Your basket is empty
‘An unshackled mind melt of amorphous Berlin School electronics, glistening guitar tones, snatches of disembodied voices and rumblings of percussive melody… an invitation to introspection, turning sky-seeking kosmiche towards a resonant, contemplative core… too busy to be ambient, too zonked to be rock, instead resting on a modern psychedelic perch of its own somewhere in between.’
We Have Delivered Ourselves From the Tonal – Of, Towards, On, For Julius Eastman
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung & others
Savvy Contemporary
264 pages of essays, librettos, lyrics, memories, nuff photos, scores, personal anecdotes by musicians, visual artists, researchers and archivists; including contributions by Mary Jane Leach, George Lewis and Kodwo Eshun, besides Eastman in his own words.
Bracingly hostile towards settled, sanctimonious thinking about the composer and musician — Hans Werner Henze’s favourite bass player, featured on Arthur Russel’s Go Bang — especially any squaring off his sexuality and skin colour in relation to canonical minimalism, this is a punchy, immersive, diverse and thought-provoking homage.
Contemporary psych legends Acid Mothers Temple and Reynolds collaborating in the studio in 2017. Improvisatory, shamanic, ecstatic, nuts.
Holy grail Detroit funk recorded in 1969 for Dave Hamilton; backed with a tape-find Northern dancer.
Stinging electric blues and sparkling Texas stride-blues piano, and dapper, sad, droll singing, with a measure of the slurred wit and poise of Percy Mayfield.
Mercy Dee picked cotton like his parents, and his writing about rural poverty is unforgettable: check his first, minor hit Lonesome Cabin Blues, and the bigger One Room Country Shack, covered by Mose Allison, Jr. Wells and co. ‘If I ever get from around this harvest, I don’t even want to see a rose-bush grow / And if anyone ask me about the country, Lord have mercy on his soul.’ He also richly and lovingly disses various girlfriends: ‘the mule-head woman… her mind in the gutter, and her hands on my pocketbook’; ‘the bird-brain baby, with a heart the size of a mustard seed…’
These sides are from 1949-55 — for Spire, Imperial, Colony, Rhythm, Flair, and Specialty — but don’t miss his comeback LPs for Arhoolie, too.
‘My life is blank and empty, like a pea out of a shell.’
‘I’ve tried so hard, and failed, baby.’
Fiery, head-banging deep funk by this Louisiana guitarist; originally out on Eddie ‘Goldband’ Shuler’s ANLA label, in 1967.