‘A wobbly loop of found sound. Almost inaudible speech from an unidentified documentary. Lapping waves of folk guitar created at the edges of the player’s ability. A haunted melodica. Mumbled vocals that reinvent the singer’s uncertainties as a deliciously glum pose. Layer these up in the recording software of your choice. Labour in a back bedroom overlooking the railway line to summon ghosts.
‘Spirits arrive from West Yorkshire, from Glasgow and Dunedin, from the suburban Midwest. Rising from squats and university accommodation past, from damp rooms filled with old paperbacks, stale hash smoke and abandoned mugs of tea.
‘Even as you listen to this collection of home recordings, made over the last few years by South London duo Jemima, these ghosts crowd around. Born in the Seventies to chase the tape experiments and gentle strumming of the Sixties they crane their necks and edge closer to the laptop. When something this perfect comes along, even the most tranquillised must stir their stumps.
‘It’s lonely music created around a wine bottle with a candle in it, made too late to appear via Xpressway or Cordelia. Don’t imagine though, that it has no home in the now. These spectres remain close because they know they are still wanted. We need them as much as they need us.
‘This spell-binding LP is a window onto a half-lit world on a deeper plane of consciousness.’

Yarghul player Atef Swaitat and singer Abu Ali are popular Bedouin wedding musicians extending long family traditions in Jenin and the north of historic Palestine. This stomping, swirling, surging, precious music was recorded at ceremonies across the Galilee throughout the 1970s.
It’s exhilarating, giddying, and immersive.

Originally released in 1981, Mr. Circle’s Thi Nam should really have been recognised decades ago as a jazz dance classic. A beautiful example of European jazz fusion at its most sophisticated and optimistic, the album is immersed in the sonics and rhythms of pan-Latin fusion and Brazilian samba, but with one foot in the upful jazz fusion exemplified by Roy Ayers or the Mighty Ryeders.
Taking inspiration from Ursula Dudziak, Flora Purim, and Norma Winstone, singer Monika Linges uses the crystalline tone of her voice as an instrument within the ensemble. The LP is built around the interaction of her vocalising with bandleader Mikesch van Grümmer’s keyboard versatility, all underpinned by the surging Brazilian rhythms laid down by drummer Gerd Breuer and percussionist Ponda O’Bryan.
The result is a unique set of sunlit, Brazilian-inspired jazz fusion. Aimed squarely at the feet throughout, the album kicks off with a double whammy: the funky title track, followed by. the percussion-rich Juntos. The long form Suka begins with a shimmering intro before taking flight halfway through into an urgent jazz samba with Linges’ vocals to the fore. Featuring the vocals of Bill Ramsay, Tides is another driving jazz-dancer with a Brazilian twist, while the summery, propulsive Schoch-Schach features virtuosic interplay between Linges and alto saxophone.

Phil Pratt productions, 1972-1974; Sunshots recorded at Channel One, Black Ark, Dynamic Sound and Randy’s Studio 17, with house engineers Ernest Hoo Kim, Lee Perry, Carlton Lee and Errol Thompson at the helm, and backing by Sly & Robbie, Family Man, Chinna, and co, aka Soul Syndicate. Check the versions of Money Money Money and I Don’t Want To Be Outside.

A harum-scarum bloodbath of sixties rock, seventies motorik-fusion, and eighties punk.

‘The landscape Orcutt Shelley Miller inhabits lies deep in the stoner American bedrock, fed by volcanic riffage and hypnotic phrasing with rhythmic nods to the SoCal ’60s and atonal slash piled on a mid ’80s SST punk-fusionoid substrate, ultimately blasting a ‘big rock statement’ that treads the line between good times and blown minds.’

‘A collection of canonical, mature acoustic guitar soli to contrast against the fractured downtown conceits of previous acoustic releases… Jump On It, with its living-room aesthetics and big reverb, packs a disarming intimacy absent from the formal starkness of Orcutt’s earlier acoustic outings… Not quite refuting (yet not quite embracing) the polish of revered watershed records by Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, or Bola Sete, Jump On It treads a path between the raw and the refined… Each track is a key to a memory, a building block in a shining anamnesis leading to the recollection that hey, we’re all humans in a shared cosmos, and music is one way we might make that universe go down easy. And who wouldn’t jump on that?’ (Tom Carter)

‘Eight tracks of jagged electronics, heavy basslines, and fractured spoken word collide in a body-jerking soundclash that is both raw and vital.’

Good On Paper enjoyed ‘Baldauf’s crisp, distanced tones accompanied by Roe’s ominous, pulsating programmed bass line and four-to-the-floor whack, coaxing pure pop out of tension and incongruity.’ Electronic Sound Magazine hailed the LP as ‘a blistering, club-forward workout’, with ‘top-drawer, nose-bloodying electronics,’ positioning the Stroud duo as ‘rather like a wonky Tom Tom Club with added grit.’