Black Ark business.

Jubilant jazz-oetry cut-ups of Weldon Irvine and John Lee Hooker.

Crucial Arthur — with a deadly Walter Gibbons mix.

Groovy version of the Deodato-CTI Gershwin interpretation; with a Willie Lindo. The dub does the trick.

Long-gone, under-the-radar garage bomb from quartermaster Daphni.

The twitching, mangled corpses of Lemon and Tamiko Jones, left for dead by Frank Timm on the altar of cut-and-loop disco-house. Brilliant, rooted, and ecstatic.

You can’t make sense of this, clicking through mp3s, on tin-pan computer speakers. Put the record on, though, and set the controls for the heart of the bloke next door, and it’s terrific. The drum-less, throbbing, droning, wailing, sawing, twinkling reconnaissance of Nothing, with massive, unnerving swoops, throttling and surges.
Beatrice Dillon and Kassem Mosse.
Great photos by Anne Tetzlaff on the sleeve.

Silent Servant from Sandwell District on call; and a Ventress.

A second killer Trilogy EP from DJT in Japan, advancing the legacy of Chain Reaction.
Serious, emotionally reined-in music; structurally minimal, linear and open-ended, without the puppeteering routines of most dance music… but all the more enthralling and grooving, with hefty bass. The sense of monumental, weather-distressed, darkening dread is counter-balanced by this forward momentum, and expertly dubwise light-and-shade, with layered detail.
The reverberative, gong-like tolling of the opener gives way on the flip to machines starting up in a cavernous space, like vast beating wings, with a tumping bottom end, over nine minutes.
In-between is a more atmospheric and tentative interval, with slowly roiling synths and near-and-far, morse-code percussion.
Ace.

A rolling, resplendent tribute to griot life — ‘gawlo’, Fula for ‘griot’ — spear-headed by none other than Baaba Maal. Expressive interjections by a trio of talking drums are especially lucid on the instrumental.

Extended, with dub.

Extended, with dubs.

Scientist, Roots Radics.

Belting space-techno steppers.

Majestic and immense Cure, on The Heptones’ Give Me The Right rhythm.

A bass-bin trembler from the surefire doyen of nu disco-house.

‘Anutha ho (bites the dust)...’ Classic rap diss, elbowing in on the Roxanne Shante - Sparky D blow-up.

A traditional Jola rhythm, with tuned, talking and kit drums swarming across scraps of guitar and the Mboups singing; then a more deeply dug-in, spaced-out funk, spun from a Serer rhythm. With full instrumentals.