Honest Jon's
278 Portobello Road
London
W10 5TE
England

Monday-Saturday 10 till 6; Sunday 11 till 5

Honest Jon's
Unit 115
Lower Stable Street
Coal Drops Yard
London
N1C 4DR

Monday-Saturday 11 till 6; Sunday 11 till 5

+44(0)208 969 9822 mail@honestjons.com

Established 1974.

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Carl Davis & The Chi Sound Orchestra

Windy City Theme

Chi Sound

  • 1-OFF 7" SOLD

Willie Clayton

Running In & Out My Life

Kirstee

  • 1-OFF 7" SOLD

Spice

Everything Is You

LPG

The New Young Hearts

The Young Hearts Get Lonely Too

Zea

Geo Rip

Geo Rip

The Trilogy Tapes

Geo Rip is John Jones (Dope Body, Nerftoss) with Aaron Leitko and Mike Petillo (Protect-U), making its vinyl debut. Broken samples and electronics improvised live to tape.
An auspicious, thrilling, varied first outing — daredevil, visceral, and fresh — in customarily gorgeous TTT livery, with top-notch sound.

The Resurrection Of St. Vincent

Me Pay Too Small

Trex / Common Ground

The Blue Rhythm Combo

In My Dreams

Wirl / Common Ground

Papa Black

Mi Mother Proud A Mi

Cry Tuff

  • 1-OFF 7" SOLD

Kiki Kudo

Profile Eterna

The Trilogy Tapes

Sparky, engaging, inventive kitchen wave — on a mission to connect with you, cheer you up, and make you dance — rolling into TTT by way of Incienso and Workshop.

Also check out Kiki’s online cooking programmes and get pickling.

FFT

Regional

The Trilogy Tapes

Roberta Vandervort & Sally Townes

Forager

The Doudou Ndiaye Rose Family

Twenty-One Sabar Rhythms

Honest Jon's Records

Magnificent Wolof drum music, performed by an extended griot family in the mystical setting of Lac Rose, outside Dakar.
Doudou Ndiaye Rose — who died in 2015 —  is a key drummer in the musical history of the world. He developed a system of five hundred original drumming patterns, ancient and new. Amongst the modern rhythms here is Bench Mi — ‘under the Baobab tree,’ a spot where where problems get solved.  Also Hibar Yi — ‘passing on information’ — the theme-tune of Senegalese TV national news for decades — and Les Rosettes, the signature rhythm of Senegal’s first ever all-female percussion group, convened by Doudou, and named after his grandmother.
These original compositions sit alongside important traditional rhythms, familiar to every Sabar player, such as Farwu Jar ( a courtship game sometimes resulting in a wedding), Ceebu Jin (also the name of the national dish of fish and rice), and Gumbé, often played after a successful harvest.
Recorded in joyful single takes, over seven consecutive days in February 2020, with no overdubs, mastered by Rashad Becker, the music is deep and thrilling, polyrhythmic to the bone, with a complex, pointillistic intensity at times evoking Jeff Mills in full flight.

  • DOWNLOADS

Grady Tate

Lady Love

Janus Records

Terrific, propulsive, widescreen version of the Jon Lucien classic, flavoured with Curtis, featuring brilliant percussion by Montego Joe, alongside Ron Carter, Richard Tee, Ron Carter… Plus a Moondance excursion, on the flip.
One for the HJ pensioners massive.

Harry Toddler

Devil Dat

Baby Giant

Thee Sacred Souls

Got A Story To Tell

Daptone

Shy Tony

Bad Mind & Grudgeful

DEB

  • 1-OFF 7" SOLD

Trinity

Lively Tribulation

Vivian Jackson

  • 1-OFF 7" SOLD

Trinity

Shanty Town Determination

Prophets

YT

England Story

Sativa

The Mighty Maytones

Madness

GG Records

Mighty Travellers

Black Black Mind

Travellers

A Way To Make A Living

The Dolly Parton Songbook

Ace

Over the last sixty-odd years Dolly Parton has written almost every major hit she has ever had (and quite a few minor ones, too). Her brilliant songs are covered here by everyone from Betty LaVette and Percy Sledge to Ru Paul and Nana Mouskouri. The booklet has some lovely, rare photos, and rich, track-by-track notes.

DJ Prime Cuts

Chartist EP

The Trilogy Tapes

Prime Cuts from the legendary Scratch Perverts crew with an upful six-tracker, full of life and intelligence, and teeming with fidgety, DIY, turntablist energy.
For us it’s a bit like a raid on the racks at Honest Jons, over the decades… but fresh and bright. It kicks off with a headlong garbling of eighties jazz-funk, complete with synths, a vocoder, and some incipient Herbie, all sagging woozily into some nuts pitch control, before a mean beat-down. Some dubwise Channel One follows up, with almightily anthemic snatches of melody and unmistakable chords, almost breaking down under a barrage of skittering effects, scratching, laser-fire, strangulated melodica, and cowbell. Then three excursions in classic Detroit techno: moody electro funk, with a sprinkling of Harold Faltermeyer; hard-grooving minimalism, with a dash of It Takes Two; then a more industrial outing, with clattering percussion and gobbling synth. Finally an ambient interlude — overcast but twinklingly ambivalent — to close.
Ace. A lot of fun. Check it out.

Tony Troutman

What's The Use?

Jerri

Jack Sheen

Solo For Cello

The Trilogy Tapes

The Observer raved about a recent performance of this at the Wigmore Hall: ‘Solo for Cello (and fixed audio) was the highlight, an extensive, ghostly work played by Apartment House’s indefatigable artistic director, Anton Lukoszevieze. Imagine a baroque dance suite — with the familiar figurations of arpeggios, quick finger work and string crossing — played muted and whispered a few galaxies away, and you get the idea.’
The performer of this recording, Anton himself has written that Solo is ‘an extended exploration of the resonant body of the cello, but also a kind of flickering, glitchy and incessant ‘moto perpetuo’ of extreme intensity and a delicate beauty. The cello has a particular scordatura tuning, which creates an enigmatic harmonic ‘space’ to its sounding throughout the work. As the cellist constantly bows the heavily muted cello with varied arpeggiated freneticism, the instrument emits a particular halo of harmonic resonances creating a spectral and ghostly effect, deceptive and illusory. The work gradually morphs into different sections, each with their own particular motivic identity, at times accompanied by an audio playback of various densities. The latter sections of the work have a baroque-like lightness and ornamental quality, but do not allay the dramatic incisiveness of the the work, which ends with a final enigmatic spasm of sounds.’
And the composer Sheen advised the mastering engineer that ‘the cello is muted with a very heavy metal mute which thins out the sound massively, and Anton plays a super-light bow with extreme flautando, which creates a strange thin wispy sound. I’d like it to sound as distant and liminal as possible, with a lot of bow sound and strange resonances from the harmonics of the cello. With the exception of a few obvious spots where it gets louder and fuller, there should be as little ‘core’ to the sound as possible, but as many strange resonances as possible. The words we used a lot of in rehearsals were ‘baroque’ and ‘internal’ and ‘light’. I hope this helps.’

Transfixing, and good for ears; with luminous strands of Marin Marais, Derek Bailey, and Eliane Radigue.
Check it out!

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