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Rico started his career in the late 1950’s playing with the likes of Prince Buster, Laurel Aitken and Max Romeo as a session musician in addition to creating his own recordings. He moved to the UK in the early 60’s and continued performing live and playing as a session musician. He signed to Island Records in the 70’s, releasing his first solo albums.
In 1979 Rico met Jerry Dammers and began playing with The Specials. He became an honorary member of the band and featured prominently on some of their most famous tracks, along with Dick Cuthell, which produced a distinctive sound. In 1980 he released his first album for the 2 Tone label, That Man is Forward.
Jama Rico was the second album released on 2 Tone Records in 1982. This album felt like a celebration of Jamaican musicians - Jama Rico was an altogether different beast. This was a more resolute statement, more African in its rhythms and a hidden treasure within the 2 Tone label.
This time the recording sessions were split between Joe Gibbs studio in Jamaica and sessions at London’s Town House Studios. The Jamaican sessions again were produced by Dick Cuthell and comprised of musician friends Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, Headley Bennett, and Ansel Collins. The London sessions, produced by Dick and Jerry Dammers, featured Specials John Bradbury and Horace Panter, along with Tony Utah and Satch Dixon.
This new remaster, originally released in May 1982, is a part of the ongoing 2 Tone ‘40th Anniversary’ releases.
The package is a 3mm Spined Sleeve, 180gm Heavyweight Black Vinyl, printed inner and bellyband.

Tape

Recorded during two days of extreme weather, ELEH's Snoweight conveys the mesmerizing force of a winter storm with sonic realism and romanticism. These two new compositions evoke both warm security and wild, blanketing intensity in ways that are both emotionally arresting and time stopping.

“BREAKAWAY” by Steve Karmen was originally released on United Artists in 1968 following a successful advertising campaign for the Pontiac car, for which the ‘jingle’ had been written, featuring the slogan “Breakaway In A Wide-Trackin’ Pontiac”. Karmen extended the 30 second track with fills and breaks building the energy and excitement and creating the perfect dance track for the highly charge Casino Ballroom where it exploded in 1974. Jimmy Radcliffe ad-libbed a new and impassioned vocal for the singles plug-side, but – to this day – it is the thrilling instrumental that rules the dance floor.
Although associated with Wigan Casino, “Breakaway” was originally spun by DJ Colin Curtis at Blackpool Mecca under the imaginative title “Black Ship To Hell” (The Wigan Casino Years by Tim Brown). Today, over 50 years on, it has lost none of its energy and appeal and remains a favourite oldie and guaranteed floor-filler.

City Slang is thrilled to welcome Pom Pom Squad into the City Slang family. The way Mia can nod to her influences, be they of the iconic 60’s girl group, characters from a John Waters film, or cutting edge fashion from today, while simultaneously spinning a beautiful and original story in her songs, is absolutely thrilling. This is the kind of record that makes you not only excited to see what you can do with an artist in a post-pandemic future, but also how you can build their career in the present circumstances. We cannot wait for you to hear this record in its entirety!

Produced by Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties and co-produced by Berrin herself, it’s a record that plays out like an exorcism in front of your bathroom mirror -- confronting the dark we’ve had planted within us and then ripping it out, all while watching every second of it. It’s vulnerable yet triumphant, deliciously irreverent & inviting yet sneering in the faces of those that had once tried to define her. First single “Lux” was unanimously praised by press including Stereogum who called it “a serrated blast of noise in which Berrin takes someone to task with glee” and The Fader who said “come for the scrappy punk reimagining of The Virgin Suicides, stay for Pom Pom Squad's galvanizing treatise on feminine awakening in a world that would rather keep your eyes shut.”

Mia Berrin spent her childhood trying to find where she fit right in the world, looking to the pop culture icons on TV in hopes of finding an image she connected to. She connected with the films of John Waters and David Lynch, loved the dark campiness found in Heathers, was in awe of the power of women like Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna. Growing up as a female of color who would later in her life unearth and embrace her queerness, discussing and reconciling

JP Harris has a secret: his name is actually “Squash.” Long before Harris
became a well regarded honky-tonker, he used his childhood nickname
while playing archaic “old-time” American tunes at underground fiddlers’
gatherings, engrossed in this punkish folk music world.
‘Don’t You Marry No Railroad Man’, his debut recording of traditional music
under the moniker JP Harris’ Dreadful Wind and Rain, features ten tracks spanning the breadth of American old-time repertoire. Harris wades between ancient ballads that traveled from the British Isles to Appalachia like “Barbry Ellen,” to droning banjo ditties such as Hobart Smith’s entrancing “Last Chance,”
here played on one of Harris’ coveted homemade banjos. Harris also works as a
serious carpenter which adds a unique authenticity to his versions of the classic
“House Carpenter” and lesser known “The Little Carpenter.”
Alongside Harris’ haunting vocals, the album prominently features the lowtuned fiddle and harmony singing of his longtime friend and Old Crow Medicine Show member Chance McCoy, who produced the record at his West Virginia studio in an old barn. On this sparse and arresting recording, Harris isn’t
mining his roots as a marketing pitch, he has the chops to back it up. In fact,
this collection of songs made him who he is today. Welcome home “Squash.”

My Morning Jacket’s ‘Evil Urges’ is now available as a
beautifully coloured 2-LP set, pressed on cream coloured vinyl
with a black blob and housed in a premium gatefold jacket. My
Morning Jacket’s Grammy-nominated ‘Evil Urges’ is the band’s
most ambitious and controversial album to date. On their fifth
studio album, an emboldened My Morning Jacket created a
fiercely uncompromising, highly eclectic and deeply personal
album that catapulted the band into public consciousness and
solidified their place as innovators and titans of indie rock

Heading into the spring of 2020, T. Hardy Morris
had 12 demos that he thought would make-up his
next album. Then everything changed. The world
took a break and so his plans to record did as well.
As we all watched and waited out the storms; viral
and societal, we seemed to wake up scrolling
through a whole new century, a time Morris began
to refer to as ‘The Digital Age of Rome’.
He scrapped the demos and began a collection of
songs in quarantine where the unprecedented
times and topics were unavoidable. He wanted to
document the era sonically and lyrically in some
way. “I wanted it to sound like how the world felt to
me in the second half of 2020. Uncomfortable and
chaotic, dystopian but still beautiful.”
‘The Digital Age of Rome’ was recorded in a
deserted downtown Athens, Ga. With long-time
collaborator / producer Adam Landry.

Written in the wee hours of the night, the late
Richard Swift’s ‘KFC’ is a winding sardonic
monologue about a rough night of food poisoning
following a quick dinner of fried chicken.
On the track, Swift’s vocal is pitched down and
distorted while accompanied by cooing vocal
harmonies and drums.

Blues And The Abstract Truth is Oliver Nelson’s triumph. Featuring his all-time classic ‘Stolen Moments’, Nelson assembled one of the most potent modern jazz sextets ever. Lead trumpeter Freddie Hubbard is at his peak of performance, while alto saxophonists Nelson and Eric Dolphy (Nelson doubling on tenor) team to form an unlikely union that was simmered to perfection. Bill Evans (piano), Paul Chambers (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums) can do no wrong as a rhythm section. Verve’s Acoustic Sounds Series features transfers from analog tapes and remastered 180-gram vinyl in deluxe gatefold packaging.

Blues And The Abstract Truth is Oliver Nelson’s triumph. Featuring his all-time classic ‘Stolen Moments’, Nelson assembled one of the most potent modern jazz sextets ever. Lead trumpeter Freddie Hubbard is at his peak of performance, while alto saxophonists Nelson and Eric Dolphy (Nelson doubling on tenor) team to form an unlikely union that was simmered to perfection. Bill Evans (piano), Paul Chambers (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums) can do no wrong as a rhythm section. Verve’s Acoustic Sounds Series features transfers from analog tapes and remastered 180-gram vinyl in deluxe gatefold packaging.

Transmeridian is the first album from Departure Lounge (ex-Bella Union) in 19 years. It features all four original members plus a guest appearance from legendary REM guitarist, Peter Buck, one of many long-standing admirers of a band that embodied a lost age of reflective, experimental pop music coming to the fore at the turn of the Millennium alongside The Beta Band, Tunng, Boards Of Canada and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.

The surprise new album, named after the defunct ‘golden age of aviation’ cargo airline for which singer/guitarist Tim Keegan’s dad was chief pilot, is released on Violette Records (formed by Michael Head (Shack, The Pale Fountains) and Matt Lockett ) on digital and vinyl formats on Fri 26 March 2021.
Originally scooped up by Simon Raymonde’s Bella Union label (labelmates with John Grant’s Czars) following the self-funded release of their debut album Out Of Here (1999), Departure Lounge’s sophomore outing, Too Late To Die Young (2002) was equally acclaimed and was honoured as the first ever Album Of The Week on the emergent BBC 6 Music. The band toured extensively in the UK, Europe and the US, including outings with The Go-Betweens, Morcheeba, Paul Heaton and Robyn Hitchcock, peers whose stylistic contrasts reflect the eclectic nature of Departure Lounge themselves.

Calling a halt in late 2002, citing family and geographical reasons (drummer Lindsay lives in Nashville, where their second album Jetlag Dreams (2001) was recorded), the four members remained firm friends and occasional collaborators, before reuniting in late 2019 for shows at The Green Door Store, Brighton and The Lexington, London, ostensibly to support the digital reissues of their first three cult-classic albums. With no plans other than to make some new music, the next day they set off for Middle Farm Studios, Devon.
Tim Keegan (vocals/guitar), Chris Anderson (lead guitars/keyboards/bass), Lindsay Jamieson(drums/keyboards) and Jake Kyle (bass/guitar/drums) channelled their evident joy at being back together into a complete 13-track album, largely conceived and recorded in just one 24-hour session in the company of studio owner and co-producer, Peter Miles. Ranging from soulful Americana to piano and mellotron-fuelled melancholia via pastoral musings on the nature of post-youth and eerie Spaghetti Western-tinged instrumentals, the next leg on the Departure Lounge journey is a multi-mood expression of pure artistic freedom.
The ‘leak’ of instrumental track Al Aire Libre (remixed by Parisian groovemeister Kid Loco) in October 2020 gave little away as to what fans could expect from a new Departure Lounge record, the track going gracefully everywhere and nowhere on a whistled Latino breeze. First single proper, Mercury In Retrograde, covered in the twinkling lights of a music box Casio CZ101 melody, turned the clock back - this was an old live favourite that never got past the studio door. Unfinished business brought to a happy conclusion, the single returned Keegan’s honest and distinctive lyrical voice back to British music at just the time listeners needed it.
It was an emotional thread, rather than one musical style, which gave the first three Departure Lounge albums their coherence. The songs told the story of the band. Transmeridian has the same sense of deeply connected musical energy. The purring, campfire acoustica of Timber and So Long bear no obvious resemblance to the ethereal, end-of-the-evening, piano-led interlude Paging Marco Polo, whilst the quasi-glam stomp of Mr Friendly would normally have no business sharing space with the strange, spacey Gurnard Pines (named after an abandoned holiday camp on the Isle Of Wight). Yet the journey’s ebb and flow, accelerations and pauses make for compelling, grown-up listening. Australia, showcasing the chiming Rickenbacker 12-string of Athens, GA’s finest guitar slinger, leaves no doubt that Departure Lounge’s pop sensibilities also remain solidly intact.
These four friends from different musical backgrounds came together originally with the stated aim of ‘creating music to soothe the troubled soul’. Citing their love of (and placing on record their debt to) influences including Robert Wyatt, Nick Drake, Talk Talk, Lou Reed, Arvo Pärt and Cocteau Twins, the band’s diversity of taste is reflected in the music they create.
Transmeridian is only the second full-length LP released by Violette Records, formed by Michael Head (Shack, The Pale Fountains) and Matt Lockett as a platform for Head’s work and developing into a respected independent label as well as multi-disciplinary event organiser, drawing in outsiders working in music, literature, art and design. The label continues to host live events whenever possible and recently initiated an ELP (halfway between and EP and an LP) vinyl series, putting out acclaimed releases by The Pistachio Kid and Studio Electrophonique.

Purple Vinyl

Even if you're well-acquainted with composer and multi-instrumentalist Colin Fisher's richly varied output, his gentle fifth solo album, Refections of the Invisible World may come as a surprise. Psychedelic lyricism has always been a fundamental aspect of his sonic signature, but his second collaboration with producer Jeremy Greenspan (Junior Boys, Jessy Lanza, Morgan Geist) finds the Toronto native luxuriating in expansive atmospherics for its full duration.
That's not to downplay the eclecticism he finds within this ethereal landscape. Each track tills its own discrete sonic acreage, and while every one emanates from a clear focal point, the spontaneous impulse that drives Fisher's more audibly improvisational music always remains close at hand. Some pieces unfold rippling aquatic vistas or delight in prismatic guitar arpeggiation, elsewhere his plaintive, blues- infected tenor saxophone wafts like some strange jazz apparition, or becomes a chorus of cosmic murmurs. The presence of electronics is undeniable, but equally irrefutable is the organic instrumental sources of these disparate hues. In fact he's discovered a rare balance: no matter how effects-saturated, every gesture on the record feels palpably sculpted by Fisher's hands and breath. As such, Refections of the Invisible World carries a sense of intimacy at the heart of its diffuse, dream-like sonics.
Fisher has a been a major presence in Canada's music community for more than twenty years—particularly in more experimental and improvisational circles. Nothing short of a guitar virtuoso, he also wields saxophone, drums, and various other instruments with similarly refined musicality, vivid textural imagination, and sometimes feral abandon. His one-man-band tape Garden of Unknowning for Manchester's Tombed Visions, showcase all of this as he spars with different iterations of himself. The Quietus' cassette critic Tristan Bath extolled it as "miraculous," adding that "it’s a visceral experience soaking up this record, and it’s all down to Fisher’s utterly innate sense of musicality." He subsequently cited it in his 2018 contributor's year-end chart for the Wire.
In 2014 his partnership with Nick Millevoi's trio Many Arms on Suspended Defnition (Tzadik) prompted Spin's Brad Cohan to remark "Many Arms have dug even deeper into math-metal wizardry, bolstering their already imposing lineup with gale-force blowing guest saxophonist Colin Fisher, thus blasting their outré sonic blitz into a fire-breathing free jazz otherworld." Fisher later engaged the band's bassist, Johnny DeBlase, to team up with him and Kid Millions (Oneida, Man Forever) as Monas. As an ongoing collaborator to introspective dance music auteur Caribou, Fisher frst appeared in offshoot project Caribou Vibration Ensemble, and subsequently on acclaimed albums Swim and Suddenly. He's also made two duo albums with celebrated Nova Scotian jaw harp innovator chik white for Dylan and Lisa Nyoukis' Chocolate Monk label. In addition to performing alongside the likes of Jaime Branch, Joe McPhee, William Parker, Laraaji, Gerry Hemmingway, and Fred Frith, he has contributed to recordings by the Constantines (Sub Pop), Bernice (Arts & Crafts), Rhys Chatham (Table of the Elements), Born Ruffans (Warp), Anthony Braxton and AIMToronto Orchestra (Spool), and many more.

In the beginning, there was just a box of tapes and “Fate’s Gentle Hand.”

It was the autumn of 2010, and an anonymous figure known only as the Head Technician, an employee of Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services (“Magnetically aligning ferrous particles since 1970”), found himself at an auction in the village of Coldred, pop. 110. He was on the hunt for tobacco pipes when he chanced across a trio of boxes listed in the auction catalog, which described their contents only as “archived magnetic recordings.” The sole bidder, he won the lot, and upon receipt of his purchase took possession of an unspecified number of mouldering cassettes and ¼" reel-to-reel tapes. The collection contained no identifying information save for a single phrase scrawled on each box: “Black Mill Sessions.” And so, armed with razors, eyedroppers, and a bevy of solid-state circuitry, the Head Technician sat down at his machines and got to work.

Whether anyone believed it or not, this was the framing device surrounding Pye Corner Audio’s Black Mill Tapes Volume I: Avant Shards, which took the mysterious tactics of artists like Boards of Canada and Burial and raised them exponentially. Much like the narrator of a 19th century novel, the anonymous Head Technician purported merely to be the messenger of secondhand sounds. These were not compositions, we were told; they were tape transfers—“transcriptions” of an unknown author, slathered

Orange Vinyl

Soul Jazz Records new ‘Cold Wave’ is a new collection of current electronic artists who have all been shaped by the early European cold wave artists of the late 70s and early 80s. This is the first release of Soul Jazz Records’ new Cold Wave overview and a second volume will be released just four weeks later. These first artists created new electronic musical landscapes as well as pursuing a stubborn D-I-Y aesthetic, often releasing material on cassette and pioneering use of lo-fi technology, primitive drum machines and home-recording
techniques. As part of this continued evolution today many of the artists featured here also self-release their own material, run labels, publish fanzines, or are part of wider musical collectives. Aside from the first electronic, no wave, and post-punk artists cited as influences – Suicide, Patrick Cowley, The Normal, Martin Hannett, Laurie Anderson, Public Image – this new generation of artists also show an exquisitely open source of electronic and disparate influences, everything from Underground Resistance to Purcell, from Scientist to New Beat and more besides. Most of the featured artists are based in Europe and include Krikor, Dissemblance and VQOA from France, De
Ambassade from the Netherlands, Moisture from Sweden, Kreidler from Germany, Celine Gillian and Carcass Identity from Belgium. One exception is FIT Siegel out of Detroit, connecting the electronic pathways of Europe to the Motor City.

A few months ago, Dj Schwa & Name Does Not Matter rumbled through the timbers with their latest EP on RFR Records. For all of you, who like to get physical, we are now offering two Tracks of the digital EP including two brand-new Remixes on Vinyl.

Follow the “Ape King” and jump into the frying acid pan! Straight forward stomping on the beat section, pretty classic when it comes to the bassline. And whilst the 303 is continuously marching towards our cortex, shit kicks in with a nonchalant melody part. Wait, are the old Djax Up days back?

London’s Posthuman is delivering the perfect Remix for “Ape King” qua musical self-definition. His analogue machine park powers the Original with an even deeper drilling bass line, reduces the melody to its essence and nonchalantly sets the groove between classic Chicago and UK Hardcore influences.

“Obsolete” is a true feast for lovers of classic Electro. And despite of the title, all its ingredients are perfectly well balanced. Sounds like Aril Brikha, Nitzer Ebb and Clarence G. (RIP) joined forces in the studio and filtered the essence of one of our favorite genres.

We stay in London. Jerome Hill lays hands on “Obsolete” and proves from the very first second that there is absolutely no space for compromise. This is all about straight Techno and the feeling of being exposed to a stroboscope in a dark basement while the first rays of sunlight are already penetrating through the crack of the door.

Perila (Aleksandra Zakharenko) left her native Russia six years ago, landing in Berlin. Finding her place almost immediately - first at Berlin Community Radio and through that amongst a group of like-minded creative individuals (including her current flatmates Special Guest DJ and exael) - she started a regular practice of working on an expressionistic "sonic diary" of field recordings and electronic sound research for her own pleasure. When the opportunity arose to create her own podcast series, WET (or Weird Erotic Tension) was born. Upon hearing her evocative and atmospheric music layered with friends Nat Marcus and Inger Wold Lund's erotic spoken word poetry, Sferic Records asked to release it, and Perila - a project name originally used for her BCR show - truly came to be. Aleksandra, who was raised in St. Petersburg, has been involved in music since childhood thanks to her melomaniac father. She's been both drummer and singer in local bands in Russia, and is also the co-founder of radio.syg.ma - one of the first online stations in Russian focusing on experimental sounds - but Perila is something else entirely. You could loosely describe it as ambient, but her soundworld is so specific and transportative, filled with detail and movement, it's more akin to hauntological musique concrète, touched by song. Her fascination with voice and language - she studied English literature at university - is still evident, although that's now her voice, her texts, her crooning you can hear on the Everything Is Already There cassette (Boomkat Editions, 2020), her processed breaths on the Meta Door L cassette (Paralaxe Editions, 2020). The Wire Magazine got it right when they said about Irer Dent that, "Sensuality is presented as a secret pass to a higher consciousness." For her debut album, How Much Time it is Between You and Me?, released via Smalltown Supersound on June 11th, Aleksandra takes inspiration from the concept of time, which she felt keenly during the pandemic. Recorded primarily in September 2020 in a rural village in France - her only travel during the first year of the pandemic period - surrounded by mountains but otherwise alone with no internet, her perception of time there differed immensely. She describes the trip as, "an immersive experience into self," viewed through a "silence prism" where everyday sounds usually ignored felt amplified. While her work has always dealt in intimacy - be it the private thrills of WET or the audible closeness of our surroundings - the organic response and consistent feedback she gets for Perila made Aleksandra recognize a longing, a need for it in today's world. Intent on creating work based in honesty and tenderness, Perila's practice also explores how we feel music and emotion throughout the body and how sound can help to release it. How does the sound enter a body and travel through it? Where does movement start? How do you reach and unblock emotional clusters with the help of sound and deep listening of the body responses? Aleksandra likes to describe her music and performances as trips - thick narratives drifting along sound to get closer to self. Let Perila guide you through this journey.

LTD 150 - Printed Sleeve

With a quiet Hardcore "classic" first track, one could believe it's gonna be just a "classic hardcore records" :)
But as the visual of the sleeve announce it.. .it'sa bit more than that.
The Dunwish, the second track, already annonce something deifferent. Reminding me the old B.E.A.S.T. records... More Industrialand speedcore.
The flip opens with an even harder "Perfect Storie", including some windows bug samples ^^
just before the last tune, a little 2 minutes interlude call murder prepare you "to the end" :CYBORG. the last track, a unique ultra speedcore kicker here : clear crazy thing. "Cyborg can dance at this speed ?"

Enjoy !

Pure Pumpin tribe, southstyle sound.
Second release in the UZI & Tournevis spirit...

Base !

With releases on the likes of Nite Grooves, Uzuri, Church and Axe On Wax, DJ Aakmael steps up to the plate for NYC’s Second Hand Records seventh release taking you on a journey through the realms of deep house. Raw, packed with feeling and bursting with musicianship, Aakmael hits with those late night, meditative keys, juiced-up bass lines and MPC-crunched drums to provide three cuts that groove endlessly from dusk till dawn.

Repress

Baris K and Jonny Rock don their incognito aliases for the second Disco Hamam release. Straight up ottoman disco business strictly from the vaults. Killer artwork, killer music. ( Baris Manco, Timur Selcuk, Istanbul Calgicilari etc)