Gilles Peterson re-imagines Lionel Loueke’s incredible and acclaimed
album HH, released in 2020, featuring the music of his long-term mentor,
the legendary Herbie Hancock, for release in 2022.
Gilles Peterson and Lionel Loueke have long term respect for each
other's music and when an opportunity to collaborate together came
about, both jumped at the chance. The result is a brilliantly chaotic
clash of worldwide club rhythms and guitar loops.
The connection is the master Herbie Hancock - a massive influence on the
London based DJ and the Beninese guitarist. Performing the music of his
mentor HH, released on Edition Records in Sept 2020, was a pivotal
album in Loueke's already fascinating journey from humble roots to
illustrious career.
Reimagined, refocused and reinvented by Gilles and co-producer Alex
Patchwork with parts re-recorded by Lionel, this is a kaleidoscopic view
of HH which realises the full range of colours inherent within it.
Tracklist: 1. One Finger Snap Version 2. Watermelon Man Version 3. Driftin' Version 4. Hang Up Your Hang Ups Version 5. Tell Me A Bedtime Story Version 6. Butterfly Version
The repertoire was tried during a
countryside tour where one of the highlights was a concert by the local
pizzeria/newsstand/kiosk in the tiny village Målsryd. That’s where
”Målsrydskiosken” was born. In the contrasting spirit of urban and
rural; old and new. The sense and the sensibility. Ying and yang.
Förnuft
& Känsla is the collaboration between three highly in demand
musicians on the Swedish jazz scene with original and unique expressions
of themselves. Together they make music made up of challenging rhythms
and abstract concepts but at the same time naive melodies and raw energy
that somehow makes everything easy to digest. Modern jazz piano trio
music at its finest.
Tracklist: 1. Byn i Staden 2. Cherokee 3. Herrliche Tage 4. Bits 5. Little T 6. Blues Vaccine 7. Sense and Sensibility 8. First Summer Lawn 9. Evidence
‘To Illustrate’: a new collaborative album co-produced by a group of
artists from the extended Wisdom Teeth family, spotlighting a scattered
scene of producers making forward thinking electronic music of various
hues around the 100 bpm mark.
It’s been impossible to miss the unparalleled levels of creativity
taking place at lower tempos in recent years. Whether it’s the
reggaeton-inspired club music coming out of the Americas, the resurgence
of downtempo and trip-hop influences in ambient and electronica, or the
chuggy UK bass variants coming out of cities like Bristol, London and
Manchester, there has been an unprecedented creative buzz around these
slower BPMs.
‘To Illustrate’ attempts to capture just a small slice of the action
taking place here, and looks to an international pool of producers and
interrelated sounds to do so. Nick León represents the booming Miami
scene, where Latin American sounds are being reimagined and reframed to
create something kindred with UK bass music. Salamanda and abentis -
from South Korea and Japan respectively - contribute low-slung, tripped
out takes on ambient and downtempo, finding close sonic counterparts in
UK producers Iglew and Glances. Elements of hip-hop and RnB creep
through in label-heads Facta &
K-LONE’s ‘Kiss Me, Can’t Sleep’, while UK artists Henzo, Clemency,
Yushh and Hussko pull things closer to the slow/fast stepping rhythms of
dubstep and drum and bass. Taken together, we find a cross-pollinating global scene of producers making genuinely forward-thinking and no-name electronic music - interconnected, but only just.
Tracklist: 1. Glances - Sun Dapple 2. Facta & K-LONE - Kiss Me, Can't Sleep 3. Abentis - Bicycle 4. Hussko - Two Nights In Peter's Bog 5. Iglew - Rockpool Pool Party 6. Salamanda - Kríni Tis Nymfis 7. Nick Leon - Separation Anxiety 8. Henzo - Whirlpool Vanish 9. Clemency - Girl Food 10. Yushh & Facta - Fairy Liquor
Belgian dub-jazz outfit Kosmo Sound release their sophomore album:
‘Fruit of the Void’. Prepare yourself for a wonderfully fresh sound that
is indebted to dub, yet offers a fresh take on the genre. With an
infectious love for deep basslines, meditative sounds and dense grooves
they proudly display their jazz influence through a sense of experiment
and rhythm.
Tracklist: 1. Amethist 2. Chloris Hell Prevention 3. Ototoxic 4. Carolina Reaper 5. Ferocious 6. Banoffee Pie 7. Electric Spider 8. Channel Raceway 9. Blue Mountain
Inspired by revolutionary efforts against oppressive hegemonies in
Detroit, and in Black locales around the world, Memoirs of Hi-Tech Jazz
is a sound score evocative of that resistance.
It is also a reminder that although violence and injustice looms, it is
not the only story: we are much more than what oppresses us. The album
celebrates Black leisure and play; the mundane joys that persist in
spite of the depleting realities of the world.
Movement, and the very mobility of the car specifically is integral to
Memoirs of Hi Tech Jazz. Timed perfectly to match the duration of a
round trip drive from Underground Music Academy in the North End, to
Detroit’s island park, Belle Isle-- the album is undoubtedly best
experienced in while driving.
That journey signifies the transition from labor to pleasure: from the
neighborhood of the Techno Museum in North End to an outdoor park that
has long been a destination for Black Detroiters to cookout, park their
boats, play spades, and listen to local music.
Memoirs of Hi-Tech Jazz embodies the feeling this place engenders—a
reprieve from the midwestern work ethic, and a reminder to ground in the
pleasures of your body and the land. Tracklist: 1. Memoirs of Hi Tech Jazz (feat. Black Nix) 2. Rouge 3. The Ballad of Robert O'Bryant 4. Motor City Madness 5. Let's Give It Up (feat. Archpriest Rev. Wanika K. Stephens & De'Sean Jones) 6. Snake Eyes 7. The Moment is Now 8. Right Now 9. Good Trouble 10. Keep It Coming 11. The Dub 12. Remember
This new release takes the opposite
approach to the previous album "Theory Of Everything". Following this
very produced record, the group had a furious desire to play... In every
sense of the word. "PlayFul", recorded during a series of concerts, is
designed and produced for listening on vinyl. The aesthetic is similar
to the jazz recordings of the 60s both in terms of the length of the
pieces and mixing techniques: the instruments have been placed directly
in your living room and will give you the impression of being present at
the recording sessions. It’s a record that shows our happiness to play
togetheragain. It's « PlayFul »:
Tracklist: 1. Toy Train (Radio Edit) 2. Tin Soldiers (Radio Edit) 3. Mystery of a White Dwarf (Live Version) 4. You Are Here (Live Version) 5. Time Travel (Live Version) 6. Separating Circle (Live Version)
Leipzig-based musician, engineer, and producer Friedrich Brückner has,
despite his youthfulness, been a decisive figure in the Leipzig music
scene for literal decades, being involved, in one way or another, in
many, if not most notable releases coming out of the city. Having
received a classical musical education, Brückner most recently figured
as part of the German-American band White Wine, playing the bassoon, but
has also, as either musician, producer or engineer, toured
internationally with the likes of Yoko Ono, Get Well Soon, Modeselektor,
or Dear Reader.
For a few years now, Brückner has been working on his solo debut, which
now comes in the form of his remarkable »Polyism«, out on Altin Village
& Mine. On it, Brückner puts his considerable musical chops to use,
in the service of a rollercoaster of an album that truly eschews
categorization, being, as its title suggests, a work of being multiform.
While the sound takes wide ranging cues from jazz, new age, dub,
electronics to post punk, Brückner’s compositions never feel accidental
in the slightest. Instead they share a distinctive sense of dramaturgy, a
pronounced attention to sonic texture, and a sense of purpose both
within the individual pieces as well as in the context of the album as a
whole. The result is an LP that is astonishingly coherent, considering the multitude of means it employs.
On »Polyism«, Brückner also enlists a veritable all-star cast of guest
performances, ranging from his parents Isabell and Bernd Brückner, both
professional musicians, on saxophone, clarinet, and flute, Martin Wenk
(Calexico) on trumpet, to Hendrik Otremba (Messer) and Brückner’s
four-year-old daughter Rosa both on vocals, to name but a few. Each lend
their own notes to »Polyism«, a work of what it means to live, that is,
to be many — truly exceptional stuff.
Back in the early 1990s as Acid Jazz began a period of extraordinary
commercial success where acts like the Brand New Heavies and Jamiroquai
sold millions of records, and US groups such as A Tribe Called Quest,
The Roots and Digable Planets were actively influenced by what was being
played in London, the whole scene was being fuelled by a small number
of clubs, led by Gilles Peterson’s Sunday afternoons at Dingwalls but
taking in nights in Leeds, Bari, Munich, Tokyo, Stockholm and New York.
In those clubs funky jazz, latin boogaloo and 70s soul soundracks
competed for time on the dance floor with import records from New York,
and the latest sounds coming out of bedrooms and makeshift basement
studios that created contemporary sounds out of the past.
Acid Jazz’s Eddie Piller and Dean Rudland have put together this
compilation of the sort of sounds that we were playing at the time. They
are releases on Acid Jazz and other label’s that surrounded the scene
and they were mainly made by people we knew from either around the club
scene, behind the counters of our favourite record shops, or from trips
to New York or Europe. They range from The Ballistic Brother anthem
‘Blacker’ to the jazz house of A-Zel
- a Roger Sanchez mix that still sounds fresh today. We have the Humble
Soul’s instrumental version of ‘Beads Things And Flowers’ which at the
time was only available as a DJ special on Acetate. There is the
presence of A Man Called Adam before they went to Ibiza, and the early
Mo’ Wax (before they went Trip Hop) single by Marden Hill ‘Come On’.
These records could fill a dance floor in seconds and we feel that they
are today largely forgotten, as they were non-album, underground club
records. It’s time to celebrate them!
Tracklist: 1. The Ballistic Brothers & The Eccentic Afros - Blacker 2. Humble Souls - Beads, Things & Flowers 3. Marden Hill - Come On 4. The Subterraneans - Last Night Beats 5. A Man Called Adam - APB 6. The Quiet Boys - Modal 7. A-Zel - Jazz Jupiter 8. Dhama B & Ace of Clubs - Everything Is Going To The Beat (Strictly Speaking Mix)
After a devastating opening salvo of 19 modernist rave mutations on a
double tape pack for Sneaker Social Club, Minder lands on Hypercolour
with another 19 cybernetic fever dreams still reeling from the open
season NRG of hardcore.
If you need to understand where Minder wants to take you, strap in for
the labyrinth narrative of ‘Knotted’, a smudged, 15-minute breakbeat
suite barrelling through lurid dystopian street scenes with only a
blown-out bass sprite as a guide. Throughout Sanctuary, bass is the
constant when all else is chaos. It comes in thick, warped Reese tones
on ‘Simulated Hunt’, gets twisted out through angry filters on ‘Popcorn
Lover’, comes on wobbly in true 2-step style underneath grimey garage
anti-anthem ‘Ard’.
There’s a lot to take in across the spread of Sanctuary. It’s the sound
of every rave genre slowly digested over 30-plus years, until the lactic
acid metabolises every snare rush, every searing lead line, every
chipmunk vocal lick, and everything gets mashed up and spat back out
into a gnarly signal chain at the flash point of
inspiration. The time taken is key – this is the sound of a life in
front of the speaker stack manifesting in something too wild and weird
to be derivative. You’ll hear snatches of familiarity thrown into
unfamiliar contexts, but for all the detectable lineage, Minder’s sound
is unsettling in its originality.
Dislodged ragga jungle techno, muffled hardcore nightmares, hard n’
haggard acid trance, junked up jump up – you could write an essay on the
sounds you can spot and the way they’ve been twisted. Aside from the
omnipresent low-end, it’s the unflinching honesty of Korron’s repeat
appearances on the mic throughout which bring Minder’s disturbing
patchwork into focus. For all the futurism attached to these sounds,
it’s also caked in a very human filth which can only come from this
earth. The roots run deep, and the fruit is rotten, and isn’t that how
it should be?
Tracklist: 1. Ard 2. Mills 3. Boxes 4. Dollar Bill 5. Service 6. Shard 7. Pomeroy 8. Cold Shoulder 9. Simulated Hunt 10. Sticks 11. Sharded 12. Popcorn Lover 13. Coleshill 14. Manipulate 15. Show Me 16. Knotted 17. Plough 18. Castle 19. Virus
