Starkly intimate, utterly captivating early recordings by this wonderful Malian singer. Voice and acoustic guitar only; as if you were the only person in the room.
The sound has been brilliantly restored by Awesome Tapes, for its fiftieth release.
Achingly beautiful music; hotly recommended.

The first volume in a two-part collection of pirate radio adverts & idents, assembled from home recordings of London stations made between 1984 & 1993.

You can hear their stage experience in ‘the sizzle and swing of the percussive highlights here, programmed with a serious depth and wriggle that reflect both an extension of and return to form. Considerations of the machine-human interface, neurological realities and physical probabilities dominate. But these tracks are economical and precise, glittering with emotional depth and cinematic effects. The album’s core, a three-act movement of symphonic uncertainty and revelation, marks one of the pair’s most evocative compositions in a career full of them.’

“I didn’t want to make a bebop record. I wanted to make a modal jazz record and there just aren’t that many on viola. I wanted to speak with a heavier voice, more akin to a tenor saxophone. The viola is darker and thicker. It speaks slower.”

‘Love that, kind of Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, big orchestrations with really low down dirty jazz music” (Gilles Peterson).

Terrific, resilient, rootical lovers, with backing by the Revolutionaries, recorded in the late-seventies by Sonia Pottinger for Sky Note. The same rugged rhythm as Clifton Campbell’s
A New Civilisation, devastatingly contrasted with the sweetness and vulnerability of the singing.

‘An unshackled mind melt of amorphous Berlin School electronics, glistening guitar tones, snatches of disembodied voices and rumblings of percussive melody… an invitation to introspection, turning sky-seeking kosmiche towards a resonant, contemplative core… too busy to be ambient, too zonked to be rock, instead resting on a modern psychedelic perch of its own somewhere in between.’