Aka Ricardo Villalobos & Argenis Brito.

His startling 1970 comeback for Reprise, recorded at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. A blend of blues, Sly Stone and country rock loaded with the Richard scream, rollicking piano and booting saxophone. ‘He was just singing his booty off,” recalled Travis Wammack (who wrote Greenwood, Mississippi for the session).
The title track kicks off side two with a staggering dollop of super-heavy funk: ten increasingly frazzled minutes of breaks-and-beats heaven pilfered by everyone from Big L and Lord Finesse to Prodigy.

Sixteen wonders from the first three years of Franco’s own imprint Les Editions Populaires, founded in 1968. Mostly OK Jazz, performing ravishing rumbas and bolero ballads in Lingala, traditional songs in Kikongo, Kimongo, and even Yoruba, collaborations with Ngoma artists Camille Feruzi and Manuel d’Oliveira, and their own tough take on US funk.
Glorious music. Bim.

VG+.

‘The first LP compilation of songs by the great Eddie and Ernie!  The duo produced tons of great singles throughout the 60s and early 70s. This LP features a couple of dance numbers, but mostly slow dramatic soul ballads reminiscent of the best moments of more well-known acts like Sam & Dave and Otis Redding.  Some pretty eerie soaring vocals and existential lyrics of the highest order.’

Percussionist Jamie Muir was a member of King Crimson during the recording of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, in 1973. Staying less than a year with Robert Fripp, the Scot had already cut his teeth with another master guitarist, Derek Bailey, as part of the Music Improvisation Company, along with Evan Parker, Hugh Davies and Christine Jeffrey, whose eponymous 1970 album was one of the first releases on ECM. Muir and Bailey recorded Dart Drug eleven years later, in 1981.
There’s no shortage of great percussionists in the brief history of free improvised music but on the strength of Dart Drug alone Jamie Muir deserves a place at High Table. Unlike for example Han Bennink and John Stevens, though, you can’t hear echoes of any particular jazz drummer in Muir’s playing, even if he has expressed appreciation for Milford Graves (who himself sounded like nobody else who’d come before him).
What on earth did Muir’s kit consist of? Some instruments are clearly identifiable (bells, gongs, chimes, woodblocks); others could be… well, anything. Old suitcases thwacked with rolled up newspapers? Tin cans and hubcaps inside a washing machine? Who cares? It sounds terrific – but if you’re the kind of person who faints at the sound of nails scraping a blackboard, you might want to nip out and put the kettle on towards the end of the title track.
Dart Drug is consistently thrilling, and often very amusing – but it’s certainly not easy listening. In music we talk about playing with other musicians, whereas in sport you play against another opponent (or with your team against another team). Why not play against in music, too? That’s precisely what happens very often in improvised music, and Bailey was particularly good at it. How can a humble acoustic guitar hope to compete with a Muir in full flight?  Sometimes Bailey’s content to sit on those open strings, teasing out yet another exquisite Webernian constellation of ringing harmonics and wait for the dust to settle in Muir’s junkyard, but elsewhere he sets off into uncharted territory himself.
“The way to discover the undiscovered in performing terms is to immediately reject all situations as you identify them (the cloud of unknowing) – which is to give music a future.” Bailey evidently concurred with this spoken statement by Muir, including it in his book Improvisation.
Derek Bailey is no longer with us, of course, and Muir gave up performing music back in 1989. All the more reason for seeking out this magnificent, wild album.

Very hotly recommended.

An ‘electro-acoustic’ approach to UK Garage, allternately banging and evasive, teeming with detail.​​​​​​​

A gob-smacking discography, 1961-1977, including pages of labels in sumptuous colour, and marked-up whites. Top job by Jeremy Collieweed, full of love and attention.
Just a handful. Last chance!

The first and and only album by this Memphis musician — spar of Junie Morrison and Fuzzy Haskins — originally released in 1973 on Eastbound. Thirteen no-nonsense get-down psychedelic funk instrumentals, including two Funkadelic covers. Bad.

A masterpiece of Guadeloupean jazz, strikingly personal and singular, brilliantly merging gwo ka, jazz funk and biguine, via exploratory production techniques. Deep tunes like Syka — fierce, electric jazz funk with wild clavinet, synth and trumpet solos. A highlight of Koute Jazz, Vini Couté E Tann’ is dazzling, funky biguine, with wicked piano and guitar playing by Patrick Jean-Marie and Gilbert Coco. The percussion-heavy Tipi Fanm is killer gwo ka jazz… The stellar names of Guadeloupean jazz are here: Jean-Marie, Ramon Pirmé, Herbert Lewis, Roger and Gilbert Coco, Germain Cédé, Philippe Dambury, Pierre-Edouard Decimus… Warmly recommended.

None other than Mick Harris from Napalm Death, and his deadly Midlands iteration of Detroit techno. Transatlantic motor-funk from the mid-nineties, when Brummie club-night the House Of God was alive and kicking. Still stinging.

The first proper compilation of her singular, unguarded, teenage dream pop, from eighties upstate New York. A kind of correspondent of Kate Bush in both composition and performance, on synthesizer and acoustic guitar, and in her otherworldly singing over four octaves, about dreamers, outsiders and lovers.