‘*****’, The Times, Independent On Sunday, Daily Telegraph, What’s On, Evening Standard, The Independent. ‘Marvellous pop — catchy, fun, young, effortless’, The Times; ‘one of the delights of the age’, Songlines.

One-sided acetate.

Big Hands re-united with trumpeter Abraham Parker.
Trialled triumphantly in recent live shows, the opener comes good on the promise of the duo’s triumphant debut for Trule: gliding, hypnotic, and moody, with rueful, burnished brass interjections riding dubwise steppers.
Then a pair of distressed, halftempo d&b rhythms: a call to arms, and a troubled circling of the wagons. Waltz For Matis winds up proceedings with a deep, spooked Fourth World excursion, with skittering marimba.
Another ace EP.

‘Their first collaborative recording: four beautifully recorded excursions, threading crystalline drum-work through a sparkling haze of guitars and electronics.
‘The opener Dessus begins with Reidy’s distinctive just-intonation guitar figures, shimmering over a delicate substratum of Befli’s brushwork and bass drum accents. As in all of Reidy’s recent work, the guitarism evades cliché via unfamiliar tuning and electronic processing. Hanging almost inaudibly in the background for much of the piece, a rush of synthetic tones surges into the foreground to end it. Oben is built from kinetic patterns of picked guitar arpeggios, locking into irregular grooves with Belfi’s drums, which move from elegant rolls and cymbal patter to driving closed hi-hats and explosive rock interjections. Around the traditional instruments and across the stereo field, electronic sounds swarm and swirl, fizzing and popping in a sun-drenched soundscape that at points suggests both vintage analogue synth destruction and glitching harmonies. Alto begins in similar territory but turns proceedings up a notch, eventually settling into a propulsive 6/8 groove of shifting drum accents, manically strummed 12 string acoustic, and burbling synth chords.
‘The B side is dedicated to the fifteen-minute Up, where the strategies adopted on the other pieces are put in the service of a more relaxed, slowly unfolding epic. Anchored by a steady pulse throughout, the piece combines chiming guitars, dubbed-out bass lines and constantly adjusted percussive details into a complex flux of sound. Change is at once so subtle and so ever-present that, at any given moment, the listener can never be entirely sure quite how they got there.’

‘These seriously playful/playfully serious gentlemen share the same vibe: a strong sense of speed and importance, paired with a kind of childlike curiosity for what lies behind the next bend. Alternating between baritone saxophone, flutophone, slide flute, clarinet and bass clarinet, phrases are repeated and elaborated, questions, answers, rhetoric, ornamentation, criticism, and free flow, all this and more can coexist when it comes from the same source.
There is a lot of commotion in this music, a lot of pressing and panting. But there are also feelings in the brutality, a brutal finesse that leads us from one sonic landscape to another. Not like a hike, more like a run through forests and scrubs, down steep slopes and up through narrow gorges…’

The Chicago-based poet and singer heads up a spicy gumbo of jazz, folk and soul.
‘By merging ferociously honest poetry with various black musical traditions, Tate stands as heir to Chicagoan Oscar Brown Jr., the veteran urban griot whose lyrics long have decried racism and social injustice’ (The Chicago Tribune).