The reissue of Steve Barrow’s brilliant, powerhouse selection for Blood And Fire.

The long-awaited reissue of Deadly’s 1982 solo LP.
This great saxophonist played with everyone from The Abyssinians through Prince Far-I to Bob Marley. Designed as a showcase record for his unique talents, producer Adrian Sherwood assembled a crack team of his singers and players at the time for this set, including Style Scott, Bim Sherman, George Oban, Lizard Logan, Crucial Tony and Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah. Also dropping by is Headley’s fellow Alpha-alumnus Rico Rodriguez.
The CD includes two previously unreleased recordings.

Pressed on vinyl for the first time.
‘A marvellous set of jazz reggae instrumentals… a unique entry of super cool amid the chaos of the On-U catalogue’ (Steve Barker, The Wire).
‘Beckett’s genius is that he is always true to himself, whoever he performs with. His effervescent, tumbling, improvised melodies never fail to lift the spirits.The Modern Sound Of Harry Beckett is a magnificent sonic treat.’ The Guardian.
‘Sherwood’s production style strikes a perfect balance here between sonic creativity and respectful restraint, and Beckett himself is brilliant, creating horn lines that weave and insinuate themselves through the grooves rather than riding on top of them. Established On-U Sound fans will find this to be an enjoyable curiosity; Harry Beckett fans may find it revelatory’ (All Music).

Monumental rebel rock from the teenager at Randy’s in 1973, riding the success of Java. The Barrett Brothers, Chinna, Zoot Simms and co on a piece of Upsetters, Santics like Horace’s Problems, Guiding Star… Ever awesome.

‘The surrealist, psychedelic brain-burps of notorious all-caps-tweeting wind-up-merchant Louis Johnstone aka Wanda Group. Twenty-six congealed morsels of spur-of-the-moment
sound-art executed with genuine economy of means, namely… a phone. An impulsive, scatter-brained trip into the inner circles of regional weirdness, secreting a creeping unease which really gets under your skin. Fragments of aural rubble haphazardly cohere into galvanising spacial tones and textures, punctured by Johnstone’s garbled Essex rantings. The long-distance stare of warbled tape loops is abruptly fractured by a drunken sing-along in a care home for the elderly. As hallucinogenic takes on the utterly mundane, there’s an obvious kinship with Lambkin’s nocturnal, straight-to-dictaphone sound-pieces. Dan Johannsen’s splintered classical collages on that PIG tape and the suburban soliloquies of Regional Bears alumnus Russell Walker also feel closely aligned.’ (All Night Flight)
With an A4 riso insert.

Starkly intimate, utterly captivating early recordings by this wonderful Malian singer. Voice and acoustic guitar only; as if you were the only person in the room.
The sound has been brilliantly restored by Awesome Tapes, for its fiftieth release.
Achingly beautiful music; hotly recommended.

‘In another life David Edren aka DSR Lines is surely a visionary biologist or chemist. In this new sound adventure, he stages anatomical and cellular symphonies, invisible biochemical processes, painting the micro-dimensional flows of the body, or imaginary geographies of hidden micro-bodies. His signature organic-electronic sound is enriched here with the influences of non-European music, especially Chinese and Japanese music (stick and chimes percussion). The mood is intimate and twilit, poised between exotic ambience and cinematic gesture: a miniaturist description of liquid currents, labyrinthine veins, weaving streams, molecules and particles in multi-orbital dances, muscular chords, drowning bubbles, light waves; all within a confident compositional overview that is unique and fascinating.’

‘Further adventures in Organic Electronic Music by this rigorous magician of vaporous, oscillating patterns, sidereal frequencies, nebulous dust; explorer of inter-zonal paths, new dreamlike dimensions, undiscovered planets. Marrying the momentum of Kraut-Kosmische with a personal, gentle minimalism, DSR Lines specialises in rare atmospheres of rhythmic pulsation, with enveloping, spiralling sounds, luminous and radiant in their hypnotic aura, or magnificently ecstatic and ascending.’