A welcome reissue of this 2013 collaboration between Onra — the Chinoiseries producer — and Buddy Sativa. Deep, spiritual jazz from the heart. Lonnie Liston Smith is a guiding light.

‘Bubbling tones, processed field recordings, and shifting electronic layers evoke the rhythms of atoms, molecules, and micro-organisms.
‘While grounded in experimental technique, The Vertical Luminous avoids the academic or austere, instead embracing a mischievous sense of melody and curiosity - a reminder that exploration and joy can coexist in sound.
‘A record that is both meditative and playful, equally suited to deep listening or casual drift.’

‘A psychoacoustic odyssey through the American South, influenced as much by Dock Boggs as by Luc Ferrari. This isn’t ‘avant-folk’ as per, but more expansive avant-garde compositions using components of traditional music as tools for storytelling. There are banjos, but they bounce around the stereo field in hypnotic patterns; there are autoharps, but they’re bowed, left detuned by time and humidity, and augmented with sounds of screeching cicadas.
‘Check out the haunted, ambient interpretation of the murder ballad Omie Wise, featuring fourteen different versions of the song time-stretched and overlaid with pedal steel by Tongue Depressor’s Henry Birdsey. It’s a wild listen!’

This is sensational; hotly recommended.

“The holy grail of British Asian music; the album that birthed the British Asian dancefloor.”

‘Recorded in London in 1982, the nine-track album combines producer Kuljit Bhamra’s searing synthesiser melodies and hammering drum machine rhythms with the Punjabi-language folk singing of his classically trained mother, Mohinder Kaur Bhamra. Part early acid house experiment, part north Indian tradition and part disco-funk, the record was a futuristic outlier: the south Asian fusion sounds of bhangra were only just beginning; the mainstream crossover music of the Asian underground was more than a decade away; and the British Asian diaspora were largely relegated to meeting at weddings and community events, rather than at the disco’ (The Guardian).

Mid-seventies Harry J dub, led by keyboardist Leslie Butler, but featuring Joe White on melodica. The original LP plus eight spaced-out dubs from the vaults, including a dubwise take on Me And Mrs Jones. (There’s no messing with Billy Paul’s singing, though. Thankfully the melodica comes to the rescue.)

This is ace.
Sweet harmonies; a majestic, more-ish rhythm, with a touch of the natural mystic. A lover’s open-hearted overture without the usual screwface braggadocio: ‘Me look like a lion but me humble like a lamb.’
An under-stated classic by the Indian-Jamaican Silpatt brothers.

‘Fourteen tracks of irresistible psych-spiked cumbia and Link Wray guitar from the edge of the Peruvian jungle’ (Uncut).
‘Rambunctious Peruvian Cumbia Amazonica … The unpredictable and unrestrained sound that locals lovingly called ‘llullampeo’ can be heard in all its glory in Gitanita’ (Sounds And Colours).