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Third time’s a charm. Or a chant in this case.“Antologia De Música Atípica Portuguesa” is back.Following two sold out volumes, the unplanned trilogy comes to a close with chants and hymns whilst continuing to merge music genres and presenting them as a world building concept.

If the first two volumes were dedicated to work (“O Trabalho”) and regions (“Regiões”), it only made sense to close the trilogy with ceremonial music, connecting the real – each musicians’ creation – with a fantasied celebration of Portuguese folk, traditions, and ghost methods within these unusual anthems.

If you’ve listened to Niagara before, you probably felt this whole ceremonial thing going on. A perfect opener then, for this volume with Niagara’s deep dive into proto religious-ambient music with “Paulo, Apolo e Pedro”. It sets the tone for the next 35-minutes of ethereal like songs. Either you listen to musicians working within their natural habitat (João Pais Filipe or Filipe Felizardo) or feel them exploring new areas in their realm (Niagara, Joana Guerra or Serpente), this third volume manages to combine eight of the best underrated visionaries working in current day Portugal.

In the past, “Antologia da Música Atípica Portuguesa” created an imaginary folktale where current day creations could live with the idea of archive or fake-folk. This volume forgets the world building and actually lives in it. Because this is the real Portugal. This is our folk. These are our chants. Embrace the otherworldly.

In November 1976, Jef Gilson’s phone rang. What a surprise! It was Serge Rahoerson, one of the musicians he had met in Madagascar at the end of the 60s and who had played on his first album “Malagasy”. Rahoerson announced that he was in Paris for a few days.

Immediately, Jef wanted to organise a recording session, starting the next day. He thought of a trio including Serge, Eddy Louiss on organ and cellist Jean-Charles Capon, who had also been on one of the trips to Tananarive and so had also known Rahoerson there. Unfortunately, Eddy Louiss –who had already played with Gilson and Capon on the album “Bill Coleman Sings And Plays 12 Negro Spirituals” in 1968- had to drop out at the last minute: he was delayed by a session with Claude Nougaro. Jean-Charles Capon had also become a sought-after studio musician since his trip to Madagascar in 1969. He appeared on several key albums on the Saravah label including the now famous “Comme À La Radio” by Brigitte Fontaine, “Un Beau Matin” by Areski and “Chorus” by Michel Roques, without mentioning the album by his own Baroque Jazz Trio. He was also to be found with Jef Gilson for his album on Vogue with the ex-drummer from Miles Davis’ first great quintet, Philly Joe Jones, or also in the orchestra led by Jean-Claude Vannier for the album “Nino Ferrer & Leggs”. He also played regularly on albums by Georges Moustaki.

Jean-Charles Capon and Serge Rahoerson found themselves thus in the studio, with Jef at the controls. He had decided to record the rhythmic structure right away. He would find the soloists later, that didn’t worry him. Serge Rahoerson was on drums. Though a saxophonist by training, Jef remembered that Serge was also capable of great things behind a drum kit: he was the improvised drummer on their cover of “The Creator Has A Master Plan” on the album “Malagasy”... The great memories came flooding back (the nod on the title “Orly - Ivato”), and the old magic worked again.

Brought in momentarily from Europamerica, Gilson’s new big band, in which JC Capon also played, the saxophonists Philippe Maté, from France (another Saravah stablemate) and the American Butch Morris (soon to be a key member of David Murray’s band) were invited to record their parts later and Gilson mixed it all as if it had been one single session (as he had already done on other albums, with the tracks by Christian Vander recorded before the creation and success of Magma).

The album would not appear until 1977, on Palm, Jef’s own label, and was dedicated to the memory of Georges Rahoerson, Serge’s father, who had also played on the album “Malagasy” and who had died prematurely at the age of 51 in 1974.
“I only received my own copy of the album in 1981 when I came to live in France definitively”, a still-moved Serge Rahoerson told us in 2013. “I was playing in a club one night and Jef turned up by surprise with a copy of the album for me, I was so pleased to see him again. When I arrived in France, I told everyone that I had played with Jef Gilson a few years previously, and I was surprised to learn that so few people knew of him. For us, he was of one of the great jazz visionaries.” (Jérôme "Kalcha" Simonneau)

Delsin welcomes Jayson Wynters into the fold for a four-track EP that embodies techno as a vibrant, expressive artform with the ability to uplift. On The Affect Heuristic, Wynters strides forth with an electrifying machine language, calling to mind the feverish, psychedelic tweaking and layering of visionaries like Dan Curtin and Lee Purkis (In Sync). Across four tracks, Wynters pivots between distinctly Motor City-indebted funk, springy electro-techno and vivid, immersive soundchasms. The artwork - a canny meld of bold geometry, bright colours and rough textures from Erosie and Erris Huigens (Graphic Surgery) - responds to the music in a wholly appropriate way.

In February 1964, Eric Dolphy assembled a formidable quintet of modern jazz visionaries with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone, Richard Davis on bass, and Tony Williams on drums, and headed into Rudy Van Gelder's studio to record what would stand as his masterwork: 'Out to Lunch!'. A genius artist of startling originality, Dolphy managed to possess the revolutionary spirit of the avant-garde while keeping a foot firmly planted in the feeling of swing, a rare feat that the five original pieces here perfectly captured from the offbeat swagger of the opening Monk tribute 'Hat and Beard' to the careening closer 'Straight Up and Down.'

Behind the finest and most moving pieces of contemporary-classical music lie deeply personal and poignant stories, and Simon Goff's new album Vale is no exception. The British violinist and composer's dazzling exploration of the interface between violin and technology and between the poles of intimacy and grandeur, as rich and deep and wide as the landscape that lies its heart, named after the Vale of York where Goff grew up. The album encapsulates not just a landscape but a place in time and an identity forged through youth and adulthood, all viewed from his current base in Berlin. Goff's artistic project is one which has been informed by his previous collaborations as both a performer and recording engineer, performing with artists such as Thor Harris (Swans, Amanda Palmer) and Federico Albanese, playing in concert halls across Europe. On his very first day working at the legendary Vox-Ton studios, Goff was introduced to Adam Wiltzie (half of the venerated post-classical/ ambient duo Stars Of The Lid/A Winged Victory for the Sullen), and over the next two years, he worked with post-classical and post-rock visionaries such as the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hildur Gudnadóttir (notably on the film soundtracks for Chernobyl and Joker), Dustin O'Halloran and Yair Elazar Glotman.

As has often been noted, psychedelic music can involve causal links between getting out of it and getting into it. Conversely, expansion of consciousness can be found by heading deep into the roots that a band explores, and journeying to the centre of their inspiration. Thus, a curious paradox is attained, whereby the traditional elements of an outfit’s sound are superseded by them blasting their core vibrations into unchartered territory. Such is the case with the new opus from third-eye visionaries Hills, a dizzying journey that traverses through the band’s origins and beyond to new dimensions.The Gothenburg-based Hills are entering their ninth year of existence, in which they’ve released two full-length albums, the second of which, ‘Master Sleeps’ saw a vinyl outing on Rocket last year. Part of a rich scene in their homestead also including friends and Rocket Recordings label mates Goat, they form the new chapter in a tradition of Swedish psychedelia that found its origins in late-’60s and early ‘70s freakouts and mind-melts by the likes of Baby Grandmothers and Älgarnas Trädgård - not to mention the unholy trinity of Pärson Sound, International Harvester and Träd Gräs och Stenar - before being developed by the likes of The Spacious Mind and Dungen in the last two decades. These inspirations make their mark on ‘Frid’ by journeying inward, via mantric repetition and hip-shaking pulsations as on the ten-minute monolith, ‘ Och Solen Sänkte Sig Röd’, yet they can also lurch into the unknown via the fuzz/wah odysseys of the aptly monikered ‘National Drone’ and the ceremonial exhortations of the closing ‘Death Will Find A Way.’As they also showed recently at a rare and spellbinding appearance at Liverpool International Festival Of Psychedelia, Hills have landed on a rich and intoxicating sound that sidesteps the cliches and humdrum stylistic foibles that often plague modern-day psych, in the process breathing new life into an approach that can sometimes seem in danger of appearing redundant through lack of imagination. ‘Frid’, their most out-of-mind and out-of-sight effort to date, crystallises everything that makes these Scandinavian satyrs stand out from the global herd; adventurous experimentation and fearless hallucinatory intensity, rendered with brass-knuckle fortitude. The end result is 38 minutes that translate into a feast for seasoned crate-diggers and fresh-faced converts alike. There is, indeed, gold in these here Hills.

At home, in the islands of Cabo Verde, there was grog, or grogu, a strong sugarcane moonshine not dissimilar to Colombian aguardiente, copiously consumed at Funaná parties. In the diaspora, in Europe, there was leite quente (hot milk). "I can still remember the taste of the first leite quente I drank in Lisbon," says Antonino Furtado Gomes, Pilon's drummer and current band leader.

Synthesize the Soul, Ostinato Records' second compilation, revealed chapter one of the Cabo Verde cultural story in Europe, zooming in on visionaries like Paulino Vieira who made Lisbon the headquarters spearheading the musical revolution taking place within Cape Verdean emigre communities across Europe in the 1980's. Musicians from across the diaspora would eagerly travel to the Portuguese capital to record.

Grupo Pilon represents the second chapter of the Krioulu diaspora story. In smaller pockets, second generation musicians were independently contributing to one of the most lush periods of cultural innovation by immigrants in Europe. In Luxembourg, in 1986, a group of teenagers formed the largely unknown (outside of Cape Verdean circles) but consistently brilliant band named after the blunt instrument used in the islands to pound corn for Cabo Verde's national dish, cachupa.

With only five members, Pilon combined searing estilo Krioulu drumming and the hybrid ColaZouk style with blissful synth work and rugged guitar licks, creating a stripped-down, addictive sound that masterfully straddled two worlds, a seductive electro-Funaná carnival born from the first few sips of hot milk.
The band drew from the inspiring political changes of the day: the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The right to democracy became a constant theme in Pilon's songs.

With access to better opportunities than their parents' generation, Pilon's roster were part time musicians. Music was not part of their academic upbringing nor a full-time gig. Their rhythm and style were wonderfully imperfect, made out of rawer skills and inexperience. Pilon did not follow the templates established by revered Cabo Verde bands. Keyboard player Emilio Borges played off beat and the band preferred arranging their songs to start from the beat normally heard in the middle of a composition rather than the beginning.

These two elements made Pilon's music simple, unique, and inimitable. From 1997-2015, a lack of concerts and professional musicians proved near fatal. Today, Antonino and what remain of the original quintet are slowly piecing back together the puzzle of their once mighty outfit from an unlikely pocket of Europe. In it's heyday in the 90's, Pilon serenaded audiences in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lisbon, Rotterdam and Frankfurt, securing their reputation as a respected and unifying cultural force.

This LP, drawing from the six most powerful songs from Pilon's three-album catalog, is the serving of still fresh leite quente to spice the summer and maybe even fuel the next generation of musicians in the Krioulu corners of Europe.

Stripped down to the roots, these 13 contemporary new versions of classic Jamaican recordings, originally from the likes of the Trojan and Studio One studios, are triumphantly fresh and channel Jamaica’s rebel music history.
With Rastafari sewn into its sonic seams, Inna De Yard remind us of Jamaica’s vast contribution to popular music around the globe with a cast of golden-generation roots artists whilst introducing a new class of roots-enthused artists from the island.

Following the release of the album is a feature-length Inna De Yard documentary-film directed by Peter Webber (3 Oscar nominations for Girl with a Pearl Earring), set for its UK and international cinema release alongside European tour and summer festival dates including a special beach performance at the music industry Midem Festival in Cannes.

After a sell-out debut tour in France in 2017, the trailblazing quartet of Ken Boothe, Cedric “The Congos” Myton, Kiddus I and Winston McAnuff join forces to front a cross-generational super-group of roots-reggae visionaries, featuring Jamaican vocal trio The Viceroys and Bob Marley backing vocalist and artist Judy Mowatt, as well as Jah9, Var and Derajah, three of Jamaica’s most stirring and spiritually-connected artists on the scene today.

'Esoteric, modal and deep jazz from the undergound, 1968-77'

Jazzman Records presents the sound of the unsung musicians who – in the midst of the Vietnam War and the fallout of the Civil Rights struggle – created some of the most beautiful Spiritual and meditative music of the era. Sometimes funky, sometimes mellow, but always trying to say something about the world in which we live.
Existing completely under the critical radar and largely ignored or unknown by music fans and critics alike, most of the musicians featured in this album won't be familiar to even the most seasoned aficionado. Their records, frequently turned down by distributors and record stores, saw little attention when first released - and have seen even less since. But in this era of musical apathy, where so many music junkies look to the past for their musical fix, we have re-discovered hidden, obscure and esoteric jazz musicians who looked to the four corners of the earth - and beyond - for inspiration. Here we evaluate Spiritual Jazz – music that is a snapshot of the era after Coltrane, a time which saw the evolution of an underground jazz that spoke about the reform of the soul, the reform of the spirit, and the reform of society: a music which was local and international at once, which was a personal journey and a political statement, and which was religious and secular in one non-contradictory breath.
The music on this album reflects the social and historical forces at work during the closedown of the '60s dream; music made by close-knit collectives and individual visionaries, by prisoners and eccentrics, by mystics and political radicals. It includes music by acknowledged masters, and moments of brilliance by unsung figures known to us from just one or two recordings. It is the jazz music of America in the age of civil rights, brutal repression, political assassination and war; a music that would guarantee the survival of the spiritual dimension in a society that was angry and traumatized, but nevertheless had seen hope of better days to come.

Freedom To Spend's first catalog wide deep dive into an artist's career focuses on four albums from Rimarimba, beginning with 1983's Below The Horizon, followed by 1984's On Dry Land, 1985's In The Woods, and finally, the once-imagined, now-realized assembly of 1988's Light Metabolism Number Prague.

Somewhere out there around the turn of the 1980s, to the left of the post-punk crew, to the right of the minimalists, and surfacing with a friendlier face than the dour industrialists of the time - there existed, seemingly unbidden, an entire, networked, tape-trading community; a community that crossed continents and oceans, that relied on the postal service to do its bidding; a community full of humble visionaries and lost, misunderstood, or just plain ignored home steeped genius.

Exploring that thicket of weirdness in the UK wild, you'd likely stumble across labels like Cordelia, Hamster, and Unlikely; compilations like the should-be-legendary Obscure Independent Classics series, or the Real Time cassettes; and inexplicable one-offs like The Deep Freeze Mice, Jody & The Creams, R. Stevie Moore, Leven Signs, Jung Analysts, and Rimarimba.

Rimarimba was the project of Robert Cox, based in Felixstowe, on the seaside in Suffolk, UK. Rimarimba was not Cox's first entry into the world of recorded music, but was the first time he explored, most perceptively, the parameters of a particular musical mode: one where minimalism is removed from its 'high-art' mantle, Cox inveigling its practices in amongst the doit-yourself creativity of a burgeoning and beguiling underground, letting the music breathe - and most importantly, letting it play, gifting it with imagination.

The first in the Rimarimba series, 1983's Below The Horizon, feature Cox in exploratory mode, figuring out exactly how to make his music. There's a pleasure in hearing how he feels out the parameters of his aesthetic, here - there's a boxy minimalism, slightly clunky and charming with it, that reflects the home-spun, improvisatory tenor of the compositions. It's ambitious music, though, wanting to do the most and the best it can with its limited resources. Cox himself admits to not being 'pre-wired' to making this music, but that only makes it more compelling: 'Were I to be properly musical, it wouldn't actually work as well in some ways; it'd be just another album of contemporary clattery music.'

On October 5, Freedom To Spend will offer Below the Horizon in a one-time edition of 750 copies, followed On Dry Land and In The Woods on January 8, 2019 and February 22, respectively. Each album features artwork reinterpreted from its original edition by Will Work For Good, and accompanying abstracts by Jon Dale.

With this new work Maurizio Abate recovers the discourse started with Loneliness, Desire and Revenge (2016) but with a different narrative sensitivity. The symbolic air that you breathe suggests a personal and universal experience in which thoughts and perceptions remain as enveloped in an eternal cosmic wheel. It's a condition that flows sincerely into an emphatic introspection and identification between the stasis of an inner soul and the flowing vitality of stagnant aquatic landscapes. In this direction the music of Abate always condenses multiple ranges of different emotional spectra evoked by profound naturalistic references. The airy openings of the strings, the distant whispers of the harmonica, cascades of phrasings more calm or more torrential can lead into the magnificent climax of the Nostalgia. The string arrangement for violin and cello by Lucia Gasti introduces in a dimension of idyll, in elegiac passages of touching poetry almost of chamber music but at the same time wet by the pastoral and bucolic moods of autumn landscapes, they are paintings imbued with different flavors and colours that recall the light and the candor of the Venetian tonalisms or the moving paintings full of meaning of Tarkoski. In the darkest and saddest moments the open chords are like suspensions of unresolved questions and torments, but the cathartic finale with a free and minimalist piano prelude to possible future glares, almost to perceiving that even where there's stasis the sun can still shine the hope for the new on the clearing of the pond. Remains the feeling with that stylistic "freedom of expression" dear to the visionaries Fahey and Basho, but also a clear interpretation of the expressive possibility of the lead guitar, absolutely lyrical and contemporary for refinement of the crystalline sound, which places this work in parallel with the basic acoustic tests of others great like Jim O'Rourke, Jack Rose or James Blackshaw.

One can hardly imagine the genre-busting, culture-crossing musical magic of Outkast, Prince, Erykah Badu, Rick James, The Roots, or even the early Red Hot Chili Peppers without the influence of R&B pioneer Betty Davis. Her style of raw and revelatory punk-funk defies any notions that women can’t be visionaries in the worlds of rock and pop. In recent years, rappers from Ice Cube to Talib Kweli to Ludacris have rhymed over her intensely strong but sensual music.



There is one testimonial about Betty Davis that is universal: she was a woman ahead of her time. In our contemporary moment, this may not be as self-evident as it was thirty years ago – we live in an age that’s been profoundly changed by flamboyant flaunting of female sexuality: from Parlet to Madonna, Lil Kim to Kelis. Yet, back in 1973 when Betty Davis first showed up in her silver go-go boots, dazzling smile and towering Afro, who could you possibly have compared her to? Marva Whitney had the voice but not the independence. Labelle wouldn’t get sexy with their “Lady Marmalade” for another year while Millie Jackson wasn’t Feelin’ Bitchy until 1977. Even Tina Turner, the most obvious predecessor to Betty’s fierce style wasn’t completely out of Ike’s shadow until later in the decade.



Ms. Davis’s unique story, still sadly mostly unknown, is unlike any other in popular music. Betty wrote the song “Uptown” for the Chambers Brothers before marrying Miles Davis in the late ’60s, influencing him with psychedelic rock, and introducing him to Jimi Hendrix — personally inspiring the classic album Bitches Brew.



But her songwriting ability was way ahead of its time as well. Betty not only wrote every song she ever recorded and produced every album after her first, but the young woman penned the tunes that got The Commodores signed to Motown. The Detroit label soon came calling, pitching a Motown songwriting deal, which Betty turned down. Motown wanted to own everything. Heading to the UK, Marc Bolan of T. Rex urged the creative dynamo to start writing for herself. A common thread throughout Betty’s career would be her unbending Do-It-Yourself ethic, which made her quickly turn down anyone who didn’t fit with the vision. She would eventually say no to Eric Clapton as her album producer, seeing him as too banal.



Her 1974 sophomore album They Say I’m Different features a worthy-of-framing futuristic cover challenging David Bowie’s science fiction funk with real rocking soul-fire, kicked off with the savagely sexual “Shoo-B-Doop and Cop Him” (later sampled by Ice Cube). Her follow up is full of classic cuts like “Don’t Call Her No Tramp” and the hilarious, hard, deep funk of “He Was A Big Freak.”