Suche:re named

Aspetuck has been steadily carving out a name for himself through releases on Never Late and Oslated, garnering a respected following for his DJ mixes and festival performances. Aspetuck’s latest record, Immersion, was sequenced and curated from dozens of ideas spanning a transformative few years in Griff’s life. The album is less a snapshot in time and more of a memory bank - flashes of fatherhood, loss, modular rabbit holes, late-night studio sessions, and long walks by the Hudson River with his daughter.
The emotional undertow of the album is immediate. Opener Hit Me With Your Pet Shark is one of the earliest compositions in the collection, created just months after the loss of Griff’s brother and during the sleepless swirl of new parenthood. Built around a single sound from Spectrasonics Omnisphere, found while rediscovering his brother’s studio gear, the track sets the tone: restrained yet searching, personal without becoming precious.
From there, The Printing Press captures the raw energy of a live jam in Griff’s upstate New York basement, running through a 1980s Tascam mixer like a lo-fi assembly line of synths, pads, and drum machines. REI, named after a spontaneous family mission to find a pink water bottle, encapsulates his knack for imprinting daily minutiae into sound. And title track Immersion- once known simply as Tuesday 303 Jam- emerges from a dinner break and a blender, distilling modular sketches and distorted drums into a powerful, slow-motion march.
Under, Under The Tree hits hardest. Built around a grainy iPhone voice memo of Griff’s daughter singing by the Hudson. And closing the album is Bobik, a collaborative studio session with Moon Patrol channeling the playful chaos of a close friendship and modular exploration. Named after a joke about their golden retriever and filled with alien textures from Griff’s beloved EMU XL7 gifted years ago by his late brother, it’s a fitting send-off to an album that straddles celebration and mourning with grace.
The artwork comes courtesy of Peter Skwiot Smith, whose textured analog/digital aesthetic resonated immediately with Griff’s original vision. Peter’s treatment draws on Griff’s personal photography and leans into motion, blur, and the layered nature of memory, echoing the album's sonic tone without overexplaining it.
Mastered by Sven Weisemann, Immersion is available on blue smoke colored 12”

REPRESS ALERT! Long out of press and with copies regularly changing hands for close to £100 on the second-hand market, Air Miles are proud to present a limited repress of their inaugural release, “An Ode To Midnight EP’ by Jeigo.

The tone is set from the off with the eponymously named first track of the release ‘an Ode to midnight’. The tracks mellow break beat feel is met by warm rushing pads, ebbing and flowing between textures of the night before last.

Floor focussed, zero fussing ‘Wing Systems’ carries the front side at an orbital trajectory. No time for an intro, the drums jolt you into alertness, the wobbly bass perfectly counterpointed by gated, washing keys.

‘Lime Hawk’, melancholic euphoria brings the release back to the conscious. It’s structure toy-fully crescendos and builds, all while the Balearic synth peaks with the sub line keeping you grounded throughout.

Rounding off the record is ‘By My Side’ meandering the record into slightly darker territories. The shifting keys wash over, the siren call vocals penetrate and the thudding kick punches through, anchoring the track as an emotionally driven, cerebral affair.

Sélection naturelle is the fourth studio album by the French rapper Nessbeal, released on CD in the fall of 2011. A self-professed fan of National Geographic, he named the record "Natural Selection" after developing a fascination for the evolutionary idea that only the strongest survive.

This ferocious attitude to life is present throughout the whole record, with Nessbeal presenting us with 14 serious tunes about persisting in the urban jungle such as "Je Suis Un Salaud", "Force Et Honneur", and "Là Où Les Vents Nous Mènent".

Sélection naturelle is available as a 15th anniversary edition of 1000 individually numbered copies on silver vinyl, and includes a 12-page booklet.

For its inaugural vinyl release, Saudi-based imprint Gabu steps boldly into the analog era with The Night We Had, a landmark record from Jerome (of Foehn & Jerome) in collaboration with Sonya Zlo. Heralding the start of the label’s physical catalogue, this first pressing introduces Gabu’s deep, groove-led ethos through an evocative vision of deep that balances emotional depth with dancefloor intuition.

Named after the Arabic word for basement, Gabu represents a space where sound is felt as much as it is heard, intimate, grounded, and conceived from the roots upward. The Night We Had embodies this spirit in full, capturing the essence of late hours, close rooms, and music that thrives in the underground

As we celebrate 30 years of Ten Lovers Music our first offering of the year is a Various Artist selection called Frisson EP Part 1. Frisson is a medical term for the response you get from listening to music, often referred to as goosebumps or a skin orgasm which is caused by the dopamine released in the brain’s reward centres.
Kicking off the A side we have Sound Signals featuring flautist Han Litz, a superb opener. Following on are Future Jazz Ensemble and Don’t Be Afraid, another track from them oozing quality. Onto side AA and Mike Perras is back with another live track featuring keys, drums, bass and a battling flute and sax on Sweet One. Rounding off side AA is Stefano De Santis with Simple Things, an aptly named track for this music that gives us Frisson.

W.R.F. was formed in 2015 by Nina and late studio partner Andrew Weatherall to help wrangle the vast output recorded together beyond his solo releases.
Spotlighting nine tracks from the Apparently Solo series of EPs recorded between 2016- 2019 and released on Bandcamp in 2023, this lustrous time capsule marks the culmination of Walsh and Weatherall’s creative relationship born after they clicked at London’s earliest acid house clubs, becoming partners then managers of their Sabres Of Paradise/Sabrettes labels before taking different paths by the late '90s.
An accomplished musician, Nina had learned the art of studio technology by the time they reunited and started working together in 2012. Created at her Facility 4 Studio situated in the dangerous, gang-ridden no man’s land between Streatham and Mitcham, Anamchara captures the super-prolific creative stretch starting in 2015 that produced Weatherall’s Convenanza and Qualia solo sets, W.R.F.’s The Phoenix Suburb (And Other Stories) plus a whole lot more. According to Nina, Andrew envisioned the spectacular ‘Borderland’ as natural successor to ‘Smokebelch’, his most revered track. When it came to his remix, Nina enlisted renowned viola virtuoso Sarah Sarhandi and composed new harmonies with Pachelbel’s Canon in D Minor in mind.
The set also catches the breakthrough period when, through Nina’s careful coaxing, Andrew started using the computer system she’d set up to better express his musical visions by arranging the elements, grooves and melodies she sent him. Still considered the UK’s greatest DJ-producer, Andrew’s arrangements were inspired by his club-igniting sets. “This allowed me to mix the colours for his palette whilst he was painting the picture,” says Nina. Anamchara straddles the gamut of musical styles explored by W.R.F. at this time, from slower paced psychedelic “drug chug” outings ‘We Two’. ‘Heat To Meat Ratio’, ‘Hidden Watchers Part 1’ to banging acid house and techno sometimes inspired by the violence outside the studio door, including ‘SCHLAP’, ‘Crack-Ed’ and churning acid juggernaut ‘Yacidik’ (“After much dangling of the acid carrot, Andrew took a bite and, after one familiar raised eyebrow, never looked back,” says Nina).
Many tracks fly elements from the enormous sonic library Nina inherited from late partner Erick Legrand that she called The Akashic Library of Sound. Marking Andrew’s 2016 admission into the vault, ‘Rattly Old Puffin’ boasts Erick’s psychedelic guitar and tumbling drum loop Weatherall would run with, including on ‘Borderland’. “Erick was like our third member,” says Nina.
Bringing down the curtain, ‘Alma’’s exquisitely poignant melody that unfolds over thirteen time-stopping minutes was composed by Nina while navigating Erick’s birth and departure date anniversaries to accompany Andrew’s reading from Gordon Burn’s 1991 same-named novel at 2018’s Durham Literary Festival. Burn’s novel imagines early 60s popstrel Alma Cogan, who succumbed to cancer in 1966 surviving to reflect on fame. “Now it just makes me think of Erick. And every time I hear those well-placed cymbal crashes I can only think of the Captain himself.”
A beautiful grand finale for this astonishing selection of pure gold from the vaults.
Kris Needs / 2026

Philip Glass, the great American composer, was already in his mid-30s before his first album appeared, and then only because he produced the double LP himself. Music With Changing Parts was the inaugural release on his own Chatham Square imprint in 1971.

At this point, Einstein on the Beach, Glass' first opera, was still five years away. Yet in Changing Parts, one can already hear much of his vocabulary in full bloom: the buoyant arpeggios, the melding of electronic and acoustic instruments, the elongated drones of human voice, the primary emphasis on pulse (an interest he shared with fellow composer Steve Reich) and the ecstatic potential inherent in repetition.

The album features the original Philip Glass Ensemble – the composer himself, along with Jon Gibson, Dickie Landry, Art Murphy, Steve Chambers and Robert Prado – playing Farfisa organs and woodwinds as well as Barbara Benary on electric violin.

As Glass describes in his memoir Words Without Music, he secured a $500 interest-free loan for the recordings' initial release from the Hebrew Free Loan Society – an organization intended to help immigrants from the Old World upon arrival in the US. Though Glass was merely the grandson of immigrants, the venture wasn't far off the society's charter as Changing Parts helped usher in a new world of sound that would become known as Minimalism.

Chatham Square went on to release albums by other composers in Glass' circle, including Gibson and Landry. The label was named after the Manhattan intersection where Landry had a studio and the ensemble rehearsed.

Born in Baltimore in 1937, Glass first moved to New York to attend Juilliard at just nineteen, having already graduated from the University of Chicago. A staple of the Downtown scene, he can perhaps be appreciated as akin to the likes of sculptor Richard Serra or filmmaker Jim Jarmusch: mavericks who became major cultural figures entirely on their own terms.

This first-time vinyl reissue reproduces the original side-breaks and gatefold sleeve.

2023 Repress


Voices From the Lake (consisting of Donato Dozzy and Neel) mark the 10th anniversary of their influential self-titled album with a fully remastered reissue on Spazio Disponibile. It arrives in full on vinyl for the first time, as well as on digital formats, first quarter of 2023 as the pair continues to play select live shows around the world. The release will see the light of day as a 4-set vinyl LP release, including download. Italians Dozzy and Neel have been friends united by a shared vision of music since their teenage years. They are immaculate sculptors of sound who fuse evocative ambient and leftfield techno into multi-layered soundscapes. For many years they worked as established solo artists but came together in 2011 to craft what is now regarded as one of techno's most pure and absorbing listening experiences. It's often said that the best music comes about as a happy accident, and that is certainly true of Voices From the Lake. The career-defining album first arose in the thoughts of Dozzy and Neel when the latter was preparing a mix for the former's wedding and named it Voices From The Lake. It was a pertinent title that stuck in the mind: both grew up by waters around the coast of Italy, and in their early days the pair even held private parties on the shores of a lake. Fittingly, Japan's celebrated Labyrinth festival at that time was also held by a river and a lake in the middle of a forest on a serene mountainside. It was that exact setting the pair envisaged when making music to play live on stage. During preparations, they "accidentally" wrote an entire album. It has only ever been performed live a few times - once at Japan's Labyrinth festival in 2011, at London's Barbican, Barcelona's Mira Festival, Paris' Marathon Festival and once during 2022's Amsterdam Dance Event. Those shows saw the pair using banks of analogue and digital equipment to improvise in the moment and essentially remix the album live on stage. That spontaneity is captured in the original Voices From the Lake recordings and on later LPs such as Live at Maxxi in 2015, and the most recent EP Quarto Freddo from 2020. But the debut album remains a standout achievement. A decade on, it's quiet intensity, musical storytelling and slowly unfolding tension remain in a class of one. Each sound is meticulously designed and placed, and the spaces left behind are just as important in conveying such a captivating mood and emotion. Rather than traditional kick drums, hi-hats or snares, this is music crafted from layers of real-world sound - dripping water, chirping birds, rustling leaves or a distant breeze - and it's that which defines the album's organic allure. From deeply contemplative to cautiously optimistic, pastoral organic scenes to more underwater worlds, Voices From the Lake is a cohesive collection of tracks that add up to one inseparable whole.

Blair French shifts course with The Migration, his debut release on Choose Better Friends Records. The title track unfolds as a leftfield disco chant, driven by Jess Minnick’s vocals—hypnotic, ritualistic, and rooted in the idea of returning to the source. On the flip, Thermal Soaring moves into deep, soulful jazz-dance territory. Named for the moment a bird rides rising warm air, it lands as a hard-earned metaphor: French lifted without escape, moving forward by feel rather than force.

Krope is a six-part conceptual album by Belarusian sound artist and producer Anton Anishchanka. Rooted in archival folk songs recorded between the 1960s and 2000s, it transforms fragile voices of the past into living, cinematic sound worlds. Created in collaboration with ethnographer Iryna Vasilyeva, the album weaves Belarusian traditional music with field recordings, acoustic instruments, and analog synthesizers — an immersive journey where memory, landscape, and resilience converge.

Flowing as one continuous suite, Krope unfolds like a film: memory re-emerges, fragile yet persistent, shaping an emotional narrative of displacement, loss, endurance, and hope. The archival voices at its core — songs of love, exile, and mourning — resonate across decades, echoing the urgent realities of today. The album flows as a single, immersive sonic odyssey. From the tender rejection in Krope (Dill) to the grief carved in Dubrovuška (Oak Grove), it traces an arc of human experience that is both deeply personal and universally shared. By reimagining traditional music through contemporary sound art, Anishchanka preserves endangered cultural heritage while revealing its timeless relevance.

Credits:
Produced by Anton Anishchanka
Engineering by Tenzor
Mastered by Alex at Quitfish Mastering
Lacquer cut by Tim Xavier at Manmade Mastering
Cover Art by Sasha Zeliankevich
Graphic Design by Ihar Yukhnevich
Creative Direction by Nadzeya Burmistrava

Archival materials courtesy of the Institute of Art History, Ethnography and Folklore named after K. Krapiva, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.

Special thanks to Iryna Vasilyeva for her assistance with archival selections and ethnographic material.

Shatkavalka 2025

Following his incendiary debut, Ingo Hammer delivers four devilishly great burners on Industrial Lies.

This time, his satanic majesty drops the sleazy, pulsating ‘Kneejerk’ and ‘Insane’, rewires body music with the robotic ‘Chinois’ before riding the D train to hell and back on the breakin’ ‘New York’.

Each one is a guaranteed dance floor 'hammer'.

DJ support for ‘Hammer Time’ came from I-f; Intergalactic Gary, Legowelt, Marcel Dettmann and Sunil Sharpe.

Limited edition of 100 vinyl copies.
Written & Produced by Ingo Hammer
Mastering by Tom Haunstein (Rand Muzik)
Artwork by Jonny Costello (Adult Art Club)

Industrial Lies
Industrial Lies is the offshoot label of Dublin house and techno imprint in First Cut.
Established in 2023, the label is named after the B-side of Cybotron’s electro classic ‘Clear’.
Industrial Lies shines a light on left-of-centre music from the past and present, including proto-Chicago house, ebm/industrial, electro and adjacent sounds.

Nervous Gender’s legendary synthpunk LP Music From Hell burbles up from infernal depths to resurface on Dark Entries. Confrontational, unhinged, and unabashedly queer, Music from Hell is an unholy grail for fans of the strangest underbellies of post-punk, minimal synth, and early industrial music, and is presented here newly remastered and on expanded double LP.

Nervous Gender (de)formed in LA in 1978 at the hands of Phranc, Gerardo Velaquez, Edward Stapleton, and Michael Ochoa. Phranc, the androgynous embodiment of the band’s name, left in 1980. Following her departure, a wide cast of LA freaks would find themselves drawn into the band’s orbit, including Alice Bag of the Bags, Paul Roessler of the Screamers, the Germs’ Don Bolles, and an 8-year old drummer named Sven Pfeiffer. In 1980, Nervous Gender appeared on the seminal Live at Target compilation alongside Factrix, uns, and Flipper. With the band’s notoriety cemented, Music from Hell followed in 1981 on Subterranean Records (as no LA label would touch this material).

Side A, dubbed “Martyr Complex”, presents a more punk-forward sound with live drum salvos and slabs of aggressive synth. These twitchy, unsettling shockers ooze with the kind of snotty misanthropy that will endear them to fans of the Screamers or Crass.

Side B, known as “Beelzebub Youth”, is a live performance the band labeled "an electronic bruto-canto dissertation on the banality of spiritual transcendence." Mutant melodies cede way to synthesized clangs, whirs, bleeps, manipulated tapes, and howls of despair.

In addition to all the material from the original LP, we’re treated to a full disc of the band’s demos, the material from the Live at Target compilation, and early live recordings. Included are unrecognizable covers of Carly Simon and Lou Reed, and the Sex Pistols that are so despairingly skewed they fall into the void. This reissue of Music From Hell includes a 36 page lyric booklet, foldout poster, and gatefold sleeve with photos, flyers, and news-clippings designed by Eloise Leigh. Tackling taboo issues like sexual kinks, mental illness, drug use, and childhood molestation, Music From Hell is still surprising – even shocking - over 40 years after the album’s release. Nervous Gender stand as one of the most genuinely anti-establishment outfits in underground music, a colossal fuck you to social norms from religious strictures to gender essentialism.

Pon is Tujiko Noriko’s sixth album for Editions Mego and a further extension of her already significant body of work as both a solo and collaborative artist. Dedicated to her cat who she adopted as an infant and passed away due an accident having been born deaf, Pon is imbued with abstraction, tenderness and a deep emotional resonance.

Noriko’s palette of electronics, romantic melodies and surprising sonic details are all fully present here, and like her last full length, 2023’s Crépuscule this is an epic work, released as a 2LP by Editions Mego alongside a Japanese CD release.

The unmistakable hue of Japan hovers throughout this emotional rich landscape. Subtle field recordings and fragile, abstract motifs drift through the album, all cloaked in a warmth and humanity that only Noriko seems able to conjure.

Pon moves effortlessly between the childlike and the obscure. There are moments of deceptive simplicity where unexpected elements suddenly surface — strange voices emerge on Boku Wa Obaka, Knife of Yonder is a standout: a startling ten-minute unfolding that begins with a warm, almost Eno-esque drift before launching into a soaring mid-section and finally landing somewhere unexpectedly blues-adjacent.

Kikoeru Pon is brimming with childlike wonder — a heartfelt ballad that dissolves into domestic field recordings, including sounds of the feline for whom both the album and track are named. A quietly devastating ending that brings the personal nature of the record into sharp focus.

There is a deep sense of the human in the way Noriko embraces technology. This is far from cold abstraction; rather, Ponfeels like a colourful photo album, documenting Noriko’s inner world and instincts with remarkable intimacy. Hovering in liminal states between pop, ambient and abstraction, this is a deeply affective and moving release that reveals new surprises with each listen.

The emotional range of Noriko’s latest offering inspires hope in a world in disarray. It is both gentle and epic and one which we feel embodies the work of an artist fully at the height of her powers.

Maria is the debut album from renowned Brazilian electric bassist and composer Moyses Dos Santos. A homecoming for the London-based artist, Moyses’ debut reconnects him with his North-Eastern roots while assembling an international cast of collaborators including legendary Brazilian arranger Arthur Verocai, US trumpet sensation Theo Croker and London-based vocal star Lynda Dawn.

After relocating from Brazil to London in the early 2000s, Moyses dos Santos quickly became one of the capitals’ most in-demand players, sharing stages, studios, and writing credits with best-selling artists including Nile Rodgers, Janelle Monáe, Emile Sandé, Gregory Porter and Omar.

In 2022, Moyses toured with Brazilian jazz-funk legends Azymuth, completing the rhythm section alongside Brazilian drumming master Ivan "Mamão" Conti. "It felt like he was my wise Brazilian grandfather figure." Moyses recalls. "When you spend so many years working internationally, you unconsciously start to leave certain parts of yourself behind. Mamão encouraged me to reconnect with Brazilian music, and that's where this record really began."

Brazil’s North-east, where African, indigenous and European traditions collided and fused most intensely, produced a musical heritage unlike anything else on earth, Moyses dos Santos is a product of this syncretism. On Maria, named after his mother, Moyses brings the musical vocabularies of his youth to the fore. From the soul of the church band where he began to learn his trade as a musician, to the rolling batucadas – maractus, baiaos, sambas and frevos – which he played throughout his teenage years.

Drawing on the lineage of North American electric bass giants like George Duke, Jaco Pastorius, and Stanley Clarke, Moyses runs Brazilian musical traditions through jazz, funk, soul and disco: his sound charged with the cosmopolitan energy of London's contemporary jazz scene.

Lead single and album opener “Boa Viagem’ is joyous, carnivalesque dancefloor jazz: a timeless groove for the nightclub and street party alike. Calling directly to a higher power “Brazilian Spirit” is an astral-jazz phenomenon, featuring the transcendent trumpet playing of Grammy nominated Theo Croker. On “Saudade” Moyses calls upon iconic Brazilian maestro Arthur Verocai, whose signature string arrangements cascade around the divine vocals of ascendant London artist Lynda Dawn.

With impeccable style, charisma, warmth and virtuosity, Moyses steps forward with his stunning debut Maria: out on vinyl, LP, CD and digitally on the 12th June 2026.

The LEMEGETON is a magical spellbook dating from the 17th century, containing 72 demons and how to invoke them.

Inspired by this manuscript, the French Dj / Producer
FHASE 87 undertakes the realization of a series of 72
tracks (18 vinyls).

Each track is named after one of the demons.

Alien Tropical: the perfect title for the second album by Servicio Al Cliente (Customer Service), the project of Colombian-born, Berlin-resident Juliana Martinez. If you were cannily seduced by the debut self-titled Servicio Al Cliente album, from way back in 2021, the wait for a follow-up has felt long, but Alien Tropical was worth the wait. Indeed, it feels like the perfect way for Michael Mayer’s Imara imprint to introduce itself to the new year: an album full of play and spirit, verve and sparkle, rich with pop spirit and with one eye smartly cocked toward the dancefloor.

That first Servicio Al Cliente album was a smart statement of intent, and a wonderful, unexpected turn from Martinez, who’d already been through plenty: being expelled from private music lessons,
training in law, joining a group named Las Palabras Correctas. 2021’s Servicio Al Cliente landed on the turntables of anyone with discerning radar (Ada included “Romántico” on her Connecting The Dots mix for Kompakt, for example). With Alien Tropical, Martinez works the sensual sway of her music even harder, building six luscious songs that twist chant-like repetitions into hypnotic mantras, each song the perfect confluence of melody and mystery.

When asked about Alien Tropical, Martinez pieces together fragments of memory: winter explorations, long road trips, navigating the highways and the heart. “I had been driving a lot at the time on the highway,” she recalls. “I depended on music I played in the car to manage my emotions and my thoughts on those long drives. Everything felt strange and unfamiliar on the highway, and I realised music was so psychological and my only tool to influence my feelings between highways and new places.”

So, the music becomes the narrative for where the body and the heart wants to go. That might explain the gentle yearning in Alien Tropical, and its eternal hypnotic, its sense of forever forward-motion, as though the music is flickering like the highway strip reflected in the rear-view mirror. But there’s also the skyward movement of the melodies, the way their loveliness lifts these six songs up through the clouds, like the helium balloons on the cover. From the sensual swelt

This is the debut release from Laguna Seca, a new project from Porto based Mike Jefford. It foreshadows a new body of work, steeped in 70s nostalgia, refracted though sounds that could belong to krautrock, disco, electronica, noisy alt rock and everything in between. Mike has previously recorded as Positive Centre releasing textural, experimental techno on such labels as Stroboscopic Artefacts, SNTS and Leyla. (seek out if you you’re a fan of Vatican Shadow or the ghostlier wing of Black Dog)

After mastering his forthcoming 2026 debut album ‘O Tempo’, Mike Jefford caught a second wind of inspiration. In just seven frantic days he recorded the heap of tracks that formed the basis of 'Live from Müsli Mountain’. It soon became clear that these tracks foreshadowed the album perfectly and the EP was born.

Named after the California raceway, this project fuses 1970s recording techniques, modern electronics and psychedelic retrofuturism, it’s a pyramid of sonic adventure that will be explored deeper on the album next year.

Specific Objects debuts on Life In Patterns with Helios, a powerful 6-track EP shaped by the pressures, ambitions, and contradictions that define creative work in a hyper-competitive society. The record explores the perpetual pursuit of success - an ever-distant horizon that inspires as much as it consumes.

Named after the sun, Helios symbolizes the personal goals we orient ourselves toward: radiant and motivating, yet capable of overwhelming those who chase them too closely. The EP was written during a period of intense reflection on performance culture, "hustle" mentality, and the rat race of late capitalism - an environment amplified by constant comparison on social media.

Helios is both a celebration and critique of ambition - a techno journey through the heat, pressure, and brilliance of striving. It is scheduled to release on February 6, 2026 on both digital and vinyl formats.

This autumn, on the occasion of his fortieth birthday, Ibrahim Maalouf will release his 12th studio album named "40 Melodies". Maalouf has teamed up with his longtime friend and collaborator Belgian guitarist François Delporte for an intimist duet album. The duet revisits Ibrahim's most memorable melodies, through his albums, to the soundtracks, including a few exclusive new tracks.

This album includes many renowned surprise guests (Sting, Matthieu Chedid, Alfredo Rodriguez, Richard Bona, Trilok Gurtu, Hüsnü Senlendrici, Jon Batiste, Arturo Sandoval, and others). Ibrahim gets back to his roots, and to the basics: a trumpet, a guitar, and 40 melodies to celebrate his fortieth anniversary.

Soul Music legend Candi Staton returns to her down-home Alabama roots on her 32nd album, Back to My Roots. The twelve-track Americana set features an array of Staton-penned originals and some well-chosen covers.

"These songs represent my roots," Staton adds as she reflects on her many trials and triumphs. "Even the new songs on some level represent something I've experienced and that's what real soul music is about." Back to My Roots was produced by Staton with her second eldest son, Marcus Williams, a professional drummer who has toured with the likes of Peabo Bryson, Isaac Hayes, and Tyler Perry. They brought in Mark Nevers of Lambchop fame, who produced three of Staton’s prior Americana albums for Honest Jon’s and Thirty Tigers, to sweeten certain tracks. “Some of the first songs I ever heard were songs like `Peace in the Valley’ and `It’s Gonna Rain,’” says Staton. “The new songs or cover songs are tracks that remind me of that era when I was growing up as a child and evolving as a young woman. That’s why I named the album Back to My Roots because I’m going back to the roots that made me who I am.”

Staton received the Americana Music Association UK’s highest honour, the International Lifetime Achievement Award, at the UK Americana Music Awards ceremony at Hackney Church in London last year for her southern soul work that stretches from her 1969 Muscle Shoals hits to her more recent collaborations with the likes of Americana kings Jason Isbell and John Paul White.
The album opens with a mid-tempo Bonnie Raitt-styled contemporary blues “I Missed the Target Again” that finds Harry Connick Jr.’s longtime guitarist Jonathan DuBose Jr. (aka the Prophesying Guitarist) showing off his skills that set the tone for the song and the album.

Staton’s older sister, Maggie Staton Peebles (who alongside Staton was a member of the Jewel Gospel Trio in the 1950s), joins her for two duets. The first, “It’s Gonna Rain,” features just a drum, steel guitar and vocals. “My mother used to sing that song to us all the time when I was a child,” Staton recalls. “It’s a really soulful kind of song I wanted to revisit.” They then take turns leading Thomas Dorsey 1939 gem “There Will Be Peace in the Valley” that Elvis Presley popularized in the 1950s.

“Hang on in There” is a new, mid-tempo song that has an old school gospel flavour and features vocals from veteran bluesman, Larry McCray.
While in Europe in 2023 for her farewell concert tour that took her to the Glastonbury Festival and Love Supreme, Staton and her British band, PUSH, went into a London studio to record a new version of The Rolling Stones’ 1972 gem, “Shine A Light.” “I love the way that came out,” Staton says. “We put a big choir on it and put our own twist on it.”
From there, Staton revives another Thomas Dorsey classic, “The Lord Will Make a Way Somehow,” with a bluesy vibe. When Al Green started recording gospel in the early 1980s, he re-introduced this song into the culture.

“God’s Gonna Use Me Anyway” is a new mid-tempo blues with subtle Caribbean influences.

The mood takes a turn on “1963.” It’s a poignant, spoken-word reflection on September 15, 1963, when four black girls were killed in the Birmingham Church bombing. “I was in the city that day and I remember the chaos and horror after the bombing,” Staton recalls. “Just thinking of how racism and hatred caused those men to kill those girls was so emotional for me that I could only do it in one take.”

It's a perfect segue into "Reach Down and Touch Heaven," a haunting, plea for divine intervention into the affairs of mankind. "That's straight Baptist," she says. "I used to be a church pianist back in the 1960s. I've never played piano on one of my records before so that's a unique song for me because I’m finally playing on one of my records. The message of that song is about the homeless. It came to me when a homeless person on the street asked me for $5. When God touches your heart to help somebody else that’s heaven to God’s hears. So, when we reach into our purse or wallet to help someone, we’re touching heaven."

Staton offers love as an antidote to hate on the bouncy, Motown-styled, “Love Breakthrough.”

Her publicist brought Aaron Frazer & the Flying Stars of Brooklyn NY’s 2017 cut “My God Has a Telephone” to Staton’s attention. She shifts the track from a retro 1960s groove to more of a 1980s Malaco Records arrangement, a subtle but distinct variation. Staton brought in her longtime friend and STAX Records legend, William Bell (“I Forgot to Be Your Lover” and “Trying to Love Two”), to add raspy seasoning to the track.

The album closes with the wistful, “In God’s Hands We Rest Untroubled,” that was originally written and recorded by the late country star, Lari White, who died in 2017 at the age of 52. “Lari sent me that song to consider at least ten years ago and I always loved it,” Staton says. “The record label didn’t want it on the album or something, so I just held it.”
Staton says, “I grew up hearing a lot of these old songs when they were new songs. I toured with the Jewel Gospel Trio in the 1950s and we got to know people like Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke and others who sang these types of songs. So, I’m sort of paying tribute to them and the influence they had on me by refreshing these songs and making new songs in the old style.”’