Twenty-six shots of late-night R&B out of Jim Kirchstein’s Cuca studio, in the late sixties.
Originally released via minuscule pressings into the Wisconsin wilderness, tracing the paths across the hinterlands of Highway 12 between the Chicago, Milwaukee and Rockford soul scenes.
The likes of Harvey Scales, Betty Moorer, The Twiliters, Birdlegs & Pauline, The Esquires, Artie & The Pharaohs… in another gem-studded chapter of the alternate history of soul music.

‘Ndegeocello’s second Blue Note pays homage to the great writer and activist James Baldwin. Her transformative music and collaborative spirit ignites this genre-bending work that is at once a musical experience, a church service, a celebration, a testimonial, and a call to action. Features frequent collaborators Justin Hicks, Kenita Miller, Abe Rounds, Jake Sherman, Jebin Bruni, and Julius Rodriguez, as well as powerful spoken word performances by Jamaican poet and activist Staceyann Chin.’

A stupendous haul of sound-system specials and inspired experiments conjured from some of the greatest reggae rhythms of all time, from the inner sanctum of King Tubby’s studio in the mid-seventies (where Philip Smart was second engineer).
Seething with lethal touches of Tubby; dotted with head-spinning walk-ons for Hugh Mundell, Johnny Clarke, Jacob Miller and co; steeped in the genius of young Augustus Pablo, Smart’s childhood friend.
A staggering turn-up. Utterly crucial.

Fragile, deep, melancholic, enthralling home recordings from Beirut; lost in memories, worry, grief, rapture, love.
Very warmly recommended.

‘Highest recommendation’, Foxy Digitalis; ‘evanescent bliss, an invitation to a safe space both isolated and welcoming’, The Quietus; ‘a sweep of introspective, breath-catching moments of beauty’, Pitchfork. ‘The combination and contrast of highly familiar and highly alien elements give Asmar’s music a quality not quite like anything else I can name. The way she channels found voices into her surreal mix of sounds is particularly striking’
(Byron Coley, The Wire).

Her first two cassette releases remastered and presented in a gatefold sleeve featuring new art-work by Yara herself.

Fabulous big-band tropical jazz — cumbias, porros — from 1950s and 60s Colombia.

‘Since the 16th century, the Ecuadorian province of Esmeraldas has been home to a unique Afro-Indigenous culture originating in the integration of the Indigenous Chachi and Nigua peoples with African Maroon communities. Juyungo documents significant Esmeraldan artists and bands playing the Afro-Ecuadorian folklore of the province, as well as including some older field recordings. Based mostly on the marimba, whose origins lie partly in the African balafon, partly in Indigenous percussion instruments, the music is laced with call and response chants, ambient insect and bird noise, the filigree finger-styles of the Andean guitar tradition and the panpipes of the mountains. This is resonant insider roots music at its headiest — the mystic revelation of Esmeraldas, gully deep and lustral.’ Francis Gooding, The Wire.

The fifth in our series of LPs compiling classic music from Ecuador. Customary Honest Jons runnings: a beautiful gatefold sleeve; superior pressing, with vivid, intimate sound; full-size, sixteen-page booklet, in colour throughout, with detailed, fascinating, bi-lingual notes, and stunning photographs.

The music is transfixing, magical; not like anything else. From start to finish, this album is continuously, profoundly immersive; a kind of journeying, trippy meditation about slavery and cultural resistance, identity and mix, places and spaces, futures and pasts. It’s inscrutable to net-surfing, algorithms, Shuffle. But for a taste try the insurgent marimba roller Agua Largo, jet-propelled by Rosa Huila’s rapturous blend of African spiritualist and Christian chant. ‘Healing music,’ Zakia called it on Gilles Peterson’s BBC show recently. And the ravishing pasillo Kasilla Shungulla — ‘calm your heart’ in the Quichua language — a duet between the Peruvian master-guitarist Raúl García Zárate and viola da gamba by Juan Luis Restrepo from Medellin, recorded in a baroque church in Buzbanza, Colombia.

The legendary jazz-funk album recorded in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1971, mapping ‘the same territory as such acolytes of Miles Davis’s late- 60s explorations as Return To Forever, Weather Report, and Tony Williams Lifetime. Experimental studio techniques combine with blazing artistry, juxtapositioning trippy electronic textures and improvised jazz, creating a hypnotic kaleidoscope of sound.’
Lovely job as usual by Wallenbink: heavyweight tip-on gatefold sleeve featuring archival photographs; sound restoration and remastering at Abbey Road (including previously unreleased recordings and outtakes); 180g vinyl. A limited edition of six hundred: half for NZ; just three hundred copies for the rest of the world.

Stewart Smith in The Wire: ‘Jeff Parker and his ETA IVtet go deeper into the hypnotic minimalism that made its predecessor Mondays At The Enfield Tennis Academy a highlight of 2022. Parker’s recent music represents one of the most sophisticated applications of hiphop language into jazz, whether he’s playing over beats and loops or imitating their feel in real time. Parker and the ETA IVtet have their groove down to the point where it’s no longer fusion but a fully integrated sound, drawing on the unquantised beats of J Dilla and Madlib, and the time stretching strategies of psychedelia, krautrock and dub.’

‘The Numero Group guide to private issue new age. Featuring Laraaji, Iasos, Joanna Brouk, Don Slepian, Peter Davison, Master Wilburn Burchette, Jordan De La Sierra, David Casper, Robert Slap and nine other pioneers of the Perrier underground. Adorned with Marcus Uzilevsky’s Linear Landscapes, this 2xLP compilation is housed in a sturdy tip-on jacket and is accompanied by a 32-page booklet. The fourth world awaits.’

The Chain Reaction classic.