Both sides are stone classic, archetypal UK reggae, produced by Dennis Bovell.
Killer, full-steam-ahead, Channel One rub a dub, with startling effects, produced by Bebo Phillips and Clive Jarrett.
Ghost Phone is back! Blowing in from Bristol with another hand of anonymous aces. Glossy R&B in flagranti and off its tits in a dank, heaving basement session.
The opener Hologram is characteristically greened-out: a 160bpm g-funk odyssey for the autonomic massive. Then it’s back to earth with Want U, a nectar-sweet, stripped-back dancefloor heater, complete with tongue in cheek nods to the Jersey Club sound.
Tough, loose jungle breaks revitalise a 90s classic on the flip, in So Gone; before Darkness Finds Home With U wraps things up with dense, heady atmospherics and ethereal vocals.
Both these sides are previously unreleased blends of the old and the new, in extended mixes.
Can’t Fool I re-unites the born-a-fighter roots warrior with Tasha producer George Nicholson, his chum from school — at last voicing a rhythm from the label’s first-ever recording session, at Channel One in 1978, with the Revolutionaries.
Easy Skanking is Alla on a brand new rhythm by Danny Bassie and Barnabas.
Two previously unreleased sides by this compelling singer: Get Up Natty was cut at Channel One in the mid-eighties, with backing by the Gifted Roots Band, featuring some sick synths and effects; No Peace is new, with Icho still in fine voice, debuting a rhythm by Danny Bassie from the Firehouse Crew, and Channel One legend Barnabas.
‘Palestre is a study of higher-dimensional spaces and altered states of consciousness. It explores parallel dimensions and temporal anomalies from a perspective that blends mythology, modern physics, ADHD, transcendental music and club culture.
‘Sciogli Assurdi was recorded between art galleries, clubs, squats, and folkloric festivities in 2018.’
Epic, grooving, extravagantly creative, perfectly attuned blends of complex mbalax drumming, field recordings, thumping kick-drum, and cosmic, bubbling, jamming synths and electronics.
The opening is suitably liminal, haunted by a diachronic sense of times past, present, and to come: ancestral ghosts, scratched playback, scraps of old recordings, voices strangulated or just out of range; puttering drums; futuristic, kosmische keys. Part II picks up the pace; III gives the drummers some, and heightens the atmosphere of enchantment. Jon Hassell’s Fourth World music courses through a kind of Dream Theory In Dakar.
Toco SOS, the second side, is a thumping, throbbing, mesmeric future-classic; perfect for fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n on the Autobahn… in a spacecraft. Expert hand percussion, call-and-response singing, bin-trembling foot-drum, spaceways keys. Sleekly funky as prime Popol Vuh.
Both sides range expansively by way of Berlin, where Lamin resided for a few years: you can hear something of T++’s brilliant, landmark HJ record on the A, and elements of Mark Ernestus’ crucial Ndagga project, on the B.
Half an hour of stunning music; in a beautiful sleeve, with mirror lettering, and an intricate spot-gloss rendition of salt crystals, laid over a photograph of the salt mines at Lac Rose, outside Dakar.
A double-header, with Prince Allah reviving the Melodians on the flip. Both extended. Mixed by Prince Jammy.
Angry, tear-up digi, both sides.
Two scorchers from 1989; blazing out of Annotto Bay, on the northeastern coast of JA.
Biff, baff, boof.
Two hunks of deep Wackies roots; and an amazing, previously unreleased coup de grace.
First off, a haunting, dazed, raving account of being kicked out of a squat; with heavy bass, killer organ, sublime backing vocals, and a hurting, searing Stranger Cole. ‘We’ve got to find a better place.’
Then a tough instrumental outing on the same deadly, signature Wackies rhythm as Clive Hunt’s Black Rose, by Wanachi.
And on the flip: stark, visionary, semi-acoustic primitivism, from the same drama school as early Ras Michael & The Sons of Negus.
Unmissable Wackies.
A stirring, percussive four-tracker. Wintry and submersible; smudged with mist, then silvered and clear as a bell, by turns. Bitten Dream is dark, atmospheric, hypnotic; Via Tekh summons vintage Objekt; Shrine despatches twisted 8-bit granularity into early Livity Sound and Carrier territory; lulling, ambient Catharsis lets go.