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Early support by: Laurent Garnier, AME, Marco Bailey, Jennifer Cardini, Terrence Fixmer, Kyle Geiger, Marcel Dettmann, Apparat, Richie Hawtin, Vril, Charlotte De Witte, Sasha, Benjamin Demage any many more..



Fresh off of a remix for Grimes’ “My Name is Dark”, producer Julien Bracht has been powering through CV19 studio seclusion on full-power, with a distinct vision for brighter days ahead. Bracht’s new album, “Now Forever One,” an emblem of dark analog synthwave, is set to drop June 11. Bracht’s first solo album under his own namesake is cut with surgical precision for the shoegazing astral sound travellers who long to break out of their pandemic quarantines, and reconvene for techno-induced ascension. The album’s first single, “Melancholia,” and it’s accompanying video, is already breaking hearts and charts. An exquisite sonic hybrid of communal revelry and profound introspection, “Now Forever One,” focuses Bracht’s multilayered craftsmanship on resolving this era’s angst with sensory exploration and optimism.



As a lifelong drummer, Bracht’s insatiable musical energy lead him to bang out his first 3 EPs within one year of first being signed in 2011-12. In 2015 he founded the band Lea Porcelain with Markus Nikolaus in London. Their hypnotic post-rock debut release in 2017, “Hymns to the Night,” gained instant acclaim from UK tastemakers Lauren Laverne, Steve Lamacq and Zane Lowe, to name a few. The lads broke back onto the international stage with dates on several major festivals around Europe, including the Leeds/Reading Festival, Great Escape Brighton and Latitude. Rich output combined with the inclusion of live drums in his solo live sets quickly gained Bracht recognition and slots on the global tour circuit.

“Now Forever One” forges Julien Bracht’s transition from techno djing, while continuing the explorations of texture and timbre over functional song structures from Lea Porcelain, to a more open-ended search for the aural sublime — the substrate on which music, life and light glide to create momentary nodes of meaning in an increasingly meaningless sociopolitical atmosphere. These are crucial themes to Bracht’s process and approach. “The intention in my music is to strengthen people’s awareness and minds… I want us all to gather in spirit and stick together.”

The album exemplifies Bracht’s hunt for elemental juxtaposition with the warm Prophet 6’s sawtooth howls and bright pads against chillingly indifferent pulsing basslines and percussion. Clocking in at just under 65 minutes, “Now Forever One’s” tracks are sequenced to take the listener through the full emotional arch of a 15-hour rave, with an emphasis on those moments of collective epiphany where heaving techno floors become the perfect microcosm for an idealistic and interconnected future. Interspersed with improvisational one-takes, the album submerges the listener in polyrhythmic meditations, of which “Streets” and “Nocturne” are standout examples, and soars on the vaulted synth melodies of future dance floor favourites “Melancholia” and “Dreams of Euphoria.” Sascha Ring of Apparat & Moderat puts it perfectly: “I played “Melancholia” the night I got it at Mutek Festival in Mexico City, and instantly knew it’ll shine on a big floor at the right time. It’s just the right balance of majestic melodic deepness.” The sounds are both triumphant and exploratory.

Greater than the sum of its parts, Bracht’s latest release hints at the artist’s emerging potential for nailing our moment’s zeitgeist; learning to live smaller while constantly seeking higher heights. Inhabiting the fertile ground between solitary rumination and dance-floor convenance, the launch of “Now Forever One’s” lunar expedition into the techno oblivion of pandemic lockdown is oddly fitting.

Born in Brixton, a child of the Windrush Generation, Letts’ slippery and unorthodox career is somewhat hard to define, without taking a few detours around London, New York and Jamaica. He began his working life managing the dauntingly hip Acme Attractions on Chelsea’s Kings Road, where he made a mark with his attitude, dress and, especially, the pounding dub reggae that vibrated the shop’s walls. His first gig as a DJ at the short-lived Roxy in Neal Street, became mythical for turning a generation of punks on to reggae. They in turn hipped him to their DIY ethos resulting in his reinvention as a filmmaker. This led to a shed-load of music videos (Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Clash, Bob Marley) not

to mention documentaries on the likes of Gil Scott-Heron, George Clinton and Sun Ra.



In the ’80s, he was part of Mick Jones’ new venture, Big Audio Dynamite and his innovative use of samples were a core part of their sound. Listeners of his weekly 6 Music radio show are taken on a musical safari that moves seamlessly between time, space and genre. It’s not called Culture Clash Radio for nothing. So this latest bulletin from Letts HQ is merely one angle of a multifaceted personality, his take on the JA tradition of the cover version.



The history of Caribbean music owes a debt to R&B as many of the early island releases were cover versions of US 45s. Ska’s breakthrough commercially, Millie Small’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’, was originally recorded by Barbie Gaye in ’50s New York. Cover versions became quite a thing in Jamaica and Don, following in that tradition, has dug deep with a selection of interesting dubbed out covers including thirteen exclusives.



“A disciple of sound system, raised on reggae n’ bass culture my go to sound was dub. Besides being spacious and sonically adventurous at the same time, its most appealing aspect was the space it left to put yourself ‘in the mix’ underpinned by Jamaica’s gift to the world - bass. But that’s only half the story as the duality of my existence meant I was also checking what the Caucasian crew were up to not to mention the explosion of black music coming in from the States. That’s why this version excursion crosses time space and genre, from The Beach Boys to The Beatles, Nina Simone to Marvin Gaye, The Bee Gees to Kool & The Gang, The Clash to Joy Division and beyond. You’d think it impossible to draw a line between ‘em but not in my world. Fortunately, the ‘cover version’ has played an integral part in the evolution of Jamaican music and dub covers were just a natural extension.”



There’s a diverse mix of classic and new, with legendary figures like John Holt, The Tamlins and Cornell Campbell, mixed in with British veterans Mad Professor and the irrepressible Dennis Bovell, while (relatively) young striplings Kiko Bun, Emily Capell and Prince Fatty deliver the goods, with laidback Texan groovers Khruangbin also offering an exclusive bass heavy-delight.



The song choices are diverse, from French dubsters’ OBF’s renditions of ‘Sixteen Tons’, the miners’ paean popularised by Tennessee Ernie Ford in the 1950s, to Ash Walker’s refix of Omar’s ‘There’s Nothing Like This’ and ‘All I Do Is Think About You’, immortalised by the ill-fated Tammi Terrell and preserved here by Quantic (the latter two both exclusives). Being a Rebel Dread compilation, there’s a cover (by Wrongtom Meets The Rockers) of The Clash’s ‘Lost In The Supermarket’ while Don’s exclusive, naturally, is a rendition of Big Audio Dynamite’s debut hit, ‘E = MC2’.



“Truth be told I’ve wanted to work with the Late Night Tales crew from the get go. We’re talking nearly two decades such was the allure of their musical aesthetic typified by curators like Nightmares on Wax, The Flaming Lips, MGMT, Trentemoller, Khruangbin and countless others. Now being as old as rock n’ roll (born in ‘56) and having nearly 20 years of Culture Clash Radio under my belt I figured I was tooled up to musically juggle with the best of ‘em. But I wanted to carve out a space that was distinctly my own - something that reflected my musical journey and the culture clash that’s made me the man I am today.”

Love returns with 'Lavender', the follow up to the Canadian crooner’s LP, 'Night Songs' (Taxi Gauche Records, February 2020).
A reflective timeline of dusty folk, 'Lavender' aims to capture the modern loneliness of the 21st century. A sorrowful soundtrack, inspired by the production of great crooners and folk artists of the 70s/80s like Cohen, Lightfoot, and Nick Drake, to name a few, Love achieves a similar quality on Lavender. Like a Chris Isaak trapped in a David Lynch film, Love’s haunted
vocals guide the listener through poetic verses on the archetypes of love and truth, posthumous poetry by his grandfather circa 1930s, and escapism, all melting and flowing into a pool of celestial wisdom.
Acoustic guitars sweep across desolate sonic landscapes of global narcissism, social media and the universal need for connection. Hypnotic bass grooves and lush 3D string ensembles, wrap the listener in a familiar cinematic romance, embraced and mystified. 'Lavender' explores the universal threads that make us feel and experience what we do, in a time when the need to peer into ourselves has never been more important. 'Lavender' draws you inwards, like staring up at the stars at night, or standing alone with the silence of the forest, 'Lavender' wants you to find your own meaning. Self-recorded in a variety of spaces through out Turtle Island (Canada & The USA). Specifically, Toronto Island, a basement in Edmonton, AB, various apartments and motels in Los Angeles and around the United States, on a road trip west via the Trans-Canada highway and ending at a cabin in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.


“There’s a lonesome vibe to his brand of heartland rock, evoking late nights on a deserted road, or neon-lit streets just after a rainstorm.” (Brooklyn Vegan)

The anticipation is there in Elizabeth Stokes’ solo guitar riff under the opening lines of “I’m Not Getting Excited”: a frenetic, driving force daring a packed Auckland Town Hall to do exactly the opposite of what the track title suggests.

As the opener of The Beths’ Auckland, New Zealand, 2020 expands to include the full band, the crowd screeches and bellows. It’s a collective exhalation, in one of the few countries where live music is still possible.

The album title, and film of the same name, deliberately include the date and location, lead guitarist Jonathan Pearce says. “That’s the sensational part of what we actually did.” In a mid-pandemic world, playing to a heaving, enraptured home crowd feels miraculous.

In March 2020, everything seemed on track for another huge year for The Beths. Home after an 18-month northern hemisphere tour, they had just finished recording sophomore album Jump Rope Gazers and were primed for more extensive touring. But within days, New Zealand’s lockdown split the band between three separate houses. All touring was cancelled.

“It was existentially bad,” Stokes says. As well as worrying about economic survival, they lost something crucial to the band’s identity: live performance. “It's a huge part of how we see ourselves... What does it mean, if we can't play live?”

The band found an outlet through live-streaming, returning to the do-it-yourself mentality of their early days to connect with a global audience. The album and film have their genesis in that urge to share the now-rare experience of a live show, as widely as possible.

The fuzzy-round-the-edges live-streams pointed the way aesthetically. Native birds, wonkily crafted by the band from tissue paper and wire, festoon the venue’s cavernous ceiling while house plants soften and disguise the imposing pipes of an organ. The presence of the film crew isn’t disguised: much of the camerawork is handheld; full of fast zooms and pans.

With much of the material still fresh, the band was less focused on re-invention than playing “a good, fast rock show”, Pearce says. The tempo is up on crowd favourites “Whatever” and “Future Me Hates Me” (released as a live single on its third anniversary) as both band and audience feed off the mutual energy in the room.

Certain songs have taken on special resonance post-Covid. Pearce has found “Out Of Sight”, a tender rumination on long-distance relationships, hits particularly hard with live audiences.

Album closer “River Run” visibly brings Stokes to tears as a mix of achievement and relief kicks in. “You can finally relax at that point … You play the last note, breathe out a sigh and look up - and you’re in a giant room full of people happy and smiling.”

Few bands manage to release seven studio albums plus a live album in the first four years of their career and turn them all into million sellers. Grand Funk Railroad was such a band. Grand Funk played an unprecedented blend of rock, soul and funk, with that creating classics such as “Closer To Home”, “We’re An American Band”, “Bad Time” and “Some Kind Of Wonderful”. These and many other great Grand Funk songs can be found on this brand new double-LP Grand Funk Railroad Collected. MOV proudly presents new Collected compilation albums in collaboration with Universal Music.

awless is 2012 crime drama film by director John Hillcoat (The Road, The Proposition) about a gang of bootleggers in Virginia during the Great Depression. And when we say star-studded, we really mean it: Guy Pierce, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy and Shia LeBoeuf signed up for the gritty and evocative story about brothers who try to create their own American Dream during Prohibition.

None other than Nick Cave helped Hillcoat with the screenplay, while he also took great care of the movie’s soundtrack. Cave and fellow musician Warren Ellis form the core of The Bootleggers, a country and bluegrass ensemble that welcome a string of guests artist like Emmylou Harris, Ralph Stanley and Mark Lanegan. The Lawless OST contains cover versions of artists such as Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart and also features original compositions by Cave/Ellis and the great Willie Nelson.

Our third release comes from Feph.
4 tracks- Drifting grooves meet otherworldly atmospheres.
Catered to DJs and meant for the club.
Made in USA.

vinyl only

Spectra! represents a lone, anomaly release by illusive producer and recording artist J. Walker of Perth, Western Australia. Recorded and produced in 2016, Spectra! comprises a collection of 12 instrumental works composed in response to an imagined brief investigating the refined shades and pigments of colour.
Whilst stylistically somewhat comparable to library music recordings from Europe released throughout the 1980’s, Walker’s compositions never step too closely toward facsimile. Instead, they maintain a unique sense of identity, one closer akin to a born-too-late contemporary interpretation of the sentimentality and lost moods that allowed library music it’s point of difference and charm in the first place. Unlike many modern artists who flirt with the past, Walker isn’t concerned with carbon copying the sound palate and tape hiss of yesterday. In these works, antecedent emotional and harmonic bodies are given new life and form by means of modern studio hardware, musical equipment and compositional techniques. Recommended for fans of the Coloursound Library and Joël Vaandroogenbroeck.

Killer tracks by Draconian Steps. A project by Jeremy Rodriguez and Ron Morelli for the first of 2 - 12''s under the name ''Circus of Death''. The tracks were recorded at Devon Analogue Studio in the UK. Wrangled in from a weekend of long studio jams. Bleak overdriven analogue business from start to finish. 3 - 909 cuts crunched out and pushed way into the red. Limited edition, so don't sleep on these!!

For its 30th Anniversary, Pixies’ 1991 album ‘Trompe
Le Monde’ is reissued on marbled green vinyl.
 ‘Trompe Le Monde’ bookended a golden run of
landmark records - a mini-album followed by four
albums, released in quick succession - that cemented
Pixies as one of the best for a generation.
 Translated from French to mean ‘fool the world’,
‘Trompe Le Monde’ showed the band still restless to
push their sound forward. Recorded between Burbank,
Paris and London, with producer Gil Norton again at
the controls, their fourth album is arguably their most
playful, with Black Francis’s lyrics on UFOs and
conspiracy theories keeping things weird while power
pop creeps in to amplify the space rock established on
predecessor ‘Bossanova’.
 Featuring singles ‘Planet of Sound’, ‘Alec Eiffel’, ‘Letter
to Memphis’ and a flawless cover of The Jesus and
Mary Chain’s ‘Head On’, ‘Trompe Le Monde’ goes full
throttle with 15 tracks coming in a quickfire 40-minute
salvo. Receiving critical praise at the time and being
supported by a huge tour that included playing
stadiums with U2, it also proved to be the end of Act
One for the band, with them taking over a decade
before returning to the stage together.

Since signing with Rhymesayers in 2015, Sa-Roc has continued to both invigorate and grow her fanbase with a string of singles, accompanied with powerful and visually enthralling music videos, including “Forever”, which is nearing 4 million views on YouTube. In that time, she has continued to cultivate and sharpen her skill sets, and now she is set to release her first album for the label.

Speaking on the meaning of the album’s title and inspiration, Sa-Roc shares, "The Sharecropper’s Daughter speaks to my father’s actual beginnings on a Virginia tobacco farm where his family sharecropped. The title is meant to signify that both my father’s and my upbringing, though so different, are linked by a shared history that informs the way I move through the world. Although his formative years were spent in the Jim Crow era of the south, where he suffered through poverty and racial oppression, and mine were shaped in the heart of DC, amidst the war on drugs and the effects of its fallout, the album finds points of connection in two very different yet tragically familiar stories of Blackness in America. It’s a sonic reflection of the things we inherit. About the emotional weight that we unknowingly bestow upon the next generation; the genetic transfer of both trauma and triumph that we, both donors and

Kamana is a multiformat release inspired by and channeling the culture and traditions of the Aeta, an indigenous group from the Zambales region in the Philippines. One of the oldest inhabitants of the region the Aetas are also some of the most fascinating and ancient nomadic and hunter gathering cultures. The release goes from the realms of the
real to the imaginary, from transcription to syncretism, from concrete to abstract. An (un)real Sonic Exorcism filled with Ancestral Frequencies, Haunted Ghosts and other animistic spirits roaming the Pinatubo forests.
The release features a series of materials released in different formats from the Field recording digital only release, an LP and CD release to a special 7inch vinyl featuring an Interview with a bat hunter.
“Kamana is a long due homage to the Aeta community that hosted me a few years back, fascinated by the endurance of these people and their connection to their land, devastated by the eruption of the Pinatubo volcano in 1991, they continued to go back to their ancestral lands surviving on basic agriculture and hunting bats and wild pigs. Living with them for weeks, I managed to capture some essential field recordings and sounds that form and com- pose the basis for this release, from the more reprocessed and interpreted LP release to the pure field recording documentation of the digital release. It is meant to be accessible to all and provide a window to the livelihoods of these unique communities. For this reason, this release serves as both an archival document and a syncretic one, trying to channel memories and feelings of living in these jungles whilst listening to their stories as well as witnessing their lifestyles.”
Carlos Casas, 2021

With COVID restrictions now easing, and fresh off the back of their ongoing in-lockdown Quarantine Series, as well as EP + album releases from Calder Valley upstarts The Lounge Society and cult singer-songwriter Stephen Fretwell respectively – the studio is now re-open and Speedy are back to doing what they do best: releasing one-off 7”/digital singles.

The latest band to be welcomed into label boss Dan Carey’s Streatham HQ is the 5-piece London based alt-pop band moa moa comprised of James Ratcliffe (guitars, keys, vox), Connor James (keys, guitar), Sophie Parkes (sax, vocals), Dan Byrne (bass) and Matt Taylor (drums).

Having sent the label a collection of demos during lockdown – of mainly finished songs – the one which caught Carey’s ear was actually a 20-second snippet of just an idea really – which the band had included in what they had sent over. ‘I know it sounds mad’ says the producer – ‘but I just knew there was something in it.’ Meaning in true Speedy style the band and producer alongside engineer Alexis Smith had to build the song around the single motif from scratch on the day – having previously never met before, in what turned out to be a mammoth 13-hour recording session.

‘It was scary and exciting in equal measures going into it’ says the band, ‘but Dan and Lex create such a safe, encouraging creative space, and from that, we somehow came out with a moa track we're all happy with.’

The resulting track ‘Coltan Candy’ is 4 + minutes of hook-laden sunshine alt-pop that layers and builds, perfectly reinforcing the band’s manifesto of marrying ‘unconventional songwriting with pop-leaning sensibilities’, channelling (amongst others) Unknown Moral Orchestra, XTC and MGMT with contemporary R & B influences into something seamless and new. And it’s catchy as hell.

‘Lyrically, the tune is darker and more direct than our other stuff’ says James (Ratcliffe), ‘even if it’s offset by everything else going on in the music. The main hook of the song is the lyric "Coltan Candy" which refers to a mineral that has been mined unethically for decades in Africa for the production of electronic circuits in the West. I’m making some pretty OTT comments about corruption, technology, and the failures of institutions in the West, but also asking some questions about our own involvement and inability to do anything about it.’
Regardless of the seriousness of the content the band just feel relieved to have finished the track. ‘Even up to the night before the session we had 20 seconds of music that we were jamming into what sounded like an awful country track…so, it’s fair to say that the whole process really helped us to focus and make decisions!’
Coltan Candy. The sweet sound of the summer.

Portuguese experimental trio 10 000 Russos are gearing up for the release of their fifth album ‘Superinertia’, which is due out September 10th on Fuzz Club Records. Following on from 2019’s ‘Kompromat’ LP and tour dates around the UK, Europe and Mexico in support, the Porto-based band describe ‘Superinertia’ as a record addressing the “state of inertia that humans live in the West nowadays. It isn’t a record about the past or future. It’s about now.” For all that ‘Superinertia’ might take aim at a world without motion, however, the same cannot be said of 10 000 Russos themselves.

On the one hand, since their 2013 debut LP and the three that have followed on Fuzz Club since (2015’s self-titled, 2017’s ‘Distress Distress’ and ‘Kompromat’), 10 000 Russos’ music has always been about as kinetic as it gets: a truly unrelenting and motorik sonic force. On the other hand, ‘Superinertia’ also sees the band itself move into whole new musical territories – aided especially by the recent addition of synth player Nils Meisel to the line-up (who replaces former bassist André Couto.)

“The synths really opened up the sound of the band and gave more routes for the music to journey down. The most important thing on this album was to not repeat ourselves. A new arc in our sound is coming to life”, drummer and vocalist João Pimenta explains. On said arc, the Russos sound is expanded to include moments that invoke Ry Cooder’s ‘Paris, Texas’ soundtrack (‘Mexicali/Calexico’), dancey outbursts that transport you to the 90s Summer of Love (‘Super Inertia’), the closest thing Russos have ever done to a pop song (‘A House Full of Garbage’) and even a touch of banjo (albeit one that sounds like a country band on amphetamines playing over a feedback-blasted Stooges beat.)

“10 000 Russos are bizarre and excellent in equal measure.” - The Quietus

“Songs drip with heavy echo, relentless beats and bass and a sense of charging into the ultimate infinite.” - Bandcamp Daily

“Something unholy has indeed been summoned out of the ground, and it is a power trio from the Iberian Peninsula.” - Clash Magazine

Portuguese experimental trio 10 000 Russos are gearing up for the release of their fifth album ‘Superinertia’, which is due out September 10th on Fuzz Club Records. Following on from 2019’s ‘Kompromat’ LP and tour dates around the UK, Europe and Mexico in support, the Porto-based band describe ‘Superinertia’ as a record addressing the “state of inertia that humans live in the West nowadays. It isn’t a record about the past or future. It’s about now.” For all that ‘Superinertia’ might take aim at a world without motion, however, the same cannot be said of 10 000 Russos themselves.

On the one hand, since their 2013 debut LP and the three that have followed on Fuzz Club since (2015’s self-titled, 2017’s ‘Distress Distress’ and ‘Kompromat’), 10 000 Russos’ music has always been about as kinetic as it gets: a truly unrelenting and motorik sonic force. On the other hand, ‘Superinertia’ also sees the band itself move into whole new musical territories – aided especially by the recent addition of synth player Nils Meisel to the line-up (who replaces former bassist André Couto.)

“The synths really opened up the sound of the band and gave more routes for the music to journey down. The most important thing on this album was to not repeat ourselves. A new arc in our sound is coming to life”, drummer and vocalist João Pimenta explains. On said arc, the Russos sound is expanded to include moments that invoke Ry Cooder’s ‘Paris, Texas’ soundtrack (‘Mexicali/Calexico’), dancey outbursts that transport you to the 90s Summer of Love (‘Super Inertia’), the closest thing Russos have ever done to a pop song (‘A House Full of Garbage’) and even a touch of banjo (albeit one that sounds like a country band on amphetamines playing over a feedback-blasted Stooges beat.)

“10 000 Russos are bizarre and excellent in equal measure.” - The Quietus

“Songs drip with heavy echo, relentless beats and bass and a sense of charging into the ultimate infinite.” - Bandcamp Daily

“Something unholy has indeed been summoned out of the ground, and it is a power trio from the Iberian Peninsula.” - Clash Magazine

Two worlds collide to offer a brand new project. The lo-fi rock from Emilie Zoé and Nicolas Pittet blends perfectly with the sounds of the machines and samples of the leader of The Young Gods, Franz Treichler. The sound triangulates and takes the shape of an /A\. Zoé is an artist who converts the ghosts of everyday life into electric fulgurations on the extreme fringes of pop and rock; Pittet is her drummer, but above all he’s an all-round musician, as comfortable backing Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s primal dub as he is

fiddling with electronics (e.g. his project Kera); and of course, Treichler is the well-known leader of The Young Gods, and band that’s been setting the bar since 1986 when it comes to transforming rock by infiltrating its genome into machines.

This diversity of backgrounds, tastes and experiences might at first sight have appeared as a reason to stay apart from each other, but instead it’s proved to be a vector of mutual attraction. What /A\ offers contains no foreign matter: Treichler, Pittet and Zoé’s aesthetics are intertwined through subterranean links that strike by their clarity, like the pieces of a puzzle that is both unexpected and surprising.

It’s through this profound entanglement that the pieces, one after the other, succeed in materialising hitherto unseen faces. They create something new: Hotel Stellar delivers an otherworldly blues, a slow snake that oscillates between the abyss and redemption; We Travel the Light, with its guitars measured in megatons, invents the notion of a steamroller possessed by insane joy; Count to Ten is a wash of restrained melancholy infused with almost Birkin-like touches, which, as the minutes go by, bristles with scratches and sandy echoes, like synthetic dub; The Leaves is yet another strange beast which could be considered as the evolution of a trip hop theme that would have been left to mature for a few decades in the noblest of drums. “It’s red, it’s hot” says Zoé when asked to analyse the record. “You can feel like there’re waves coming at you, but you never really know when.”

The edition that marks the start of the brand-new Comets Coming could not be more suitable: it is that Rodrigo Brandão, like his grandfather Herman Poole Blount, dust of stars that the world knows as Sun Ra, may have his feet on the Earth, but he has definitely a sidereal head.

Brandão arrived recently to Portugal, but already left a strong mark in the most adventurous Lisbon scene, having performed several concerts in which his language has been wrapped in the exploratory sounds of musicians such as Rodrigo Amado, João Valinho, and Hernâni Faustino. The agitator, poet and spoken word artist, brought a vast experience that over the years saw him collaborate with artists as distinct as the members of Metá Metá or Prince Paul (that one!) on BROOKZILL!.

This work, however, came in his luggage, across the ocean, on the rediscovery trip that brought him from Brazil to Lisbon. OUTROS ESPAÇO was recorded in São Paulo in late 2019 with a luxury crew: Tulipa Ruiz and Juçara Marçal added to the microphone, Thiago França played flute and alto & tenor saxophones, Guilherme Granado dealt with the synthesizers and effects, Marcos Gerez measured the overall pulse with his electric bass, Thomas Rohrer played soprano and 'rabeca' (fiddle), and Paulo Santos dealt with the percussion. In addition to the base band, OUTROS ESPAÇO also features some members of Sun Ra Arkestra's current incarnation. Respectively: Danny Thompson (RIP) on baritone and bongo, Elson Nascimento on 'surdo' (tom drum), Knoel Scott on tenor and soprano, with the giant Marshall Allen in a prominent role leading the collective towards the unknown, while playing the alto sax and synthesizer.

In OUTROS ESPAÇO, Brandão reaches for words from different origins, from contrasting times and cultures, all with magnetic resonance imaging: what is not from his furrow comes to him from Candomblé (“Quando Os Orixás Desfilam Sobre A Cracolândia”), from his readings of Sun Ra (“Eu Sou 1 Instrumento” is an adaptation of the poem I Am An Instrument), or from the school's playgrounds (“Jamais Nos Esqueceremos”). And in these words there are teeth and nails ingrained in injustice (“Quantos Coltrane...?, “Todo o Dia Tem +”) and kaleidoscopic delusions that result from the speed of light (“Sol da Meia Noite”).

The crew that travels through these OUTROS ESPAÇO (PT for "Other Spaces") has freedom as the main fuel, jazz as a measure of their reach, and all swings in the world as maps, so they can lose themselves at the end of the cosmos. There is urgency and reflection, craziness and precision, surprise and well-known ancestral raw material, that makes us vibrate inwardly with the same trembling as the comets that are coming.

The visionary and veteran Scotty Hard was responsible for making everything sound like the music of the spheres, dealing with the mixing from his INGUASONIC SOUND studio in Brooklyn, NY.

And lastly, in January, Rob Mazurek, another frequent ally of Brandão, another notorious space traveler, offered a poem that frames this project. Among other things, he writes:

Make this place sing

Make this place thunder

Make this place shake

It couldn't be in any other way.

Pioneering electric bluesman Albert King not only influenced
American guitarists like Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughan, with
whom he played in later years, but made an indelible mark in
Britain. Cream-era Eric Clapton, in particular, was an early devotee
before Albert ever set foot on UK soil, while Gary Moore, who
unashamedly took his cues from Clapton, later shared a stage with
King in his ‘Still Got The Blues’ period. Enjoy his earliest
recordings as all his famous fans would have discovered them –
on vinyl!

Avant-garde cosmic sounds from Senegal, Wau Wau Collectif's "Yaral Sa Doom" is a groundbreaking album spanning borders and musical scenes. Inspired from West African tradition, Sufi praise songs, spiritual jazz, and dub rhythms, the effect is a genre defying entry in outernational sound. Hypnotic percussion loops across sweeping pads, call and response chants echoes layer over electronic beats, and children's voices sing out to recordings of crashing waves. In 2018, Swedish music archeologist and leftfield musician Karl Jonas Winqvist traveled to Toubab Dialaw, Senegal, a small fishing village turned hub of Senegal's bohemian art scene. Over the next weeks, local musicians, percussionists, poets, and beat makers came together, sketching out ideas and recording free improvisation. Winqvist returned to Sweden, trading recordings back and forth over WhatsApp with Senegal based collaborator and studio engineer Arouna Kane. "Yaral Sa Doom" is a Wolof phrase that means "educate the young." Central to the album is this theme of education, with songs that directly address social issues facing contemporary Senegal, education, and immigration. "Today you must educate children with an instrument and art, when you teach them an instrument you teach them to use their spirit," says Djiby Ly. With over 20 contributing performers from Senegal and Sweden, Wau Wau Collectif's debut is layered and complex, yet maintains a central vision. "It's like diving into the sea," explains Kane. "There are all different species of fish swimming around, but together they make the ocean." Nonetheless, it's also a geographic anomaly, made possible only by exchange of the internet age. An exceptional recording on its own, "Yaral Sa Doom" is a visionary entry in the future of transglobal collaboration