No-one else makes music like this: devilishly complex but warm and intuitive, stirring together a dizzying assembly of outernational and outerspace influences, whilst retaining the subby funk-and-hot-breath pressure of Shackleton’s soundboy, club roots.
The result is an evolutionary, truly alchemical music — great shifting tides of dub, minimalist composition and choral song (Five Demiurgic Options); ritual spells to ward off the darkness (Before The Dam Broke, The Prophet Sequence); radiophonia and zoned-out guitar improv (Seven Virgins); even the febrile, freeform psychedelia of eighties noise rock (Sferic Ghost Transmits / Fear The Crown).
Over the five years since Music For The Quiet Hour, Vengeance’s vocal and lyrical range has rolled out across this new terrain. Throughout these six transmissions he’s hoarse preacher, sage scholar and ravaged bluesman; blind man marching off to war, and exhausted time-traveller warning of impending socio-ecological catastrophe.
Six dialogic accounts of our conflicted times, then, expanding beyond the treacly unease of the duo’s early collaborative work into something subtler and more emotionally shattering — its shades of brightness more dazzling, and its darkness even murkier.
“We almost didn’t hear it when the foundations went.”

Shackleton’s most expansive, ecstatic and hallucinatory music to date. Four extended excursions channeling Congotronics way to the east, with an aura of restrained mania reminiscent of the feral pomp and gallows humour of Coil’s moon-musick phase.
The pairing with Tomasini is a match made in heaven. Swooping from deep growl to piercing falsetto, his four-octave voice both heightens the taste for the theatrical that’s always been integral to Shackleton’s music, and makes explicit the latter’s kinship to the occult energies of the UK’s post-industrial underground.
As the title suggests, these are shadowy songs rich with allusions to bodily ritual and psychic exploration, with Tomasini’s lyrics framed by luminous whirls of hand-struck drums and synthetic gamelan, bells and tumbling organ melodies, all earthed by dubwise bass. You Are The One escalates from delicate choral chant to full-bore psychedelic organ freakout; Rinse Out All Contaminants is a slow incantation, to purge all negative thoughts; the melodies of Father You Have Left Me are smudged like early Steve Reich, then burned out by snarling subs; and the magnificent Twelve Shared Addictions balances elliptical melodies like spinning plates, gradually unfurling into a breakneck storm of voice and hammered keys.

‘Marvelling, playful, inquisitive contemplations, ranging from the stardust that forms us to the very first human sound that reverberated through a cave; ambient, liminal narratives woven by poetic recitation and Buchla, bass and sitar, edging towards blues and spiritual jazz.’

Anthony Maher’s 1988 dub album, an Australian commingling of JA science and UK post-punk and Industrial.

‘The saxophonist leading a septet into fascinating, playful and sparky combinations of contemporary music, avant-garde jazz, techno, and improv; a kind of seance summoning the wailing fairy of Irish folklore, a shrieking harbinger of death.’

Compositions from 1969/70, when Forti was based in Woodstock, New York — ‘stoned in the woods,’ she recalls — around the time of the Festival, just before moving to California, and working and performing with Charlemagne Palestine.
The seven songs here were recorded in 2012 during her exhibition Sounding, at The Box gallery in Los Angeles. The blue vinyl carries an etching of Forti’s Illuminations Drawing on the flip; accompanied by a sixteen-page colour book with images of the original sheet music scored by Charlemagne Palestine.

Demdike Stare and Andy Votel.

Remastered direct from the original master tapes, with previously unreleased outtakes and rarities — including Patti’s 1975 RCA audition tape.

‘Synth chutes, synth ladders, popcorn 808 beats, dirge-y chants and busted sub-woofer hums from inner-galactic soul pioneers Nathaniel Woolridge and Anthony Freeman intertwine to create this hypnotic, mythical 1984 LP from Newark, New Jersey. The most damaged party record ever set to black, or the most partied cry of the heart ever howled into personal space. Probably both.’

Blaxploitation from the Staples and Curtis Mayfield. The title track is all-time knockout soul music: Mavis is startlingly randy, over a masterful, sinuous rhythm. Goddess. New Orleans winningly sublimates I Heard It On The Grapevine; I Want To Thank You is decent, too; Curtis throws in a few Shaft-style instrumentals.
That title track, though.

This saxophonist came through with the likes of Roy Ayers and Joe Henderson in the sixties, before hooking up with Steve Lacy in Paris in 1973. In this soundtrack composed for a film by his friend Joaquin Lledó — entitled Le Sujet Ou Le Secrétaire Aux Mille Et Un Tiroirs — he was joined by members of the group around Lacy, and diverse co-conspirators including friends from the funk outfit Ice, French accordionist Joss Bassellion, and none other than Jef Gilson at the mixing desk. It’s a dazzling, intensely entertaining blend of modal, cosmic and spiritual jazz, free funk, dirty grooves, heavy jams, bistro boogie and Javanese wah-wah.