silver dollars and gold dust, and the body of an unknown ‘West African boy – estimated age around eight’. The boy is buried in St Martin’s churchyard, Isles of Scilly. I wrote this song from the perspective of his mother.”

And about Cruel Mother Country: “In 1775 and 1776, enslaved Africans in the US were encouraged to put their lives at risk by escaping to join the British army. They were assured the Queen of England was Black – the Black Queen in question was Queen Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, wife of King George III. We may never know the truth about Queen Charlotte’s ancestry, but we do know that gossip about it was rife at the time. The promised homeland these enslaved Africans risked their lives in exchange for never materialised. Most became homeless on the streets of London.”

Alex Neilson and Martin Carthy are amongst the supporting musicians.

‘It’s always summer somewhere, but especially so wherever Cheryl Glasgow’s carefree clubber Glued To The Spot gets a spin. An absolute ear-worm from the opening strums, Glasgow’s Sade-adjacent, jazz vocalese sweeps into a warm up-tempo groove, never breaking sweat. Issued on Ross Anderson’s short-lived, London-based Live label, Glued To The Spot swept through the club scene briefly in 1987, embarking for warmer shores when the season changed.’

Guitarist Willie ‘Junei’ Lee spent the late-seventies touring with with Albert King, Curtis Mayfield, and The Emotions, before returning home to Gary, Indiana, to focus on his own sound. ‘The only artists I listened to was Hendrix and Santana,’ he recalls.
‘The emissions coming from his home studio were entirely different, however, as Let’s Ride channels the Euro sensibilities of Kraftwerk or Italo over virtuosic guitar. ‘I just didn’t want to sound like anyone else.’
‘Let’s Ride anticipated Chicago house by a few years. Pressed in minuscule numbers in 1987 on Pharaohs Records, the 45 never connected with the nearby scenes in Chicago and Detroit where it might have found purchase in fertile soils. Decades later, though, it found new life as the bed for Kaytranada’s Scared To Death.’