Sublimely beautiful, emotionally wide-open meditations on a wonky piano, exploring the same spare, enraptured equivocacy — getting lost in order to find or recover something — which you hear in Satie, Mompou, Cage, Duke, Monk, Masabumi Kikuchi…

‘Mashu leaves nowhere to hide, his playing is poised and coolly controlled, focusing on the beauty of simplicity and purity. 
‘The lo-fidelity plays a part too, these recordings are clearly diaristic, caught close up, granular and beautifully blown out in places, adding a level of cohesion to a genuinely special suite of music that melts so effortlessly into the everyday.’

Very warmly recommended.

Washed between industrial and devotional fronts, eight pluviophile excursions by Giuseppe Ielasi & Giovanni Civitenga, steeped in the manifold evocativeness of rainfall — how it orchestrates some of our deepest memories and fantasies. 

‘Yesterday it started to rain…
‘The smell of damp tarmac rising up through open windows from a suburban pavement, a school playground, a basketball court…
‘The rain cut through a band of low pressure that had been lying over the city for days, pinging rhythmically off metal, causing rolling tyres to hiss and spit.
‘Its soundtrack is the debut full length from Rain Text, run through with build-ups of low-end pressure relieved by the fizz and clatter of metallic rhythms…
‘Static… discord… release…’

‘Absolutely essential,’ says All About Jazz.

‘Perhaps the best representation of a typical Joe Harriott Quintet gig of the period, combining as it does straight-ahead tracks with his free-form work… it opens with the easy swing of Morning Blue with Harriott’s alto warm, sunny and optimistic and Shake Keane’s flugelhorn light as air… Count Twelve is pure bebop rooted in the blues with some simply lovely flugelhorn from Keane and delightful piano from Pat Smythe. The relationship between Goode and drummer and Bobby Orr here is almost symbiotic, while Harriott’s own solo is wild and free-flowing.
‘Michael Garrick’s quirky Face in the Crowd follows. It’s a fine, angular performance that sits well with Harriott’s own more abstract writing. Revival is one of the saxophonist’s most Caribbean-inflected tunes and is perhaps the record’s highlight, whilst Garrick’s Blues On Blues reveals perfectly how very, very good this group really was.
‘The album concludes with three tracks: Spaces, arguably the most abstract piece Harriott ever recorded; the fine, if mainstream bop Spiritual Blues, with some great bowed bass from Goode and excellent drums from Bobby Orr; and the album’s title track has an intensity not found in all of Harriott’s free form work. It’s a stunning group tour de force, again building from comparatively simple melodic materials into something that is dark, brooding and even slightly unsettling.’

The mighty deejay in irresistible form, riding all-time-killer rhythms by way of Yabby You, Dennis Brown, Burning Spear and company. Plus a side of tough Skin, Flesh & Bones dubs. Errol T is at the controls. Ace.

The reissue of Steve Barrow’s brilliant, powerhouse selection for Blood And Fire.

The long-awaited reissue of Deadly’s 1982 solo LP.
This great saxophonist played with everyone from The Abyssinians through Prince Far-I to Bob Marley. Designed as a showcase record for his unique talents, producer Adrian Sherwood assembled a crack team of his singers and players at the time for this set, including Style Scott, Bim Sherman, George Oban, Lizard Logan, Crucial Tony and Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah. Also dropping by is Headley’s fellow Alpha-alumnus Rico Rodriguez.
The CD includes two previously unreleased recordings.

Pressed on vinyl for the first time.
‘A marvellous set of jazz reggae instrumentals… a unique entry of super cool amid the chaos of the On-U catalogue’ (Steve Barker, The Wire).
‘Beckett’s genius is that he is always true to himself, whoever he performs with. His effervescent, tumbling, improvised melodies never fail to lift the spirits.The Modern Sound Of Harry Beckett is a magnificent sonic treat.’ The Guardian.
‘Sherwood’s production style strikes a perfect balance here between sonic creativity and respectful restraint, and Beckett himself is brilliant, creating horn lines that weave and insinuate themselves through the grooves rather than riding on top of them. Established On-U Sound fans will find this to be an enjoyable curiosity; Harry Beckett fans may find it revelatory’ (All Music).

‘The surrealist, psychedelic brain-burps of notorious all-caps-tweeting wind-up-merchant Louis Johnstone aka Wanda Group. Twenty-six congealed morsels of spur-of-the-moment
sound-art executed with genuine economy of means, namely… a phone. An impulsive, scatter-brained trip into the inner circles of regional weirdness, secreting a creeping unease which really gets under your skin. Fragments of aural rubble haphazardly cohere into galvanising spacial tones and textures, punctured by Johnstone’s garbled Essex rantings. The long-distance stare of warbled tape loops is abruptly fractured by a drunken sing-along in a care home for the elderly. As hallucinogenic takes on the utterly mundane, there’s an obvious kinship with Lambkin’s nocturnal, straight-to-dictaphone sound-pieces. Dan Johannsen’s splintered classical collages on that PIG tape and the suburban soliloquies of Regional Bears alumnus Russell Walker also feel closely aligned.’ (All Night Flight)
With an A4 riso insert.