At their chilliest, most magnificent and dread. 
Brilliantly remastered; one-sided.

The 45 reissue of a Tune Town 78, and a scorcher of a CD generously covering various late-fifties Ike Turner projects.

The ‘un-muting’ or ‘sonic restitution’ of African instruments held in Western museum collections, this project began with a recording session in October 2023 at the British Museum in London, when Hoyt was granted access to instruments from the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. These recordings were then developed in his studio, blending in African and Western instruments from his own collection.

‘This record is not an album but a diagram, a blackground score for a people who have never stopped dancing. Instruments exiled into the vitrines of empire, their voices stilled by taxonomic theft, now murmur and hum again. This is restitution by vibration, and the sounds you hear refuse to be forgotten, to be fixed, to refuse to die. You won’t find Western time signatures here; you’ll find time folding, spilling, catching fire. His compositions bespeak an afro-sonic-philo-sophy, more drastic than gnostic. These desperate times call for desperate pleasures.’

“This is killer,” says Ben UFO.

See Mi Yah remixes. A triumphant series finale.

Thirteen and twenty-two minute slices of carnival thunder and lightning from the hill above Port Of Spain in Trinidad. Lengths of steel, assorted bits of metal, African drums. An Honest Jon’s recording.

All Depends is an intimate, spare do-over of the Spiderman rhythm which Yellowman smashed with Operation Eradication: eight minutes of yearning and pleading, dosed with the stylings of the original Night Nurse himself.
I Put My Trust swaps religious for amorous devotion: musically it is more characteristically Wackies, reverberating but crisp as a biscuit, stepping but spaced-out. Neither track appears on the LP, Great Jah Jah.
Warehouse find; last box.

A new venture for Big Hands, under the moniker Andrea Ottomani, resuming his partnership with trumpeter Abraham Parker.
Trialled triumphantly in recent live shows, the opener comes good on the promise of the duo’s triumphant debut for Trule: gliding, hypnotic, and moody, with rueful, burnished brass interjections riding dubwise steppers.
Then a pair of distressed, halftempo d&b rhythms: a call to arms, and a troubled circling of the wagons. Waltz For Matis winds up proceedings with a deep, spooked Fourth World excursion, with skittering marimba.
Another ace EP.

You can’t make sense of this, clicking through mp3s, on tin-pan computer speakers. Put the record on, though, and set the controls for the heart of the bloke next door, and it’s terrific. The drum-less, throbbing, droning, wailing, sawing, twinkling reconnaissance of Nothing, with massive, unnerving swoops, throttling and surges.
Beatrice Dillon and Kassem Mosse.
Great photos by Anne Tetzlaff on the sleeve.

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.

Two spaced-out, synthed-up, house tearaways; a chunk of totally fucked-up dancehall; dub techno. A guitar solo and tincture of Fleetwood Mac to boot. TTT measures.

Crafted, varied EP from Kenneth Lay and Jason Carr, out of the Metasplice milieu in Philly. A couple of ant nests, a droner with an mbalax tic, and a monster-crunchy, sun-up soundscape. Boot cyan lean.

Bracing portions of the screaming abdabs dressed as naked, hooligan machine-funk — fizzing, stomping, juddering and going mental in the furnace of high noon like whizzed-up children of the hydra’s teeth.