Cerca:one man

First Ever Vinyl Reissue (released in collaboration with the Numero Group)

180g BLACK vinyl limited to 500 copies (w/obi strip). Non-Returnable.

Little is known about the mythical band ‘Heart-Soul & Inspiration’ and their band leader, L.A. drummer and producer Vince Howard…The crooning Howard got his start in 1957 on Herb Newman’s Era label where he released a bunch of excellent Doo Wop, Funk & Soul singles. Over the ensuing decade Howard slowly began piecing together his “Orchestra” consisting of bassist Jimmy Soul, guitarist Ron Carr, and pianist John True.

Howard’s Heart-Soul & Inspiration Orchestra cut their self-titled (and only) album in 1974 for John Spriggs’ Los Angeles-based Viscojon concern under the watchful eye of R&B godfather Johnny Otis.

The result was the birth of an astonishing piece of art filled with playful sexy moans, climaxing grooves and soulful hooks. One of the many highlights on the album (and clocking in at an epic eleven minutes), Vince Howard’s “I’m Gonna Love You More” is a tantric reimagining of Barry White’s 1973 sexually charged classic. Where White was content delivering a subtle and syrupy innuendo, Howard transformed the break-heavy track into a meandering funk workout.

Sadly, after their Barry White/Isaac Hayes facsimile LP failed to gain traction, the group released their final recordings—“Funk on Down” b/w “Fallen Angel”—for Viscojon in 1975 which became a hit among prominent DJ’s in the nightclub circuit. This ushered in the end for Howard’s Heart-Soul & Inspiration project.

Heart-Soul & Inspiration was a true example of a bright light burning out way too quickly. Thankfully we are left with the unique (and very rare) document that is their self-titled album. Almost impossible to get ahold of…a well-deserved reissue has been long overdue. This is an album that deserves a prominent place in every serious Funk & Soul enthusiast’s record collection!

Santana's self-titled debut album announces the arrival of a new Guitar God. Made during the legendary bandleader's most fruitful and creative period, the classic 1969 set functions as an accessible entry point into the tangy worlds of Latin music by way of an intoxicating blend of Afro-Cuban percussion, jazzy tempos, exotic leads, bluesy riffs, and psychedelic accents.

Indeed, separation between Carlos Santana's fluid fills, spicy solos, and broiling grooves and pianist Gregg Rolie's soulful Hammond organ runs allows the music to come alive with a newfound freshness and radiance. Songs simmer, with each passage bursting forth with vibrant colour. Just like the equally essential follow-up Abraxas, Santana also lays claim to one of the biggest (and unfortunate) production gaffes in music history.

For nearly four decades, copies were produced with the left and right channels reversed, meaning that everything was placed in a backwards manner. This even extended to compilations on which individual songs from Santana were included. Rest assured that, in addition to boasting reference audiophile sonics, this 180g 45RPM 2LP set gets all the specifications exactly right. And with a record of this magnitude, you want everything to be perfect.

Bound by natural chemistry and earthy spirituality, the record's innovative synthesis of myriad styles goes beyond anything that came before – as well as nearly everything that's followed. Playing with the finest band that the iconic guitarist ever had, Santana doesn't water down any exotic roots or simply incorporate mainstream Western styles into a Latin framework. This is a true hybrid, responsible for opening up borders, transcending cultural divides, and, most importantly, exhilarating the senses.

Released just weeks after the band blew minds at Woodstock, the groundbreaking record stands alongside Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and Jeff Beck's Beck-Ola as a pillar of rock fusion. Featuring the Top Ten radio smash "Evil Ways" and jam favorite "Soul Sacrifice," it hasn't aged a day. Hear like never before why Rolling Stone says Santana is #149 on its list of the Greatest Albums of All Time.

Marc Richter aka Black To Comm released his debut record 20 years ago. In 2023 he is still busy releasing music under various disguises and is currently signed to the Thrill Jockey label. To celebrate this anniversary his own Cellule 75 label is re-releasing some classic out-of-print vinyl albums that originally came out on the defunct Type and De Stijl labels. The LP will feature a full-colour printed inner sleeve exclusive to this edition.

In 2009 the Type Recordings label run by John Twells had just released seminal records by Grouper, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Yellow Swans when they signed Richter and put out his breakthrough Alphabet 1968 album. The LP sold out within two weeks, receiving a glowing full-page review in The Wire Magazine by the late Mark Fisher (later reprinted in his book Ghosts Of My Life), was selected for Boomkat's Top 10 releases of the year (alongside debut albums by Leyland Kirby, Demdike Stare and Oneohtrix Point Never) and was greeted with universal praise in the underground blog network as well as established magazines such as The New Yorker and Pitchfork.

The music itself played with the notion of nostalgia without being nostalgic itself. It's the sound of half-remembered dreams, a surreal distorted vision of the past, an aural polaroid of long forgotten musics, a ghostly voice from a non-existent era.

From the original Type one-sheet:
"The mission statement for Alphabet 1968 was to write an album of "songs" for want of a better word. Short tracks which represented genre points, the milestones which stuck in Richter's mind when he thought back to his favorite records. What we arrive at is a breathtaking 10-track album which, over the course of 45 minutes, explores world music, techno, noise, avant-garde, ambient music and even exotica. Each track is linked with a loose thread of radio static or environmental sound, dragging you through the album, as if tuning in to a stray broadcast or a particularly adventurous mix. Richter has pieced the album together from hours of recordings made at his studio with home made gamelan, small instruments and loops gathered from a collection of ancient vinyl and 78 records. The scope of the album is admirable, but ignoring this, it is simply a shockingly arresting collection of experimental oddities, with references ranging from Moondog to Basic Channel by way of Bernard Herrmann. It's not hard to fall in love with Alphabet 1968, far harder would be to place exactly where the record should fit into your collection."

Mark Fisher in The Wire:
"But what if we were to take Richter's provocation seriously - what would a song without a singer be like? What would it be like, that is to say, if objects themselves could sing? It’s a question that connects fairy tales with cybernetics, and listening to Alphabet 1968, I’m reminded of a filmic space in which magic and mechanism meet: JF Sebastian’s apartment in Blade Runner. The tracks on the LP are crafted with the same minute attention to detail that the genetic designer and toymaker brought to his miniature automata, with their bizarre mixture of the clockwork and the computerised, the antique and the ultramodern, the playful and the sinister. Richter’s musical pieces have been built from similarly heterogeneous materials - record crackle, shortwave radio, glockenspiels, all manner of samples, mostly of acoustic instruments. ….. JF Sebastian's apartment was itself an update of older spaces in which science and sorcery co-existed: the workshops of ETA Hoffmann's inventor-magicians, or of Pinocchio's creator, Geppetto. I think, too, of Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's astonishing 1886 tale The Future Eve in which Edison, using the expertise he has recently acquired from inventing the phonograph, sets himself the task of constructing an artificial woman. But if there are songs here, they are sung by the gramophone and other recording and playback machines. Richter so successfully effaces himself as author that it is as if he has snuck into a room and recorded the objects as they played (to) themselves. Rather than simply automating his music, as in the case of Pierre Bastien and his mechanical machines, Richter makes us feel that he has merely recorded the unlife of objects. ….. Indeed, the impression of things winding down is persistent on Alphabet 1968. Entropy has not been excluded from Richter's enchanted soundworld. It feels as if the magic is always about to wear off, that the enchanted objects will slip back into the inanimate again at any moment."

A wild and funky collection of Afro grooves that was ahead of its time in 1977 and has become a collector’s item in recent years, especially due to the growing international interest in Colombian picó sound system culture. Fruko and his studio bands Wganda Kenya and Kammpala Grupo treat us to a diverse set of African and Caribbean styles, laced with crazy synths, psychedelic guitar and infectious pan-African polyrhythms. By the time Discos Fuentes released the album “Wganda Kenya Kammpala Grupo” in 1977, Wganda Kenya’s discography was expanding with many 45 singles and appearances in various artists collections. The group’s 1975 debut record “África 5.000” was a full length LP in the U.S. and a various artists compilation in Colombia, which was followed by the self-titled long player the following year. However, Kammpala Grupo, which shared the album’s title and was credited to three songs on the record, had never appeared before, yet was basically the same studio group as Wganda Kenya. Most likely the creation of this short-lived studio band was just a ploy by the label to make it seem like there were more groups playing the type of exotic afro tracks favored by the picotero DJs of Colombia’s Caribbean coast (especially in Barranquilla and Cartagena). 1974 Discos Fuentes’ management had sent musician, band leader and producer Julio Ernesto “Fruko” Estrada to the coast on an A&R mission to discover what people were dancing to in the verbenas (communal open air neighborhood parties) run by the owners of picó sound systems (decorated mobile DJ rigs). Always game for an adventure, Fruko was tasked with bringing some popular examples of these esoteric, hard-to-find African, French and Dutch Antillean records back to Medellín to serve as inspiration (or to outright copy) so that the label could enter into the growing regional market and spread its popularity to the interior of Colombia and other Latin American countries via its own studio creation, Wganda Kenya. Fuentes was always returning to exploit the rich African-rooted culture of the coast as it had with the cumbia and other regional genres before, so in a way it was not surprising that they were attuned to this particular niche phenomenon from a marginalized sector of the population. The most popular genres with the champeta dancers in the 70’s and 80’s were styles like Congolese rumba, highlife, afrobeat, juju, mbaqanga and soukous as well as the music of Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Curaçao and Dominica, all of which were fiercely guarded by the DJs who had managed to acquire them often through extreme means of travel, barter and intense digging. The record kicks off with the joyful ‘El Gallo Africano’ which features exquisite interplay between Sepúlveda’s highlife style guitar and an authentic-sounding African style saxophone, perhaps played by Carlos Piña. In reality it was ‘Go Call Police Chief’ by prolific Nigerian highlife guitarist Chief Oliver Sunday Akanite, aka Oliver De Coque. Next up is Kammpala Grupo’s ‘La Yuca Rayá’ (‘Grated Yuca’), written by Isaac Villanueva in a style he termed son haitiano which sounds much more like Zimbabwe Shona mbira music. Wganda Kenya’s ‘Caimito’ (star apple, a type of tropical fruit), on the other hand, is actually a cover of a relatively well-known Haitian merengue song. Kammpala Grupo then takes us from the French Antilles to the multi-cultural discotheques of Paris, where a cover version of Black Soul’s Afro-boogie anthem ‘Black Soul Music’ is retooled and renamed ‘King Kong’, perhaps in a nod to the 1976 remake of the monster flick of the same name. Side two introduces us to the infectious merengue rebita of Angola via ‘La riphyta’ with “Paparí”, aka Mariano Sepúlveda, doing the vocals and faithfully replicating the Angolan guitar style. ‘La Trompeta Loca’ (‘The Crazy Trumpet’), probably the nuttiest track on the album, is an ingenious cover of ‘Ye Gbawa Oo Baba (Tribute To Nigeria)’ by Joe Mensah of Ghana. As with all their covers of African tunes, this rendition tightens up the original with some pop sheen, more consistent drumming and higher production values, remaking it into a powerful slow-burning dance floor filler. This is followed by one of the most powerfully original songs to come out of the entire Wganda Kenya project, Mike Char’s reggae anthem ‘El Nativo’ with Joe Arroyo on vocals. The record ends on a more authentically Caribbean sounding note with the instrumental ‘El testamento’, a cheerful islands banger with bright brass, syncopated calypso beats and chunky cuatro guitar (or ukulele). The original was in the mento genre and titled ‘Sweet meat’, written and recorded by Jamaican trumpeter Bobby Ellis. First time reissue. 180g vinyl.

Ned Milligan is a New York based elementary school teacher and occasional musician. He’s behind the great small-run label Florabelle since 2015. This is his sixth solo album.

"My work in the past five years has been grounded in recording and playing outdoors, trying to communicate the meaning of being in a particular location and finding meaning in interacting with whatever sounds or elements are equally present. I'm still excited by all of it! This sense of purpose continues with Considerable and the most I could wish for is that the specificity of what I am doing and where I'm doing it manages to evoke something in anyone listening--a connection to their own environments and spaces. None of these pieces is strictly documentary or one-take in approach or composition, but I hope that the combination of processed and "factual" sounds achieve integrity."

chimes, singing drum, autoharp, field recordings, processing: Ned Milligan
campfire recording in "Sky Smokes & Electronics": Jerome Klap
additional percussion in "Mosey With Me": Rory Milligan
singing: graciously and anonymously donated

recorded mostly outdoors, sometimes indoors in York, Maine.

Selected by Jim O’Rourke for his Tone Glow list of 25 albums that “never got their due”, Org was founded in the early 90’s by Espen Jensen and Kjetil D Brandsdal who would later go on to variously record as Elektrodiesel, Noxagt and Ultralyd in the swirl of the highly active Norwegian underground. “Org" was the only album the pair recorded as a duo, pressed in a meagre edition of just over 100 copies which disappeared almost as soon as they were made, lodged in the memory of the select few who have managed to hear it in the years since.

Made up of three long tracks, the near 20-minute ‘001’ opens the album with an extended organ zone-out matched with scraping factory machinery saturated into a dense cloud of harmonic fuzz. There's something transcendental about the sound that intersects with microtonal Alice Coltrane (particularly the unfairly maligned organ-only edition of "Turiya Sings"), as well as Pauline Oliveros and Ramleh. It’s music that pulls you in subconsciously; before you know it, you're fixating on the uncomfortable grind of metal on metal, buried mechanical rhythms and liturgical organ vamps that wind between industrial cacophony and sacred ritual music. For its last few seconds, we go into a full death metal tearout that fades out before it takes full flight, a glorious wtf.

‘002’ connects between minimalist drone styles and shoegaze, distorting fuzzed organ into pliable, dreamlike warbles that end up sounding like Kevin Shields' ‘Loveless’-era glides, or even Sunn O))) at their most devotional. Never losing the numbing overdriven mettle, its a piece that sounds spiritually entwined with Matthew Bower's Skullflower - a minimalist re-reading of high-contrast guitar music that takes all the psychoacoustic power and none of the annoying posturing.

For ‘003’, subaqueous organ is joined by synth and drum machine, sounding like the inspirational spark for Religious Knives' screwed 'n chopped cosmic psychedelia. The choice of sounds links it to Antena's foundational electro samba recordings too, but the overwhelming drone - a constant on all three compositions - connects the music to minimalist spirituals that have simmered beneath the DIY/avant garde for decades.

‘Org’ sits heavy on the nerves with overproof levels of mulched amp worship and ungodly, palms-down organ chords and wheezing, bezonked lines of melodic thought. 25 years out of sight and marinading in the archives, with the benefit of hindsight we can better understand the role these sounds played in the development of music in the contemporary sphere. It’s an important piece of the puzzle, one that makes valuable connections that, over time, have looked progressively more faint.

In the centre of deep space we tune in to the radio broadcasts from an old Class T interstellar spaceship. The emissions endlessly resonate the frequencies of the seventeenth release on the label HC Records by one of the titans of the Valencian scene, The Lost Boys, new pseudonym of the DJ and producer Raszia.

With releases on labels such as Bass Agenda, Subsist or Hxagrm Records, the artist mesmerises our senses with the Exiles of Mars Ep, available in both double vinyl and digital.

Syncopated rhythms are the protagonists across four original tracks together
with remixes by four electro legends: Boris Divider, Estrato Aurora, Dark Vektor, and Filmmaker.

The EP’s first cut is a remix of "Wall Of Bricks" by the legendary Boris Divider, which gives the track an air of crystalline, synthetic and cosmic sound, very much in line with his latest works on the Generative Operations series. Next, we find the original version, where the kick drums are heavier, the synths and basses more colourful and the acid sequences take centre stage in an odyssey of sidereal intensity.

On the record’s flip side, a feeling of overwhelming melancholy takes root in our soul. Valencian Estrato Aurora mentally transports us to the mysterious red sand of Mars in a precise exercise in symphonic minimalism with his remix of "Exiles of Mars", which mutates the original idea with velvety pads, synths and a slow and rapturous hypnotism that sinks us to unfathomable depths.
The Lost Boys' original concept on B2 is a combination of Miami Bass-style breaks and a demonic mantra-like main synth line, backed by what seems like an infinity of pearly effects and secondary melodies, pushing the track towards a crescendo punctuated by a dry and sharp snare.

The second disc’s opener "Bust My Moves" is a masterclass in deconstruction and reconstruction by Dark Vektor with his "Electro Escuadrón Remix”. The genius from Terrassa provides powerful lyrics loaded with a message about the modern rise of the 808 movement. We return to the original Lost Boys version on C2, a futuristic martial discourse takes shape with combating breaks combined with rave chords and brief episodes of respite, almost dreamlike, in the middle and end of the track’s exciting development.

On the D side, rough frequencies verging on distortion materialise through our ship's speakers as we pick up the Colombian Filmmaker’s remix of "Data Recovery For Brains". A psychotronic final appetiser that combines harshness and elegance in the use of the rolling kick drums and saturation of the sound, it is without a doubt the ideal soundtrack to narrate the collision of two galaxies. The closing of the EP features the original track, in which The Lost Boys show us his most mental and lysergic side as the track progresses along a slow and comforting broken rhythm, made dynamic by clever use of diverse acid sequences and clairvoyant stellar melodies.

The complete artistic experience is enhanced in all dimensions with accompanying artwork by
Daniel Requeni and videos elaborated by Frank-F.

Mastering as usual by Steve Voidloss at Black Monolith Studios in London (UK).

From Alehouse to Playhouse Bjarte Eike and his barnstorming Barokksolistene capture the vital spark of Restoration London’s entertainment scene with a captivating new recording for Rubicon Classics! The Playhouse Sessions will be released on 23 September 2022 to coincide with Barokksolistene’s concert double-bill at London’s Southbank Centre.

‘A smattering of Purcell, dances from Playford’s Dancing Master, shanties, reels and ballads succumb to a nine-piece ensemble drawing on Baroque, jazz and folk styles for a no holds barred hooley of riotous improvisatory give and take,’ (BBC Music Magazine review of The Alehouse Sessions, August 2019)

London’s musicians, pushed in the 1650s, to the margins of society by order of Oliver Cromwell, found room for new forms of entertainment in city-centre taverns and alehouses. They remained there long after the restoration of the monarchy, performing sets of dances, theatre songs and bawdy ballads to audiences glad to be free from Puritan constraints on pleasure.

Norwegian violinist Bjarte Eike and his Barokksolistene have restored the spirit and substance of those long-forgotten performances with their Alehouse Sessions, hailed by The Times as ‘irresistible’ and ‘fabulously unrestrained’ by The Guardian. Five years ago the Norwegian violinist and his band scored a best-selling album with The Alehouse Sessions on Rubicon Classics. They return to the label with another compelling collection of music and words of the kind on offer more than three centuries ago at Henry Purcell’s favourite Westminster watering holes. The Playhouse Sessions, set for release on Rubicon Classics on 23 September 2022, reflects the uplifting energy and engaging emotional contrasts of Barokksolistene’s Alehouse performances.

“The album contains a sort of inner narrative that runs through the recording,” says Bjarte Eike. “It has become like a play in its own right, with each track being a small tale within a larger story.” The recording’s tracklist includes Eike’s beguiling arrangements of music from Purcell’s semi-opera The Fairy Queen and his own original compositions on words from the play on which it is based, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; popular songs and ballads such as ‘The Irish Washerwoman’, ‘I often for my Jenny strove’ and ‘The Three Ravens’; tunes from Purcell’s welcome odes and stage shows, Come ye sons of art and Dido and Aeneas among them; the ‘Willow Song’ from Shakespeare’s Othello; Eike’s own voice in Puck’s monologue from Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and John Dowland’s sublime air ‘Can she excuse my wrongs’.

London’s theatres were closed at the start of the English Civil War in 1642 and remained shut until the Restoration. Alehouses offered redundant musicians, actors and dancers a place to scrape a precarious living and soon became their creative refuge. “Although a few surviving theatres reopened in 1660 with the return of Charles II, there was little money around to rebuild those that had been demolished,” observes Bjarte Eike. “And a generation of musicians had already found an audience in places like the Black Horse in Aldersgate Street. So popular were their alehouse sessions that Cromwell tried to abolish them! But they outlived him and became part of Restoration musical life.” The form of a Barokksolistene Alehouse, he adds, is like a creative room. “Within its framework I can frequently refurbish the show with new contents. The Playhouse project is likewise an extension of the ever-evolving Alehouse Sessions. Together they tell the story of music and theatre in London during Cromwell’s time and after the Restoration. Of course there’s an historical context to what we do. But there’s also the practical context – which is even more important to me – of connecting with a contemporary twenty-first century audience. An Alehouse / Playhouse performance is not something for the museum; it's about music made in the present moment, just as it was in the London alehouses of Purcell’s day -- with their playhouses annexed to the rear of the beer-drinking saloons. The encounter of musicians onstage and the audience in the hall is the real magic of it. We have to fuse the audience into the action of our performance!”

The Playhouse Sessions will be launched on Friday 23 September with a late-night concert at the Purcell Room and a post-concert Alehouse Session in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Soprano Mary Bevan is set to join Eike and his Alehouse Boys for the first half of their Southbank Centre double-bill, offering unique interpretations of songs from Purcell shows and other hits from the late seventeenth-century London stage. “The Southbank Centre is a direct descendant of concerts given in the 1650s in the alehouses of London,” notes Eike. “These alehouses after all staged some of the world’s first public concerts. Later, after the Restoration, it became common for promoters to advertise alehouse concerts in the press and offer subscription tickets. Purcell and his fellow musicians were thus just as at home performing there as they were in the chambers of the royal court or in London’s new theatres.”

Bjarte Eike launched his Alehouse Sessions in company with like-minded musicians 15 years ago. The ensemble comprises a core of regular performers, all of whom have committed to memory a huge setlist of up to four hours of music. Typically they meet a day or so before a concert tour to share a meal and make music together; then next day, re-grouping thirty minutes before the show, they discover Eike’s select-menu for the evening. “That ensures that every show is fresh,” he notes. “I make sure we never repeat the same programme twice. It’s therefore essential to work with people who share my outlook and dare to adventure. We’re into a high-risk sport, with lots of traps and places where the unexpected appears - for good or for ill. And so the audience knows we’re vulnerable. But our skill is seen in how we re-act on the hoof to the unpredictable. That’s authenticity and honesty - and above all it’s a performance that’s genuine.”

Armed with a classical training and a background in folk music and improvisation, Bjarte Eike was drawn naturally to Early Music in all its stylistic variety. “I never really felt at home with only one genre,” he recalls. “Early Music allowed me to study profound, complicated compositions, but performing it has also opened up the chance of rebellion and uproar! Early music offers wide, multi-faceted areas of musical exploration for me. You find, for instance, links to different types of music wherever you look in seventeenth-century English repertoire. And I am fascinated by all these connections. They offer a foundation for the Alehouse Sessions and for all Barokksolistene performance more generally. Every member of the group plays, sings, dances and improvises without limitation. We’re all interested in the many different fields of being a stage performer and pushing hard at the ‘normal’ boundaries of what it means to be a classical musician.”

Sichern Sie sich jetzt die farbige Vinyl-Neuauflage von Sarah Connors Top-10 Album ”Unbelievable” und erleben Sie musikalische Meisterhaftigkeit in einer ganz neuen Dimension, physisch manifestiert auf strahlender 2LP in transparentem Magenta.

Mit ihrem 2. Studioalbum ”Unbelievable”, stieß Sarah Connor zur Veröffentlichung im September 2002 direkt auf Platz 10 der deutschen Charts und eroberte die Herzen der Zuhörer ein weiteres Mal.

When Belgian Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in the mid-19th century, he could not have imagined what he had set in motion with his invention. Neither in classical music nor in military music did his new woodwind instrument find much appreciation. It was only long after his death that it became the most important instrument in jazz music via swinging big bands. It would probably have amazed Mr. Sax if he had been able to witness a young trio from Germany playing loudly against climate change and the lack of political consequences with two noisy saxophones and a drum set on a stage in front of the Reichstag in Berlin in front of more than 50,000 people jumping up and down during the climate strike in September 2021: BRASS RIOT.

The trio around Constantin von Estorff (Sax), Simon Sasse (Drums) and Carl Weiß (Sax) have been a band since their school days in Lüneburg. What started there as street music became a permanent and sought-after formation through the proximity to political initiatives, above all the Fridays-For-Future movement, and appearances at countless demonstrations. The band's name is slightly misleading, as "brass" in music refers to brass instruments such as the trumpet or tuba, even though most brass bands always include a saxophone. Moreover, the word "brass" means something in the German language, which in turn fits perfectly with this young, energetic trio: Fury.

On the heels of their debut album "Matschsafari" (2018), their second studio album "The Never Acting Story" is now released on Fun In The Church. The album title, in critical allusion to the world-famous fantasy book by Michael Ende, sums up well what the music of BRASS RIOT is about at its core: the possibility to get a noisy outlet for all the fury about the failed politics of the last decades and the frustrations and fears that go with it, and to free oneself from it for a moment. That this path has produced the wildest live music on this crisis-ridden planet is an irony of history - and certainly not the first time it has happened. It's no different in the jazz of Charlie Parker than in the songs of Patti Smith, the raps of Little Simz or the Afro-beat of Fela Kuti.

Musically, BRASS RIOT move more in the area of the melodic ska-pop of Madness, the fake jazz of the Lounge Lizards and contemporary rave brass ensembles like MEUTE between house music and electro beats. The fact that they have managed to politicize their sound so strongly over the years, despite all the party that goes with it, and without any song lyrics at all, is truly phenomenal.

Jabee's Am I Good Enough is the prolific OKC hip-hop artist’s most ambitious project to date. Several years in the making, Am I Good Enough compiles four EPs of brand-new music (22 tracks total), each recorded entirely with a different producer. The resulting four EPs each could stand alone as powerful individual works, but combine to make one of the most remarkable and compelling artistic statements of Jabee’s career. Am: produced by Derek Minor I: produced by Blu Good: produced by Conductor Williams Enough: produced by Havoc (of Mobb Deep). Am I Good Enough is available on 2xLP, housed in a gatefold jacket with inner sleeves showcasing each of the four EP’s individual covers.

Juli Giuliani is a prolific artist, since 2009 he started at a very young age in the hip-hop scene and since then he has been releasing music non stop. In 2017 he begins a new stage under the name of Juli Giuliani, delivering collaborations with artists such as Toteking, Dano, Jonas Sanche or Big Menu, performances at Sónar, and a tour of Latin America, where he consolidates the respect of the scene at the Ibero-American level. Giuliani is a different artist due to his versatility, warmth and closeness to the listener. His new ways of making rap, maintains the essence that so many yearn for without disconnecting from actuality and building a unique discourse and identity. This profile makes his musical proposal one of the most solid, ambitious and mature on the scene, ready to fill the new spaces that are opening up on the scene. His next LP, in collaboration with Mabreezee and Karmasound, will be released at the beginning of 2023 via Costa Futuro.

Following hot in the footsteps of his debut HF release ‘Cocoa Butter’, ‘Off The Grid’ sees Renelle 893 team up with producer Bay29 on a body of work that offers an escape route from the monotonous every day; the duo taking us further and further off the beaten track, marrying moments of purest hedonism with stark reminders that the real world lies in wait, just after sunrise, with no pause button in sight.

Laying the foundations with summer anthem (and lead single) ’Spaghetti’, Renelle wrestles with the fleeting nature of youth, and his topsy turvy relationship with the finer things in life. The dynamic is both gritty and nostalgic as Renelle walks the fine line between Hollywood hedonism and slurry excess, his mood swinging between moments of invincibility and vulnerability, expertly scored by Bay29’s ethereal, bass dripping instrumentals.

Another SE London / Brighton hook up, one of many on the label in recent years, Renelle utilised his late night train rides to-and-from Bay29’s Brighton studio as an opportunity to refine the verses that make up the bones of the project.

Twelve-tracks; six vocal, six instrumental, ‘Off The Grid’ is the first in a series of new works from Renelle 893 & Bay29. A perfect scene-setter for what’s to come.

As Renelle 893 explains… “Off The Grid is about soul searching and figuring out what kind of adult I am looking to be, navigating a world filled with distractions that will do everything to numb the pain as life inevitably passes you by…”

It's hard to think of any other act whose music being added to digital streaming sites would make as many headlines as De La Soul. It has been followed up with a big reissue project that's brought all their many great albums - they made more than just that one iconic one, you know - back to print. Stakes Is High brought the same high levels of wordplay, great beats and overall narrative as any of the band's albums, and all at a time when hip-hop's initial popularity began to wane. Fact fans, take note - Mos Def guested on one tune 'Big Brother Beat' and Common on 'The Bizness' way before anyone knew who either of them was.

Richie Culver had been waiting his whole life to record I was born by the sea. His debut album immediately and messily inscribed the artist into the canon of outsider music and experimental electronics, serving both as an arresting statement of intent and a painful reckoning with the difficult path that lead up to it, stealing one last glance back at a place he always knew he had to escape. Between grim lamentations, faded memories and anxiety attacks, all told with searing honesty and disarming openness, I was born by the sea excavates a space for hope, finding Culver digging through Humberside silt to find a world weary optimism, the raw material from which his visual and sound art is shaped. For this collection of expansions and inversions, Culver invites a collection of kindred spirits, contemporary inspirations and old heroes to wade into the salt water of his formative years spent living for impromptu raves and afterparties, connecting vivid memories of his birth place of Withernsea to artists hailing from as nearby as Preston and Bridlington, further afield, from Manchester and London, Berlin and Paris, before returning back to Hull, to where it all began.

For some, responding to I was born by the sea means diving even deeper into the record’s furthest reaches. Space Afrika clear away the pummelling loops of noise from ‘It’s hard to get to know you,’ revealing a cool and cavernous expanse in its wake. Distant chatter, previously heard as though through thin, plasterboard walls, now echoes from outside the maddening claustrophobia of the original’s Sisyphean sonics, illuminated as a dense storm cloud suspended amidst a more open scene, washed clean by a lighter rain, allowing the tender heart of the track to beat clear. London producer MOBBS stretches out ‘Pigeon Flesh’ into an epic, 10-minute, cold-sweat spiral, strung-out tension wrung from disconnected phone tones twisted in unexpected directions, snatches of Culver’s voice turned inside-out and deep fried bass threatening to tip the track over into oblivion, the build-and-release of a nervous breakdown experienced in real time. In an act of subversive self-reflection, Morgane Polanski switches one kind of ennui for another in her adaption of ‘I was born by the sea,’ swapping the sea for the city, English seaside towns in January for summer evenings in Paris and flashing lighthouses and sparkling oil rigs for the Eiffel Tower and the traffic around L’Arc de Triomphe. Even Culver finds time to revisit ‘Dream About Yourself,’ a track taken from his EP Post Traumatic Fantasy, breathing new words into its glacial drift, the half-remembered testimony of a shut-in: Woke up in the evening / Pray for me / Don’t trust anyone / Pray for algorithm. Reframed in a more melancholy light, the track’s reverberant keys even more clearly evoke a mournful nostalgia, fresh pain felt in old wounds.

Others find a parallel universe in Culver’s visceral world building. Rainy Miller flips the script with a scorched, avant-drill rework of ‘Daytime TV’, threading puncturing hi-hats and queasy low-end surge through the track’s steady ambient cascade, invoking the irresistible Preston beat magic of Miller’s own essential debut album, Desquamation. Aho Ssan melts away the crystalline textures of ‘Love Like an Abscess’ with the ominous crackle of a nascent fire, building through swathes of organic Max/MSP squelch and brittle, nails-down-chalkboard scrape, swelling and metastasising the original to spill over Culver’s desperate hymn to corporeal desire, at once flesh and not. Teresa Winter transports us an hour up the coast from Withernsea to her native Bridlington, replacing the sea wall of synthesis on ‘Nervous Energy’ with muffled ASMR murk and fever dream whispers, transforming Culver’s unflinching observations into a haunting call-and-response, filling in the blanks with her own eerie utterances, a fleeting conversation with a ghost. In a touching victory lap, Fila Brazillia, eccentric stalwarts of beloved ‘90s trip hop imprint Pork Recordings, whose performances at Hull institution The Lamp convinced a young Culver of the necessity to make his mark on club culture, resurface for their first remix in 20 years. Steve Cobby and David McSherry lead a low-slung, heartfelt stroll back through a suite of tracks from I was born by the sea, tracing a full circle saunter from Culver’s origins to his current musical practice, the sounds of his present repurposed by the sound of his youth. In a gesture that reflects the emotional complexity of the project, Fila Brazillia find joy at the end of Culver’s troubled reflection, picking out an undeniable groove in the stasis of feeling trapped in your hometown. Underlining Hull’s vital musical legacy, from Baby Mammoth to Throbbing Gristle, Cobby and McSherry demonstrate that, though there are certainly storms, by the sea there is also sun and through the fog, if you listen, you can hear a singular sound, a sound now carried by Richie Culver.

Participant is a record label and creative studio run by William Markarian-Martin and Richie Culver

Director's note : "My encounter with Wild Dee, the main actor in DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD, was a determining factor in the making of this film. Not only are we strongly influenced by the same literary atmospheres - Among them American authors like Harry Crews, Iceberg Slim, N.Tosches and Belgian horror author Jean Ray - we also share the same cinematic tastes - low budget cinema be it French, Japanese or Spanish. Our main aim was to recreate the spirit, and play with and even subvert, the codes of Exploitation cinema. We also share the same taste for Rock & Roll, as our parallel musical backgrounds show. We were both singers in emblematic Belgian rock bands of the 80's and 90's - Wild Dee in The Wild Ones and me with Marine (79/81 - 3 singles with Les Disques du Crepuscule) and La Muerte (84/94 - 6 albums with Pias). The film's soundtrack, inspired by Francois de Roubaix, John Carpenter, Lalo Shiffrin, is like its second layer of dialogue: the original compositions of Renaud Mayeur (winner of the Magritte 2013 Belgian cinema awards for best soundtrack) and of J-M Lederman (Fat Gadget, TheThe, ... ), Moaning Cities, Ashtoreth, The Nick Leonardo Orchestra, The Manarays, Jack'O'Roonie. " A further thing that brings us together is something that has been with us since childhood and that we Belgians call: Belgitude...

Repress!

‘Shapes,’ the third album from London-based multi-instrumentalist, Robohands, fuses elements of jazz, krautrock, hip hop and ambient music. For fans of Khruangbin, Yusef Dayes, CAN, Coltrane and 70s library music moods.

Shapes is the solo project of London based composer, instrumentalist and producer Andy Baxter. His debut LP Green was released on Village Live Records in 2018 and was received with much love and acclaim in the UK Jazz, hip hop and surrounding scenes.

His follow up full-length, 'Dusk’, dropped in 2019, combining soul, funk, Latin & experimental moods. It featured vocalists & musicians from around the world including legendary New York French horn player, John Clark, who has worked with Isaac Hayes, Gil Evans Orchestra, McCoy Tyner, Jaco Pastorius, Ornette Coleman and many more greats.

'Shapes' is inspired by 1970s library music and their legendary composers including Piero Umiliani, David Axelrod, Brian Bennett and co. The album builds on these influences and incorporates modern motifs, contemporary jazz/hip hop drumming styles with a nod to 1990s Mo Wax artists such as DJ Shadow. The theme for the record is future/nostalgia, mixing vintage & modern instruments and production techniques.

Much of ‘Shapes’ was recorded with JB Pilon at Buffalo Studios in Limehouse, London. Due to the COVID restrictions that changed everything in 2020, the remaining parts were recorded in Andy’s flat using a collection of old mixing desk preamps and instruments.

For the heads – ‘Shapes’ features an array of vintage snares, including a 1960's Ludwig Pioneer and a mono, overhead ribbon mic on the drum kit provided extra old school points! The kick drum was re-amped through a huge vintage bass amplifier on a couple of tracks to give it some real character: “My favourite guitar sound achieved on this LP project is a Sontronics Sigma ribbon microphone in front of a WEM Dominator amp, which you can hear on the track 'Odysea'. The bass sound for all the tracks is a 1973 Fender Precision into an old Altec valve preamp, the one used on most Motown recordings."

If you are a death metal fan, GRACELESS shouldn’t need an introduction. Three full lengths and two split EPs have granted the Dutch ensemble a respectable reputation across the globe. Closer to home, the four piece has played countless live shows since their 2016 inception. The rock solid line up -unchanged since day one- has delivered ferocious, high energy live performances at Eindhoven Metal Meeting, Into the Grave, Party San Metal Open Air, Ruhrpott Metal Meeting, Stonehenge, SDF2021 and many more festivals and clubs. Joining forces with LISTENABLE RECORDS in 2023 is the next thundering milestone for GRACELESS. Tirelessly working on their fourth full-length, the next chapter for GRACELESS will be another step deeper into the abyss that started with Shadowlands (2018), via Where Vultures Know Your Name (2020), to Chants from Purgatory (2022). For fans of DEATH, ASPHYX, GORGUTS, BOLT THROWER, AMON AMARTH, BLOODBATH.

1000 Die-cut leather structure gatefold with eight artist photo cards & insert.

"Welcome to the America Dream Reserve, home to husband & wife duos, pub legends, one-man-bands, preachers’ sons, and country-lounge entertainers..."

About: America Dream Reserve is a home for kindred souls. An hour-long journey into the world of lo-fi drumcomputer folk, disco-pop-lounge, haunting ballads, obscure vanity pressings, and synthesized string ensembles. A collaborative compilation between Charles Bals, creator of the inimitable Club Meduse, and Smiling C.

Sleeve: This is a premium edition of ADR housed in a die-cut leather structure gatefold. It comes with eight loose double-sided swappable photo cards with artist photos on both sides, and an insert with write-up about the project. Limited run.

Compiled by: Charles Bals & Henry Jones.

This second volume of Mangle Rojo is a tribute to the spirit of celebration and diversity that reigns in the festivities of Colombia´s town squares. We created this compilation in vinyl format, in which we continue to explore the traditional sounds of the Caribbean and Pacific coasts, which have a rooted Afro tradition.

We begin this journey with field recordings of traditional groups such as Sexteto Tabalá from Palenque de San Basilio, who plays the sextet format heir to the Cuban Son and Los Alegres del Telembí, exponents of the marimba music of the Colombian South Pacific.

We continue this voyage with proposals that fuse traditional rhythms with modern instruments and musical genres: The popular singer Nelda Piña makes a featuring with the afrobeat orchestra La BOA and the marimba band Saborimba, from a small town on the Pacific coast, collaborates with urban musicians.

In addition, we find new protagonists like the big band formats that have been popular in Colombia since the beginning of the 20th century: the Papayera band (Calentanos Brass Band) and the Chirimía format (Chirrimía Balsámica), this last one with the collaboration of the renowned singer Alexis Play.

Finally, we invite artists who use traditional rhythms to develop electronic proposals, such as Ghetto Kumbé and the well-known singer Nidia Góngora.