The eagerly awaited return of Bastian Epple to Marionette, for his debut album. Fifteen richly evocative vignettes conjured up with modular synth, tape-work, synthetic sounds, percussion, guitar: captivating, scene-setting catalysts of dreams, nostalgia, and other imaginary voyages; intimate, unpredictable, and alive; full of curiosity and wonder.

Bikini Kill, Boris, Endless Boogie, New Kingdom, The Clean, ELO, Archie Shepp, Echo and the Bunnymen, Primal Scream, The Guerilla Girls, Planetary Peace…

Lou Reed, Velvet Underground, Lee Perry, Grateful Dead, Goats, Phew…

The great Mingering Mike, 75 Dollar Bill, photographer Michael Lavine, Pavement, Cindy, Irreversible Entanglements, Lea Bertucci, essayist Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Detroit punk flyers… 132 pages, full colour…

Belle and Sebastian, novelist David Gordon, Motown artist Christina Carter, Mowest group Odyssey (and its connection to CLR James), Chris Forsyth and Steve Wynn, Tony Iommi-era Black Sabbath, Buffy Saint-Marie…

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.

‘Performed in Berlin at the Haus am Waldsee in July, 1985, it was every bit the chamber concert — super intimate and interactive, gorgeously recorded by FMP’s Jost Gebers in an ideal acoustic room. Rather than alternate between one and the other, Lacy and Parker explore middle-terrain the whole time, perhaps skewing a tad more Lacy’s funky-tuneful direction, becoming a single soprano entity made of fragments of sound sometimes accreting into perfectly imperfect lines. Two long tracks, Full Scale and Relations, are completed by a final four-minute coda aptly titled Twittering. Indeed, the whole program has the joyous interactivity of Paul Klee’s painting Twittering Machine: birds aligned on a line, proposing and picking up lines, nothing cruel or mean-spirited, free play all a graceful twitter.’

With Barry Guy and Tony Oxley in 1971. Gatefold sleeve.

The first decent compilation, from the early honky tonk and rockabilly sides — total killers like the tanked-up, randy-as-a-stoat I’m Coming Home — through to the witty country hits.
‘Get your face all pretty and your hair done right / ‘Cos we’re gonna do the town tonight / Well I’m comin’ into town and right on time / I still got your lovin’ on my mind… Well I came to a hill and the truck looked down / Throwed in low and she’s huggin’ the ground / Scratchin’ gears but I’m goin’ again / I’m comin’ home baby /  I’m doggin’ it in.’