Shy People is a 1987 drama film directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, the Russian director who early in his career was the screenwriting collaborator of the great Andrei Tarkovsky. The plot revolves around Diana, a successful New York journalist who is commissioned to write a piece about her distant relatives and their difficult lives deep in the bayous of Louisiana. Reluctantly, her wayward and drug-addicted teenage daughter Grace agrees to join her mother on the soul-searching trip to the Southern wetlands, resulting in a culture clash between the cosmopolitan and the rural, with devastating consequences. In true arthouse fashion, the film premiered at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival to acclaim but never received a wide release. However, Barbara Hershey did take home the award for Best Actress, for her role of Ruth, Diana's cousin.

Responsible for the soundtrack is the legendary kosmische outfit Tangerine Dream, led by Edgar Froese. Throughout the 80s they composed scores for more than 20 films, with many composed of reworked material from either the band's studio work or tracks that were work in progress. Their haunting, complex, multi-layered synth work combined with dreamlike vocals proved to be the perfect accompaniment to the palpable tension between Diana and her family. But, as always with Tangerine Dream, the score works perfectly well on its own too. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Shy People (Vocal Version)
2. Joe's Palace
3. The Harbor
4. Nightfall

Side B
1. Dancing on a White Moon
2. Civilized Illusions
3. Swamp Voices
4. Transparent Days
5. Shy People (Instrumental Version)

What began as an experimental session at Richard Branson's Manor Studios in Oxfordshire became a seismic event in modern sound. Using the Moog sequencer for the first time, Tangerine Dream - then comprised of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke & Peter Baumann - crafted 'Phaedra', an album that shimmered with innovation, mystery & a palpable sense of discovery.

Half a century later, Tangerine Dream returned to London's Barbican to honour that landmark work - reimagining it for a new era. Across its three vinyl LPs, '50 Years Of Phaedra: At The Barbican' captures this transcendent live performance, in which the current line- up - Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane & Paul Frick - revisit the spirit of 'Phaedra' with the very tools that Froese & his collaborators helped pioneer.

TRACK LISTING

1. Phaedra Suite Initial Applause
2. Sequent C, 2024
3. Movements Of A Visionary, 2024
4. Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares, 2024
5. Hippolytos Session - Part 1
6. Hippolytos Session - Part 2
7. Hippolytos Session - Part 3
8. Hippolytos Session - Part 4
9. Hippolytos Session - Part 5
10. Hippolytos Session - Part 6
11. Hippolytos Session - Part 7
12. Phaedra 2024
13. Hippolytos Session - Part 8
14. Phaedra Suite Applause & Words
15. Happy Ending
16. Sorceror Theme
17. You Are Always On Time
18. Dolphin Dance
19. Rare Bird
20. Continuum
21. Los Santos City Map
22. Logos (Velvet) 
23. Portico 
24. White Eagle
25. Raum 
26. Encore Break 
27. Phaedra 2022
28. Closing Words

Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce the release of a newly re-mastered edition of the classic album 'Zeit' by Tangerine Dream. Released in August 1972 on the OHR label in Germany, 'Zeit' was recorded at the Dierks Studio near Cologne and also featured a guest appearance by Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh. One of the group s finest early albums, 'Zeit' was enthusiastically championed in the UK by John Peel and was a major breakthrough for Tangerine Dream.

This Esoteric Recordings edition includes a previously unreleased bonus CD of Tangerine Dream’s legendendary Kalngwaldt performance recorded in Cologne in November 1972, fully restores the entire unedited double LP version to compact disc and includes a lavishly illustrated deluxe booklet with new essay.

TRACK LISTING

DISC ONE:
1. BIRTH OF LIQUID PLEJADES
2. NEBULOUS DAWN
3. ORIGIN OF SUPERNATURAL PROBABILITIES
4. ZEIT

DISC TWO:
1. KLANGWALDT PART ONE
2. KLANGWALDT PART TWO

Excellent kraut rock style grooves!!

With nearly 40 million record sales, three albums topping the Billboard charts, a Grammy win and a legion of fans, System Of A Down are one of the biggest metal bands on the planet. At their core has always been Serj Tankian, whose journey from the streets of Beirut to rock superstardom is as remarkable and unlikely as you'll get. By dint of luck, circumstance, struggle, and more than a little talent, Serj has had the chance to live an extraordinary life.

In Down With the System, he retraces this remarkable and unlikely journey, and explores what it's taught him - about music, about art, about activism, and about himself. From teaming up with Tom Morello to push social justice causes on unsuspecting metalheads, arguing with LAPD officers over the best way to quell his rioting fans, and traveling with Anthony Bourdain through Armenia one meal at a time, Down With the System is an immigrant's tale, an activist's awakening, and rock memoir unlike any other.

Eric Emm and Jesse Cohen of Tanlines are indie-rock lifers turned reasonable, happy middle-aged fathers of two, figuring out their place in a chaotic culture and industry that can no longer command their full attention.They are emblematic of a particular time and place that doesn’t really exist anymore, yet here they are existing, and thriving, in 2023.

The Big Mess came together when Emm and his family moved from Brooklyn to rural Connecticut, while Cohen launched a marketing career and a successful podcast and stayed in the city. Emm continued writing songs hundreds of them through all the weirdness of the past few years, but he wasn’t exactly sure who he was writing them for. “I spent years figuring out in my mind, ‘What is my musical life going to look like?’” he says. “I just kept writing.”

Cohen gave Emm his blessing to continue Tanlines, even if his own contributions would be limited due to his own non-musical obligations. “I’m like, ‘Whatever you can do to keep this thing going, do it,’” Cohen says. And with that, Tanlines was reborn.

By January 2022 Emm felt he had a body of work that made sense as a Tanlines album. Cohen spent ten days with Emm at his Connecticut studio, along with unofficial third Tanline Patrick Ford (!!!). This was tied together with a sleek final mix from Peter Katis (The National, Interpol) at his famed Tarquin Studios, resulting in a clear vision of what Emm’s musical life was going to look like: The Big Mess.

The first sounds on The Big Mess are the title track’s coiled guitars and thumping drums, building into the kind of outsize, choral rock anthem artists like Tanlines were almost a reaction to. It is warm and nostalgic, and Cohen likens a lot of the prevailing mood to “a sepia filter on a digital photo.” He continues, “we were pretty intentional about making this the first song on the album, underlining the way that this is a new phase of the band.” Cohen says.

The moody, scintillating “Burns Effect” serves as one of the biggest pushes forward for the Tanlines sound, and for Emm as a lyricist. He says that the song is “deep and dark and dangerous, but in a fun way. It’s one of the more personal tracks on the album where this ungrounded part of my personality surfaces, but with an over-the-top machismo, almost an ironic character.”

Other tracks like “New Reality” and closer “The Age of Innocence” are also demonstrably guitar-forward in ways that wouldn’t seem obvious for Tanlines (despite Emm’s pedigree in austere avant-garde math-rock outfits Storm & Stress and Don Caballero), but Emm is less sure The Big Mess is a total departure. “I’m trying to make these absolutely simple things,” he says. “I think of these songs as Rothko paintings: They’re big and they’re bold and they’re seemingly straightforward, but they have a lot of depth and they engage with you and make you feel something.”

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. The Big Mess
2. Outer Banks
3. New Reality
4. Burns Effect
5. Clouds
SIDE B
6. Unreal
7. Arm’s Length Away
8. Endless Love
9. Speed
10. Hold On
11. The Age Of Innocence

Five years since her last album ‘Sundays’ Tanukichan is back with the follow up…’GIZMO’.

It's a heady mix of fuzzed out guitars, shoegaze and wall-of-sound alt-rock.

Released on Toro y Moi's Company Records (he also helped write, record and produce the record)

When the pandemic hit, Hannah van Loon adopted a dog named Gizmo, who became a much-needed companion while the Bay Area musician wrote her second album as Tanukichan. Aptly Named after her new four-legged friend, GIZMO is an exercise in release, whether from situational hindrances—a forced lockdown, for one—or from self-imposed hedonistic coping mechanisms.“ A theme I always had floating around was escape,” van Loon explains of her follow-up to 2018’s Sundays. “Escaping from myself, my problems, sadness and cycles.”

To channel the more uplifting spirit she wanted for GIZMO, van Loon turned to the radio pop-rock of her childhood: “I was struck by the in-your-face positivity of the lyrics,” she adds,referencing artists like 311, The Cranberries, and Tom Petty. “I wanted to bring that positivity while writing about the sad and helpless emotions I’d been grappling with.” But GIZMO’s lightheartedness doesn’t make it shallow: “I think that I could let it go, as beautiful as snow,” she murmurs on “Don’t Give Up,” a nu metal-meets-Cocteau Twins groove about the sudden awareness that all the relationships you depend on could vanish instantaneously. Van Loon’s main collaborator on GIZMO was Toro y Moi’s Chaz Bear, and the jangly pop earworm “Take Care” showcases the heavily distorted, in-your-face guitar work reminiscent of Bear’s own psych joints What For? And Mahal. On the hypnotic, wall-of-sound-rocker “Thin Air” featuring Enumclaw, van Loon channels the triumphant grit of The Smashing Pumpkins as she ponders the impermanence of even the most impactful relationships: “I’ll always have the memories/Of how you used to make me see/Until they fell in the ocean/They’re not swimming/They’re not floating.”

Existentialism aside, GIZMO also sees van Loon break out of her sonic comfort zone. “One ofthe main changes of how I’m approaching music now is that I want to have more fun in the process,” she says, and she walks the line between melodrama and whimsy gracefully: “I can learn something because I’ve been here before,” she sings on the soaring, bittersweet “Been Here Before.” Deftones-inspired thrash drums and screeching electric guitars are gracefully contrasted with van Loon’s hypnotic, almost deadpan vocal style and a crystal clear acoustic guitar she describes as “cute.” Gizmo the dog suddenly passed away right as van Loon finished the album, but he’s immortalised with his photo on the cover—a fitting emblem of this new era of Tanukichan.

TRACK LISTING

1. Escape
2. Don't Give Up
3. A Bad Dream
4. Been Here Before
5. Make Believe
6. Like You
7. Thin Air (feat. Emunclaw)
8. Nothing To Lose
9. Take Care
10. Mr. Rain

Signaling the follow-up to their initial EP reveals ‘Covet’ and ‘Pulse, Pose, Position’, Tanzana’s tantalising new effort drifts between genres and showcases their heaviest material to date. Equipped with punchy guitars and enigmatic frontwoman Freya Talbot’s gripping vocals, the group are fast becoming leading figures in Scotland’s emerging music scene.

Detailing their third release, Talbot added: “‘Without A Sound’ deals with the connection to the art you make and the frustration caused when pushing yourself to your limit. Ultimately knowing it’s the one thing that keeps you going."

TRACK LISTING

1. Covet
2. Astar
3. Without A Sound
4. Pulse, Pose, Position
5. You Bite, I Bleed
6. This Love 

Trapped Animal Records is proud to announce Cambridge band, Tape Runs Out's debut album.

Floodhead is an exploratory sonic journey from the mind and soul of long-time band leader, Liam Goodrum-Bell (guitar, vocals). Tape Runs Out’s experimental sound comes in part from their excellent array of instrumentation - the band members bring violin (Clare Myerscough) and the hammered dulcimer (Ellie Winter), as well as bass (Takeshi Kanemoto) and drums (Laurence Moore). Recorded and produced by Liam and Dan Dawson (band’s guitarist) at Dan’s home studio over the course of a year, the album thrives off experimenting with different textures and sounds, with each song seeking to be its own microcosm of creativity, delivering its unique part within the whole. The painstaking detail and time spent by Liam and Dan between the initial recording session during the summers of 2021 and 2022 has resulted in an incredible production, and one that takes the listener through the Tape Runs Out universe. The first single from Floodhead, Souvenir made God is in the TV's track of the week and was heaped praise on by Steve Lamacq on his BBC 6 Music afternoon show and new music fix. 

TRACK LISTING

Jab
Ark
Souvenir
The Garden
The Garden Pt2
In The Muddles
Overseas Assignment
Paperback
90oc
Pillowtalk

Tapes & Nikolaienko get comfortable behind an organ. Four highly personal vignettes that take on dub's abstract sentiment and design and apply them to more freeform, experimental song structures.

Take “Rushing To Emergency” with ear-catching reggae lick, dancing with dub whilst line dancing in the daisy meadows, An unconventional mix of bucolic influences and 8 bit production which'll welcome any morning sunshine.

"Countryside Emergency" continues the rural outlook, with its loosely galloping rhythm-loop & alarming arpeggiated keys; manically toying with the tape machine to create a sped-up and stuttered sonic collage determined to unravel your inner most anxieties.

“Time With Burnt” sees deconstructed synth fractals ricochet and echo off into oblivion, as though smashed by a holographic hammer in a gravity free zone, the ripples and cascades of these 5D audio objects likely to resonate for an eternity.

Dub informed free flowing goods, as you'd expect from sonic explorer Jackson Bailey & the boss of beautiful Muscut label Dmytro Nikolaienko. Mastered by The Bastard.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: I bloody love Tapes. Can always be relied upon to twist your melon right inside, out and back again; usually with just enough time to blow a truck of ganja smoke up yer arse in the process. Delightful.

TRACK LISTING

Rush To Closing Gates
Countryside Emergency
Time With Burnt
Jaaksoni Tamm

“Estonian cultural theoretic Tõnis Kahu once said that Black Metal is men seeking for masculinity while their bodies lack the capacity to catch up and are lagging behind. In the age of microplastics and low-testosterone, Tapetud Rott is asking for ancestral guidance from George Michael. Each day with the growing pains of maturity they can only dream about living somewhere so happy-go-lucky and tranquil as the city that once provided the suitable breeding ground for giving birth to such an aggressive and theatrical expression that could mark its cadaverous polar opposite. The mask they now so falsely wear is one seeking for Vitamin D inside the heart of a deceased Rat.”

Limited Black 7-inch Vinyl

Music by Robert Nikolajev & Mikk Madisson
Recorded in Tallinn

Mastered By The Bastard

TRACK LISTING

lahme oue
see mees

South London six-piece Tapir! serves as a ‘boiling together’ of different mediums: at once musical, theatrical, mythological, artistic, collaborative, narrative-led and, above all, something to be enjoyed and shared.

With their debut album, “The Pilgrim, Their God and the King of My Decrepit Mountain”, Tapir! have proven they are more than technically adept at transporting the listener to another realm. You could read the whole album as being an escape from the trappings of the modern material world, a sidestep into a pre-industrial, pre-internet wonderland where creativity and community reign supreme. The narrator of ‘My God’ might suggest to us ‘Maybe it was Maybelline that put you at a loss/That’s my God’, but for Tapir! it is imagination itself that is king.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Though the striking minimalism of the cover might carry through to some of the more relaxing pieces on Tapir's debut album, the depth of compositional skill and scope of the album as a whole is breathtaking. Brittle folky guitars and soaring vocals, conceptually rich pieces imbued with intrigue and heart. Stunning.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Act 1 (The Pilgrim)
On A Grassy Knoll (We'll Bow Together)
Swallow
The Nether (Face To Face)
Act 2 (Their God)
Broken Ark
Side B
Gymnopédie
Eidolon
Act 3 (The King Of My Decrepit Mountain)
Untitled
My God
Mountain Song

In this exploration of Cocteau Twins’ quintessential album, Chris Tapley traces lines in all directions from Blue Bell Knoll to paint a revealing portrait of the enigmatic trio and their career-long struggles with self-doubt, stubborn principles, and pure experimentation. Throughout their career, Cocteau Twins sought to escape definition. Lyrics were a closely-guarded secret, their transcendent recordings sounded completely unique, and they were notoriously tight-lipped during interviews.

The music, they said, should speak for itself. Only nobody could agree on what the music said. Released in 1988, their fifth full-length, Blue Bell Knoll, is the pinnacle of Cocteau Twins’ legendary ambiguity.

The first album recorded entirely in their own studio, these dense dreamlike songs capture the band as they refined the key elements of their iconic sound while testing the limits of language and the mixing desk. From lyrics and production to artwork and interviews, everything about this influential, one-of-a-kind band stokes contradictions and uncertainty, and raises the question: can anyone ever really define what a song means?

This previously unreleased album by the Horace Tapscott Quintet was unearthed from master tapes in the Flying Dutchman archives. Recorded in 1969 it was intended to be a follow-up album to the classic 'The Giant Is Awakened' which was released that year.

The iconic pianist and composer Horace Tapscott was one of the most unique and important figures in LA's jazz world. This lost recording was produced by one of the pivotal figures in jazz, Bob Thiele, a leading behind-the- scenes star who worked with many of the greats in jazz, such as Quincy Jones, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Della Reese, Shirley Scott, Gil Scott-Heron, the list goes on. His name can be seen gracing, arguably the best, Impulse! releases and those released on his own Flying Dutchman imprint set up in 1969.

Joining Horace for this three-track, deep, heavy, avant-garde session is the same stellar cast featured on 'The Giant Is Awakened'; Arthur Blythe on Alto Sax, Everett Brown Jr on Drums, with David Bryant and Walter Savage Jr. on Bass. Kicking things off we have 'World Peace', which starts with an almost baroque- esque melody, leading to an eruption in sound, it then ends in the same manner it began. The beautiful 'Your Child' is the jewel in the crown, skirting modal, deep jazz and introducing elements of free jazz. 'For Fats' with its bow bass and piano intro takes you on a journey, dropping into, at times dark, stormy melodies and developing a driving energy as the composition progresses.

TRACK LISTING

1. World Peace
2. Your Child
3. For Fats

The Beasts of History is the new album from Michael James Tapscott, featuring contributions from members of Gospelbeach, Howlin' Rain, Sugar Candy Mountain, Papercuts, Elephant Micah, Tarnation, Odawas, Yea-Ming and the Rumours, and more. Nearly four years in the making, the album pulls from disparate strands of American ephemera to create a uniquely captivating collection of songs that play out like one act plays, full of doomed anti-heroes and beautiful losers; calling to mind the small town dramas of Bobbie Gentry, the golden age pop of The Beach Boys, the lonely jangle of The Beau Brummels, the echoing melodies of Lee Hazlewood, and the experimental ethos of ambient folk. Highly anticipated sophomore album from Michael James Tapscott. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Reno News (Intro)
2. Cheap Hotel
3. The Hills Of Montreal
4. Bobby’s Army Jacket
5. Roll, Little Sparrow
6. The Lonely Evergreen
7. Bobby’s Reprise
8. Los Peñasquitos Falls
9. When Lisa Got Pregnant
10. Her Mysterious Past
11. Leopard Print Coat

Not far off two years from the day, Bristol's Tara Clerkin Trio return to World of Echo and the EP format for a five song collection of quixotic, emotional redolence. But do not mistake their absence for inertia. If their musical output has been a little sparse during those in-between years, limited to a few solo ventures and an astonishing ten minute long piece as a trio, their time has otherwise been richly spent: continuous writing and recording, extensive live performances across Europe and Japan, a cultivation of local and more far-flung artistic connections (musical and otherwise), and a monthly NTS show that, through the voice of others, speaks most obviously to their own unorthodox interests. It's the conflux of that winding activity that leads indirectly to On The Turning Ground, 26 minutes of probing, thoughtful composition that draws from no one specific source. Their inspirations might be centreless, but the trio still possess a very obvious anchor in the form of their hometown. Bristol stands as a city of multitudes, heterogenous and vibrant in such a way as to allow it to renew and remake time and again. Tara Clerkin Trio drink from that same well, duly reflecting a rich musical heritage built on fwd-facing electronic subcultures and experimental urges. As such, On The Turning Ground finds them subject to their own subtle internal evolution, the pervasive sense that you've caught them mid-bloom, on their way to becoming but never anything but themselves. The two instrumental pieces that bookend the EP stand as a perfect case in point, displaying an increasing mastery of compositional space. Pensive and restrained, 'Brigstow' and 'Once Around' both emanate an interstitial quality that's not so much after- as in-between-hours, miniature dub-folk symphonies held together by the kind of tacit understanding that remains the preserve of only the closest of family units. If those two tracks are shaped by a sense of shifting temporality, then the three vocal-led pieces that comprise the record's core feel like a gentle ossifying of aesthetic into something approaching their own unique form of avant-pop. 'Pop' is, of course, a broadly subjective concept, but there's no avoiding the overt sparkling melodicism of songs like 'Marble Walls' and 'The Turning Ground', undeniable re-directions of that late 90s impulse to bend pop sensibilities into off-centre terrain, to render the familiar new again. This is what Tara Clerkin Trio do, gently pulling the ground from under your feet, turning you to face something you'd not quite seen before. To view the world as they do: sideways, sometimes, all of the time.

TRACK LISTING

1. Brigstow
2. World In Delay
3. Marble Walls
4. The Turning Ground
5. Once Around

You remember how it was, don’t you, back in the Spring of 2020? Knowing so little about what any of us should do, so many of us crawled inside our quarters to find new obsessions or indulge the familiar ones, unencumbered by anything else we could do. At home in the woods on the eastern edge of Asheville, N.C., Avey Tare took the latter path, sequestering himself in his small home studio to sort the songs he’d written and recorded with friends in the instantly distant before times—Animal Collective’s Time Skiffs, of course, their astonishing document of communal creativity a quarter-century into the enterprise. He often worked there for 12 hours a day, tweaking mixes alone, save the birds and bears and his girlfriend, Madelyn. By Fall, though, it was done, so what next? How else should Avey now occupy himself in his cozy little room? The answer became 7s, his fourth solo album (and first in four years), an enchanting romp through the playground of his head. He wasn’t, however, going to do it alone.

During the first week of January 2021, Avey began making regular drives to his friend Adam McDaniel’s Drop of Sun Studios to give guts and flesh and color to the skeletal demos he’d made at home. They turned first to “Hey Bog,” a tune Avey had been tinkering with since he wrote it to have new material for a rare live performance years earlier. The inquisitive electronic meditation—all tiny percussive pops and surrealist textures at first—slowly morphs into a gem about surrendering cynicism and accepting the world a bit more readily, the call buttressed by trunk-rattling bass and spectral guitar. It feels like a lifetime map for new possibilities, encapsulated in nine absorbing minutes. The plot for 7s, then, was set: trusting, intuitive, exploratory collaboration among friends, after a Winter without it. These songs are like overstuffed jelly jars, cracking so that the sweetness oozes out into unexpected shapes. Still, the sweetness—that is, Avey’s compulsory hooks—remains at the center, the joy inside these Rorschach blots.

If Animal Collective has forever been defined by its charming inscrutability, Avey surrenders to a new intimacy and candor with 7s. Take “The Musical,” a bouncing ball of rubbery synths and wah-wah guitars that contemplates what draws someone to sound and how turning that calling into a profession can alter the source. “I can hear the mountains singing,” he counters with an audible smile wiped across his face, painting a postcard of his home amid one of the United States’ folk hubs, “and I do believe they could do that forever.” Obligations aside, this is a self-renewing love, he realizes, the source as captivating as it was the first time. “Have you ever felt a thing and known that’s how you felt about it all along?” he ends this guileless love song for everything.

TRACK LISTING

1. Invisible Darlings
2. Lips At Night
3. The Musical
4. Hey Bog
5. Sweeper’s Grin
6. Neurons
7. Cloud Stop Rest Start

‘Down There’ is the debut solo album from Animal Collective member Avey Tare.

Recorded in 2010 at the Good House, an old church in upstate New York, with fellow Animal Collective band member Deakin.

‘Down There’ is a world of nine songs from Avey Tare. His first official solo full length carries you through a murky world of sound, an alien death world of soul grooves that is both honest and otherworldly.

Take a ride on this haunted boat and let yourself be guided through deep sloshy rhythms, waterlogged bass and moonlit breaks in the canopy that reveal a crisp crystalline pop buzz.

TRACK LISTING

Laughing Hieroglyphic
3 Umbrellas
Oliver Twist
Glass Bottom Boat
Ghost Of Books
Cemeteries
Heads Hammock
Heather In The Hospital
Lucky 1

The stories that make up Tarentel's existence are almost as dramatic and hard to follow as their musical trajectory. The San Francisco group started in the mid-90s as an outlet for guitarists Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Danny Grody to make left-of-centre instrumental guitar suites. Their sound and vision proved very infectious, drawing in more collaborators and full-fledged members than anyone has time to count. Over the course of nearly a decade, the band has become a bit of a legend in independent music. The songs themselves, average over 10 minutes each – with some stretching past the half-hour. Perhaps then, it comes as a bit of a surprise that their first album in nearly four years bears more songs in less time than ever before. Though hardly a pop record, "We Move Through Weather" is Tarentel's most focused album. Now stripped to a trio (Sonna's Jim Redd completes the line-up on drums), the sound is almost entirely intuitive. Virtually every song is built from expansive improvisations of sweeping drones and walls of discordant feedback. Where taught, meticulous guitar melodies once drove their songs to conclusion, thunderous drumming now navigates the group through an uncertain abyss of layered noise, horn bursts (courtesy of musician Steve Dye's arsenal of homemade instruments) and the occasional lonely piano.

With the release of These Factory Days, San Francisco's TARTUFI have further advanced upon their layered spectrum of sound by adding a third member to the band. Welcoming good friend Ben Thorne (Low Red Land, Minot) into the band to take over the role of bass player, Tartufi is now a fully realized machine. Whereas before Angel and Gorman preferred the whirlwind approach, favoring a systematic shock to the senses - with the addition of Thorne the band is able to utilize time and space to elicit an overall sense of complete synchronicity and total fluidity. If you thought you were in a strange alien river before then best grab a paddle because this river flows into the sea of sonic accord. Tartufi took over a year and a half to track and mix These Factory Days, once again with the aid of Tim Green (Melvins, Howlin Rain, Joanna Newsom, Fresh & Onlys) at Louder Studios and The Hangar, and also with Scott McDowell at Hyde Street.

Introducing a super charged split LP featuring the talents of Cameron Stallones aka Sun Araw and Spencer Clark’s duo with Jan Andersen, Tarzana.

What originally started as an Aquapelago inspired residency in the summer of 2021 quickly developed into its own thing. Truth be told, both artists always surfed their own personal waves of musical freedom, so Aquapelagos Vol.2 album became AQUA X, a split offshoot work featuring rehashed Tarzana compositions on one side and a live presentation form Cameron’s residency in the island of Tenerife around Keroxen festival's 13th Edition. With two artists very dear to us this split LP picks up perfectly on the aquapelagic concept and twists inside out into worlds high and below creadng a further testament to both's artists oeuvres. Here’s an extract of Professor Haywards original liner notes regarding the music: ‘’The tracks on this album reflect the geo-cultural position of Californian-based musicians, Cameron Stallones, (who records here under the Sun Araw moniker), and Spencer Clark and Jan Andersen’s (performing as Tarzana) with oceanic atmospheres and structures of feeling.

Sun Araw’s dedication to producing subtle, flowing, psychotropic compositions can be read as an a`unement to the oceanic sublime. Recorded within the disused Keroxen tank in Santa Cruz harbour in Tenerife, The Canary Suite is an extended piece that features a mix of electronic pulses, short synthesizer fragments and distorted guitar bursts. The textures are relatively sparse throughout, with a linear emotional contour sustained by an ongoing melodic play within a defined band of possibilities before settling into a calmer, soothing and floating mood, like an aural floatation tank.

Tarzana’s tracks artfully blend simple synthesizer tones, vocal exhortations, and an assortment of treated instrument sounds to create a pulsing, wandering and restless music. Short rhythmic ostinato fragments push and pull against bold blown pipes and horns while subtle darker colours and shades intermittently move through the soundscape to intensify the mood. This is busy and dense music but with an orderly flow and internal sense of motion that sweeps up the listener in its wake, like a sailing ship propelled through tropical seas.’’

TRACK LISTING

Tarzana Side By Spencer Clark And Jan Andersen
1. Tarzana - Nano-Desert Imaging
2. Tarzana - Repdle Enclosure, MIR
3. Tarzana - Deep Ocean Ibex Arena
4. Tarzana - Ling Sheng Su’s Peacock Mands Shrimp Repertoires Super Coracle Side By Sun Araw Side
1. Sun Araw – Plex Chora (Mov.II)*
2. Sun Araw – Serpierite Sonare (Mov. III)

'In ‘All This and So Much More’ Tasha is an artist flung open. For Tasha, the last few years have been propulsive, dynamic, bursting at the seams. They've included painful encounters with grief; a sudden break up; new flirtation; new hair; the glitter of world travel and not least, a role in Tony-nominated Broadway musical ‘Illinoise’ which adapts Sufjan Steven’s ‘Illinois’ for the stage. If ‘Tell Me What You Miss The Most’ was an introspective meditation on love with a few moments of glancing toward what’s next, ‘All this and So Much More’ is Tasha turned outward, flourishing, telling us what it’s like to take life by the chin and look it in the eye.

Take, for example “Eric Song.” This was the first song to be written on the album, penned while Tasha grappled with the sudden, tragic death of Eric Littman, the co-producer of her last album. Though the instrumentation is a familiar 3/4 guitar strum, lulling us into a comforting waltz, Tasha’s voice is breathy with grief, adding depth and dimension to the hushed sound. “No, I’m not alone after all / You must be near / Facing this soaring sprawl,” she sings, transforming the experience of loss into a talisman of love and courage meant to help usher in a new self.

Said a different way, ‘All This and So Much More’ is a full-throated ode to all of the ups and downs of becoming. In the opening track, “Pretend,” when Tasha sings about “feelings outgrowing this little life,” we get the sense, both lyrically and sonically, of someone in the throes of growth. This is an album crafted with a big, ambitious sound (in part, thanks to the production of Gregory Uhlmann)—cinematic droning, orchestral woodwinds, dazzling arrays of jangling guitar, all lining up to capture a sweeping moment in Tasha’s life. Written over the course of 2022 and 2023, right on the cusp of Tasha being cast in Illinoise, the songs in this

album invoke friendship, heart ache, flirtation, doubt. From the social anxiety of “Party” (“Do they think I’m funny? / Did they like my jokes last night?”) to the questing for meaning in “So Much More,” Tasha brings us along on a journey of finding out that the person you wanted to be was inside of yourself, just waiting to bloom all along.

She sums it up neatly in her final track, “Love's Changing,” charging us with a brilliant, sweeping vision of the future, singing: “Suddenly the world is bigger than it ever felt before / Feel the weight of my future sinking in / See the joy I’m running toward." In ‘All This and So Much More,’ Tasha asks us to consider abundance in its truest form. Our lives, a deluge of possible experience if only we will surrender to it, all the way from the citric ache of heartbreak to the chest bloom of new adventure.

“'Michigan' is both instant and lovably rugged, shining boldly with an unexpected gleam that redefines expectations of wherever Tasha chooses to go next.” Gold Flake Paint.

TRACK LISTING

Pretend
The Beginning
Be Better
Good Song
Michigan
Party
Nina
Eric Song
So Much More
Love's Changing

'You are Spring!' opens with a latticed wall of sound, acapella vocals layered in lush harmony, singing the semi-eponymous Spring. Immediately, Tasha spirits us away from dull, gray winter into a world replete with images and sensations of new life. Think: a riot of bell shaped blooms; blush and citrine and butter yellow; the sky a clear, lungful of blue; warmth, everywhere, kissing skin overwintered and longing for touch; ease after suffering; a deep breath after suffocating. “Don’t die now / There’s life to be found now,” she begins.

In lyrics inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem To The Young Who Want To Die, Tasha enunciates the thesis of this album with exquisite precision.There are seasons of harshness, seasons of difficulty, yes. But, here, in this album, we meditate on spring--on a season of celebration, made all the sweeter because we know what one must endure to get there. “Alive now / It’s spring now / Alive now / You’re spring now,” she closes, borne aloft by the velvety voices of Jamila Woods and Taja Cheek of L’Rain featured on this track, inviting us into the edenic jewel box that she’s created here. For Tasha, spring is a place we arrive, but it’s also a state we’re in, a way we’ve become.

When discussing what she hopes the album conveys, she further expounds on the meaning of Spring, saying “it’s a way to say you are the thing that other people are looking forward to; you are the thing we’re waiting for; you are the beautiful thing.” If the previous album was about yearning, of stretching toward an abundance you know is coming, then 'You are Spring!' is a chance to pause and take it all in once you have stepped into your fullness.

TRACK LISTING

1. Spring (ft. Jamilla Woods & L'Rain)
2. Clarion
3. Perfect
4. Promise
5. Ending
6. Summer
7. Lucky
8. Actor
9. Special
10. Porous
11. Quick!

In the early 1980s, the pop charts were dominated by musicians tarted up in Day-Glo colours, who fought it out for coverage on our TV screens and magazine pages. Dexys Midnight Runners did things differently. They were surly.

They were serious. They were ambitious, but success had to come on their terms. They were a disciplined outfit, a gang with a defined purpose: to make music so pure that it couldn't fail to elicit a deep emotional response from anyone within earshot.

And they managed it. This motley crew - in woolly hats and donkey jackets for their first coming; all dungarees and copious body hair for the second - gate-crashed the charts, scoring number-one hits around the globe. But being in Dexys wasn't all sunshine and roses.

Many members came, many members went. Some returned unexpectedly as being part of this particular gang was a way of life; it was everything. Nige Tassell, author of the Penderyn Prize-shortlisted Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids? employs his skills of detection to go off in search of the dozens of members who - for however brief a period, and to whatever level of success - have been a part of Dexys Midnight Runners.

These are the people who gave the band its sound, its soul, its substance. But whatever happened to them?

A celebration of a much-cherished pop group and a long-overdue companion to their unique musical output. Rolling Stone called him ‘the last pop genius’, while Richard Osman claimed he is ‘the most unfairly overlooked lyricist of his generation’. Paddy McAloon is undoubtedly one of the great songwriters of the last half-century.

As the leader of Prefab Sprout, he’s overseen ten heavily praised albums, including the classic Steve McQueen, along with a trail of hit singles, among them ‘When Love Breaks Down’ and ‘The King of Rock ’n’ Roll’. His songs have been sung by Kylie and Cher. Others were written for Madonna, Sinatra and Streisand.

But despite the commercial success and abundant critical acclaim, McAloon remains an enigmatic figure within the bright, brash world of pop. The semi-reclusive Prefab Sprout have seldom followed paths trod by others. They rarely toured.

They took their time to make records. They always danced to their own drum. A lifelong fan of the band, acclaimed writer Nige Tassell attempts to illuminate the mystery, to uncloak the enigma.

Truly Gifted Kids is the deepest dive ever made into McAloon’s craft, exploring the motivations and methods of a man who, 13 years since the band’s last album, still obsessively marries melody to words on a daily basis, in the process building up an enormous stockpile of songs that no one will hear. Occasionally esoteric and freeform, and always original, Truly Gifted Kids pulls together stories, interviews, analysis, history and travelogue to fashion a fulsome portrait of the band, with its chief creative force at the very centre. During his investigations, Tassell both acts as an ad-hoc roadie for solo Sprout Martin McAloon and goes undercover in search of pop music’s most famous motorbike.

At its beating, romantic heart, Truly Gifted Kids is a celebration of a much-cherished pop group, a long-overdue companion to their wonderful music.

In 1986, the NME released a cassette that would shape music for years to come. A collection of twenty-two independently signed guitar-based bands, C86 was the sound and ethos that defined a generation. It was also arguably the point at which 'indie' was born.

But what happened next to all those musical dreamers? Some of the bands, like Primal Scream, went on to achieve global stardom; others, such as Half Man Half Biscuit and the Wedding Present, cultivated lifelong fanbases that still sustain their careers thirty-five years later. Then there were the rest, who ultimately imploded in a riot of paisley shirts, bad drugs and general indifference from the record-buying public. Now, for the first time, music journalist Nige Tassell tracks down the class of C86 and recounts their stories, both tragic and uplifting.

Yet, while the pursuit of long-lost musicians can often manifest as earnest hagiography, Tassell's unique, light-hearted approach makes this a very human story of ambition, hope, varying degrees of talent and what happens after you give up on pop - or, more precisely, after pop gives up on you. It's a world populated by bike-shop owners, architecture professors, dance-music producers, record-store proprietors, birdwatchers, solicitors, caricaturists and even a possible Olympic sailor - and let's not forget the musician-turned-actor gainfully employed as Jeremy Irons' body double... More than simply the tale of the tape, Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids? is an exploration of C86's wide-reaching and often surprising legacy.

Taste is the solo project of Oli Lipton (Now, Cindy) born of countless after-hours time spent in his home studio and the hoarded recordings those efforts produced. 1/2 Fantasy, released via Tough Love, splits two previously self-released tapes down the middle, side by side, to form a debut LP of sorts. It’s like summer wine and starshine on a night that lasts for years or just a few minutes. Habits, loves, money spent, Friday night, Saturday morning— a rock 'n' roll heart steps out with a Les Paul, a pen, and tongue firmly in cheek. Looking sharp and clean but feeling dirty, a hip priest Nikki Sudden if he cared to hone a craft.

TRACK LISTING

1. Lucy
2. Staying Underground
3. Name of Love
4. Snap Reaction
5. Half Off
6. Lowlife or Hero
7. All In
8. A Second Thought
9. In Her Own Time
10. In Style
11. Dirty Dream
12. Stevie Wrote A Letter
13. To Be Young
14. My Condition

Matt Eades formerly of the bands Brubaker and Performance (managed by Paul Gallagher) met Danny Cawley (Alf and Delia, Hector's House) in the Autumn of 2002 through a mutual friend. Danny had returned to Manchester after spending some time in London and Brighton, and brought back with him some songs and ideas he wanted to develop. Matt was also looking to get back into music after some time off, so the pair began writing and playing music together. "Hit The Hills" is their second album.

TRACK LISTING

01. Mexican Hotbox
02. Big Spender
03. If I Want To
04. Careful Mind
05. OK Then
06. California Can Can
07. Shooting Blanks
08. I'll Be Your Whatever
09. Cinnamon Sugar
10. Populatio
11. City Kids

LP Traclisting
A1. Mexican Hotbox
A2. Big Spender
B1. I I Want To
B2. Population
C1. California Can Can
C2. Shootingblanks
C3. City Kids
D1. Cinnamon Sugar
D2. I’ll Be Your Whatever

'An Insight To All Minds' is Kaidi's 3rd solo album under his own name, following several EPs and two albums for First Word; 2018's acclaimed 'It's A World Before You' and the re-press of his seminal 2008 sophomore album 'In Search Of Hope' last year.

For those that don't know, Kaidi Tatham is a legendary multi-instrumentalist. Once dubbed "the UK's Herbie Hancock" by Benji B, he's a virtuoso on the keys and a true innovator in sound production as one of the original creators of the Broken Beat sound. Over the years his musical prowess has blessed numerous projects, initially with the likes of Bugz In The Attic and The Herbaliser, and more recently with DJ Jazzy Jeff (through the PLAYlist projects), Andrew Ashong (on the acclaimed 'Sankofa Season' EP last year) and with longtime accomplice, Dego. This in addition to session work for artists such as Mulatu Astatke, Slum Village, Amy Winehouse, Soul II Soul and Leroy Burgess, along with First Word label mates such as Eric Lau, Children of Zeus and Darkhouse Family. Kaidi is also a revered DJ known for rocking parties globally, whilst his solo catalogue spans tons of EPs and releases for labels such as 2000 Black, Eglo and Theo Parrish's Sound Signature.

On 'An Insight To All Minds', Kaidi says it's "not about a destination, but a process. It's about how you drive, not where you're going. Nothing in this world can torment you as much as your own thoughts… We are all going through it. We can all feel what the next person is feeling, believe it or not. It's learning how to tap into it".

The album is comprised of an assortment of Kaidi's unique flavours - uptempo jazz-funk bruk, laced with rhodes, flutes, live bass and delicious percussion. Using that blueprint he moves effortlessly through latin and samba, half-step, deep afro house and a sprinkle of curveballs, all presented in Kaidi's inimitable way.

'Intergalactic Relations' brings with it some 110bpm synthed-out spacey electro-breaks, 'Could It Be' sets off sounding like a Morricone film score, whilst 'Rodney' is some serious heads-down business; stark and punchy off-kilter broken beat and vocal stabs. There are a few guests too - 'Chungo' sees the return of Uhmeer (who previously appeared on 'Cupid' on the album 'It's A World Before You'); here the young Philly MC deftly rides a 9/4 time signature beat. Meanwhile 'Stro Kyat' invites in another supreme talent, Stro Elliot (The Roots), who provides a suitably crisp & crunchy riddim to accompany Kaidi's key play over a mind-bending 5/4 time signature.

With this new album, Kaidi Tatham adds further to his already impressive catalogue, a body of work that falls within the cracks of jazz and dance music, exemplifying modern British black brilliance once again; uncompromising, innovative, groundbreaking, intricately sophisticated and deeply funky. His fanbase expands on every release and it's no surprise that that fanbase includes peers such as Madlib ("ahead of his time"), Gilles Peterson ("a key part of an entire movement"), K15 ("a limitless source of inspiration"), Alexander Nut ("a true virtuoso") and Kyle Hall.

'An Insight To All Minds' is released on double vinyl & digital via First Word Records, April 2nd 2021.

TRACK LISTING

1. Try N Follow
2. Intergalactic Relations
3. Interlude
4. Carry It Mongo Man
5. Chungo (feat. Uhmeer)
6. Insight To All Minds
7. Nah Top Yuh Noise
8. DSXSWC
9. Rodney
10. Rain
11. Could It Be
12. Interlude 2
13. Stro Kyat (feat. Stro Elliot)
14. Tek Care
15. Enjoy Life

This is Kaidi's 4th solo album under his own name, following on from 'An Insight To All Minds' (2021), 'It's A World Before You' (2018), and 'In Search Of Hope' (re-pressed in 2020), all released on First Word, along with several EPs from 2017 onwards.

To bring you up to speed, Kaidi Tatham is a legendary multi-instrumentalist born in the Midlands and based in Belfast. Once dubbed "the UK's Herbie Hancock" by Benji B, he's a virtuoso on the keys and a true innovator in sound production as one of the original creators of the Broken Beat sound. Over the years his musical prowess has blessed numerous projects, recently with the likes of DJ Jazzy Jeff, Andrew Ashong and with longtime accomplice, Dego. This in addition to session and remix work for artists such as Mulatu Astatke, Slum Village, Marcos Valle, Amy Winehouse, Soul II Soul, Nubya Garcia, Rosie Frater-Taylor and Leroy Burgess, along with First Word label mates Eric Lau, Children of Zeus, Allysha Joy and Darkhouse Family. Kaidi is also a revered DJ known for rocking parties globally, whilst his solo catalogue spans tons of EPs and releases for labels such as Dego's 2000 Black, Alex Nut's Eglo Records and Theo Parrish's Sound Signature.

This new album 'Don't Rush The Process' opens with an intro of sweet strings on 'Mystery Solved', ahead of lead title track, which is on a mid-tempo boom bap vibe, before switching to a more uptempo boogie vein, with the assistance of The Easy Access Orchestra, who also appear on 'We Chillin' Out', which is on a similar boogie tip. 'All I Need' is some gospel flavoured hip hop, whilst 'Knocknee Donkey' steps things up in a jazz-funk fashion. The second half of the album takes on a very Brazilian flavoured stance, with a set of delicious latin flavoured grooves on 'Any Flavour', 'Runnin' Tru', 'What A Dream' and 'Sooretama', the latter featuring the additional prowess of pianist Robert Mitchell. There's a touch more of the hip hop beats thrown in via 'Funky Fool' and the album closes out in inimitable Kaidi style with a short message: 'Mind Yourself'.

A hugely prolific artist, here he adds to an already impressive catalogue, a body of work that falls within the cracks of jazz and dance music, exemplifying modern British black brilliance; uncompromising, innovative, groundbreaking, intricately sophisticated and deeply funky. His fanbase expands on every release and it's no surprise that that fanbase includes a diverse set of peers such as Madlib ("ahead of his time"), Gilles Peterson ("a key part of an entire movement"), K15 ("a limitless source of inspiration") and Kyle Hall.

STAFF COMMENTS

Millie says: The musician's musician and broken beat pioneer Kaidi Tatham graces us with a lavish selection of boom-bap, semi-instrumental hip-hop and pure broken beat funk. It's an amazing collection from this much-lauded innovator.

TRACK LISTING

1. Mystery Solved
2. Don't Rush The Process (feat. The Easy Access Orchestra)
3. Just Not Right Rudi
4. All I Need
5. We Chillin' Out (feat. The Easy Access Orchestra)
6. Knocknee Donkey
7. Any Flavour
8. Funky Fool
9. Sooretama (feat. Robert Mitchell)
10. Runnin' Tru
11. What A Dream
12. Mind Yourself

Kaidi Tatham returns to 2000BLACK with R&B and boogie offerings in his own distinct style. 'Galaxy' features Lola who soulfully sings about escapism and hope through the stars. 'A Message From Above' sounds like the gods themselves have passed on a message to Mr Tatham to tell us all. Take heed to the sound of jazz boogie via Jamaica. The Ep is signed off with 'Ergonomic Structures' the sound of a hip-hop / 2-step tune that we all wish existed in '87 (soundman know wha we a chat)

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: One of the great OGs of broken beat, Kaidi Tatham quickly traverses styles and flavours on this new one for 2000Black - all the time keeping it distinctly stylistic of his deft handiwork.

TRACK LISTING

1. Galaxy (feat. Lola Violet)
2. Galaxy (Upbeat Mix) [feat. Lola Violet]
3. A Message From Above
4. Ergonomic Structures

From his earlier work with pioneering London production outfits like Bugz In The Attic, DKD, Silhouette Brown, Blakai, Likwid Biskit, Neon Phusion and Agent K, to his recent releases and collaborations with Dego and the extended 2000black family, Kaidi Tatham is one of the most quietly influential British artists of his time.

2008's 'In Search of Hope' is the second solo album from Tatham and the first under his own name. It pushes the musical boundaries of electronic and dance music in a way that is still rarely heard today. While the album retains its contemporary London influences, it allowed Tatham to stretch out musically in a way he hadn't done on record before. The majority of the album's tracks aren't in the standard 4/4 time signature that most contemporary dance music follows, and some switch between a handful of different time signatures over the course of a few minutes. In a way, the album could be viewed as Tatham's mission statement and a sign of what was to come from him as an artist: uncompromisingly and unapologetically sophisticated modern black music. His face melting virtuosity never gets in the way of coherent groove, melody, harmony and arrangement. Originally released on Tokyo based label Freedom School and recorded on a modest set up at his flat in south London, 'In Search of Hope' has become a holy grail record for dance music fans and jazz heads alike. Its mythical status is spurred on by the fact that it was unavailable digitally, until now, with physical copies fetching astronomical prices online, especially considering how recently it was released compared to other records that reach similar prices.

TRACK LISTING

1. In Search Of Hope, Pt. 1 
2. Swift Inspiration (Quick Kid)
3. Do What You Gotta Do
4. Could I Ever Know?
5. He Laughs She Cries
6. So Amazed
7. I'm High
8. Simiya
9. On A Vibe
10. These Things Will Pass
11. In Search Of Hope, Pt. 2

If there is one artist that has truly become synonymous with Jazz re:freshed over the years, it is the energy, the skill, the showmanship, the innovation, the genius that is Kaidi Tatham. The vibe behind the west London/broken beats/nu-jazz scene as a core member of Bugz In The Attic, Kaidi's 5ive continues the lineage of jazz, fusing it with his own twisted funk, boogie and eletronica.The 10 year anniversary of its first release sees Kaidi's 5ive presented for the first time ever on vinyl.

TRACK LISTING

1. Don't Hide Your Love
2. To My Surprise
3. Dyno
4. For All The Love In Time
5. Organic Juggernaut

'Miles Away' is the sixth full-length solo project for the award-winning London-based independent label.

Comprised of 10 new tracks, performed entirely by the multi-instrumentalist himself once again, this is an array of forward-thinking eclectic electronic jazz. Rhodes, pianos, synths, strings, horns and flutes weave in & out atop of vibrant percussion and mind-bending drum patterns, forming a sound that is uniquely King Kaidi.

We begin with the delicate groove of 'Misty Garden', before the infectious synth-boogie of 'Sweet Cherry Punch'. The almost-Quincy / EWF vibes of lead single 'So Happy' follow, ahead of the mid-tempo stomp of 'Kanji'. 'Silkie Bantam' keeps the energy nice while picking up the BPM a touch, as we reach the half-time title track 'Miles Away', which also features Kaidi on vocals. 'Hipsteppin' does what it says on the tin; another slice of infectious bruk-tinged jazz-boogie. Then it's the return of frequent collaborator, the super-dope MC Uhmeer (aka Jazzy Jeff's son!) on the smooth soulful hip hop bounce of 'Wave'. 'Hydration' brings the funk; clavi keys and some weighty live bass accompany some truly knockin' drums that switch in & out. The set closes with a real treat for the reggae steppers; 'Ku Deh' is a short sweet touch of uplifting rock steady.

For those that don't know, Belfast-based Kaidi Tatham has been an innovative powerhouse in the world of British black music for decades. From his early days as one of the pioneers of the broken beat movement, to his recent prominence as a key-player for DJ Jazzy Jeff's PLAYlist project, he has inspired an array of artists and tastemakers across the globe, from Madlib to Gilles Peterson.

The list of artists he's worked and collaborated with reads like a fever dream - Amy Winehouse, Mulatu Astatke, Soul II Soul, Leroy Burgess, Nubya Garcia, Slum Village, Andrew Ashong, Marcos Valle and beyond. Additionally to a number of releases with 2000 Black's Dego and The Herbaliser, he's also dropped records for Theo Parrish's Sound Signature and Alex Nut's Eglo Records, taking in a number of aliases along the way, including Agent K, Shokazulu, Blakai, Da One Away and Likwid Biskit - the latter two projects alongside IG Culture (New Sector Movements / LCSM). He's also worked with fellow First Word label-mates like Children of Zeus, Allysha Joy, Darkhouse Family and Eric Lau.

TRACK LISTING

1. Misty Garden
2. Sweet Cherry Punch
3. So Happy
4. Kanji
5. Silkie Bantam
6. Miles Away
7. Hipsteppin'
8. Wave (feat. Uhmeer)
9. Hydration
10. Ku Deh

Kaidi Tatham is a legendary multi-instrumentalist born in the Midlands and based in Belfast. Established as one of the original creators of the Broken Beat sound, he is a virtuoso on the keys and a true innovator in sound production.

A deeply prolific artist, this is Kaidi's 5th solo album under his own name, following on from 'Don't Rush The Process' (2022), 'An Insight To All Minds' (2021), 'It's A World Before You' (2018), and 'In Search Of Hope' (re-pressed in 2020), all released on First Word, along with several EPs from 2017 onwards.

'The Only Way' is the latest chapter in Kaidi's entirely unique explorations into sound. 11 tracks touching on bruk, funk, jazz, mid-tempo hip hop and hyper-energetic Brazilian flavours, all thrown into a melting pot that's difficult to define, but all containing Kaidi's unmistakable sonic signature. The epic opener 'Reason We're Here' starts the album softly, before switching midway into KT's trademark synth-lead bruk boogie, to set the scene of what's to come. Lead track 'The Only Way' sees the return of Philly MC Uhmeer (Jazzy Jeff's son), his third collab with Kaidi and a timely celebratory track about this thing called Hip Hop, in its 50th year. 'Feels Like I'm On My Own' is a statement within itself, starting off as a jazz-funk jam, before switching to breakneck Brazilian choro, in the only way Kaidi can, with 'It's On' on a similar vein. 'Fricassee' is some heads down dancery business, and there are more guests with Trian Kayhatu appearing on 'Alien @$^%' and Matt Lord on the super energetic album closer 'Not Suffering'.

Kaidi Tatham continues to grow on his already impressive catalogue, a body of work that falls within the cracks of jazz and dance music, exemplifying modern British black brilliance; uncompromising, innovative, groundbreaking, intricately sophisticated and deeply funky. His fanbase expands on every release and it's no surprise that that fanbase includes a diverse set of peers such as Madlib ("ahead of his time"), Gilles Peterson ("a key part of an entire movement") and K15 ("a limitless source of inspiration") to name just a few of the many influenced by Kaidi's sound.

TRACK LISTING

1. Reason We're Here
2. The Most Wanted Puffin (Lukey Dukey)
3. Interlude Criss Ting
4. The Only Way (feat. Uhmeer)
5. Windus Mc'Guntus
6. Confidence With Attitude
7. Feels Like I'm On My Own
8. Fricassee
9. Alien @$^% (feat. Trian Kayhatu)
10. It's On
11. Not Suffering (feat. Matt Lord)

Co-produced with Metronomy’s Joseph Mount, electro-pop artist TATYANA’s debut album is a careful fusion of her classical harp training with her keen sense for pop production and song writing. Inspired by late-2000s indie pop and Swedish pop auteurs, Treat Me Right is a sparkling, catchy collection of ‘80s synths and futuristic auto-tuned vocals.

TATYANA has lived in Holland, Russia, Singapore, and Boston – where she attended Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship – before settling back in her hometown of London in 2018. The transient nature of her upbringing has certainly informed her music: from underground raves to viral YouTube covers to playing harp on tour with Neneh Cherry, there seems to be no scene that she doesn’t thrive in.

Last year, she released her thrilling debut EP Shadow On The Wall via Sinderlyn. The self-produced collection was met with praise from tastemaker outlets like NYLON, FADER, Office, Bandcamp, Line of Best Fit, and Crack, as well as an exclusive vinyl pressing with Vinyl Me, Please’s Rising program. Treat Me Right is the irresistible product of these impressive first steps, the kind of precisely produced, impossibly catchy pop that takes other artists their entire careers to nail.

TRACK LISTING

1. Kiss Me Right Now
2. Right Places
3. On My Mind
4. Lover, You Don’t Know Me
5. Runaway
6. Introduction
7. Treat Me Right
8. Between The Lines
9. Make Amends
10. End Of The Galaxy

‘Visions’ is a new collaborative album from BADBADNOTGOOD co-founders, Matthew Tavares and Leland Whitty. The Grammy Award winning, multi-platinum producers have been performing and writing music together for 10 years. They have achieved international acclaim with BADBADNOTGOOD and Tavares’ recent solo single ’Self-Portrait’ has been championed by tastemakers such as Gilles Peterson and Benji B. ‘Visions’ is the latest upshot of their incredibly fruitful partnership.

Recorded in Toronto, it was produced by Tavares and Whitty - with Tavares also mixing the album and arranging strings. After a three-week writing period it was played in its entirety in one continuous studio session; almost all the tracks on the album are the first take. Tavares is on piano and guitar, Whitty on saxophone and flute. The rhythm section of Julian Anderson-Bowes on bass and Matthew Chalmers on drums completes the players. They make an impressive collective and are performing at the peak of their powers.

Conceptually the album is a canvas for a combination of composition and group free-form improvisation. Tavares and Whitty are the sole composers, but with some tracks collectively improvised, there is also a group dynamic running through the album. The outcome is a sublime melting pot of modern jazz, impressionist classical music and Arthur Verocai-esque arrangements. It is a sound that is hard to date; it is certainly of the now but is also reminiscent of a lost classic. Similar to the process of its creation, the optimal listening experience for ‘Visions’ is in its entirety. As a coherent body of work it draws the listener in with waves of intensity and crescendos that release back into tranquility - there is both darkness and light in the album’s narrative arc. There is also rawness and honesty to the music, which makes it feel like an intensely personal and intimate offering.

TRACK LISTING

Through The Looking Glass
Woah
Blue
Symbols Of Transformation
Visions Of You
Eyes
Awakenings
Heat Of The Moon
Black Magic
Symbols Of Transformation II
Living Water Assembly 

January 12th, 2020, a Sunday night in Toronto - Matthew Tavares and Leland Whitty (of BADBADNOTGOOD fame) are reunited at Burdock for a live improvised Jazz session. The pair are joined on stage by bassist Julian Anderson-Bowes and drummer Matt Chalmers as part of Burdock’s Piano Fest, an annual event at the city’s brewery and music hall. Two days later an email from Matthew hits Mr Bongo’s inbox... “I think it turned out amazing, brought some really nice recording gear and it sounds almost like a studio record, thought I’d share. Moments definitely get to the jazzier side but there is some spiritual moments that are so far out”.

The Bongo office were all blown away by this free-flowing session, one which sounded like a well-rehearsed set at the end of a long tour, rather than a onetake improvised assembly. The chemistry between the musicians is magical. The tight friendship and musical connection between Tavares and Whitty are self-evident, however, Chalmers and Anderson-Bowes have a great contribution to make too. They act as the solid foundation that leaves Tavares and Whitty free to roam and explore moments of darkness and light, intensity and beauty. From the first time of hearing this intimate session, we knew this had to be shared. The same quartet feature on Matthew Tavares & Leland Whitty’s 2020 album ‘Visions’. The plan to promote ‘Visions’ was to tour, with each night comprising a uniquely improvised set. Sadly due to world events, this couldn’t happen, but for now ‘January 12th’ is a snapshot of the wizardry that would have been from four amazing musicians at the top of their game.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Unbelievably smooth-flowing, intricate jazz improvisations from the master duo of Tavares & Whitty. Expect moments of BADBADNOTGOOD-like smooth jazz and more esoteric, freeform freakouts. A superb recording of superb musicians at full flow. Amazing.

TRACK LISTING

10,000 Roses
Chandelier
Cloud Dance
Forever

Two years after their last long player, Taxi return with another fine set of tracks for our listening pleasure. Mixing up soul, nu-jazz and electronics they create a subtle, atmospheric home listening LP.

Hot Chip front man Alexis Taylor pares everything back to just piano and voice for an intimate record of new songs, reinterpretations of his own writing, and a selection of favourites both well-known and unheard before by other artists. Recorded at Hackney Road Studios by Shuta Shinoda, Piano invites the listener to be privy to a very private recital, with Alexis’ vocal and piano captured live and up-close, preserving each beautiful moment.

“The idea with this record was to choose songs of my own and others' that were personal to me and to document live performances which were intimate and unadorned. I wanted to reduce everything to the barest elements, record a great piano well and do as little as possible to the recordings eq or effects-wise. The mood created on the record is pretty different from that on other records I have been involved with. It feels like a special place to be able to go to."

“After it was completed 'Piano' struck me as a sort of gospel record in places - albeit an atheist's gospel album, if that's possible. 'In The Light of the Room', Elvis's 'Crying In The Chapel', the hymnal 'I Never Lock That Door', and the miracle-referencing 'So Much Further To Go' - they have that feel to them for me lyrically and musically. But the Miracles in 'So Much Further' are Smokey's as much as anything Biblical, and the reference to both silence and music filling the air reflects the album’s observations about absence, loss, repair and surrender to love and sound. The song is one I was really happy with when I first wrote it partly because it offered some mystery to me - I didn't fully understand it. After a close friend and collaborator passed away during the making of this record - actually someone who I had asked to contribute small string parts to it - I felt I understood it all too well:

'Life a miracle - a miracle that's hard to bear'”

TRACK LISTING

01. I’m Ready
02. So Much Further To Go
03. Crying In The Chapel
04. Without Your Name
05. In The Light Of The Room
06. Lonely Vagabond
07. Repair Man
08. Don’t Make My Brown Eyes Blue
09. I Never Lock That Door
10. Just For A Little While
11. Don’t Worry

Tough, mid-tempo Ghanaian funk & Highlife grooves from Ebo Taylor Junior, son of the mighty Ebo Taylor. Originally released in 1978, this sunkissed set with Wuta Wazutu is now extremely difficult and expensive to find in its original form. Soulful and skanking with the classic Accra sound, the nine track set is infectious from head to toe, though never better than the mighty back-beat attack of the killer “Mondo Soul Funky”.

STAFF COMMENTS

Patrick says: Autumn might have hit hard this year, but this groove heavy LP from Ebo Taylor Jnr and Wuta Wazutu is simply sunshine in vinyl from. Funky, soulful and skanking, this has had everyone smiling in the shop this afternoon.

TRACK LISTING

Lord We’ve Missed You
System To Love
Begging On Knees
You’ve Got Yours Greedy Man
Gotta Take It Cool
Mondo Soul Funky
Swinging Soul For Love
Every Woman Needs A Helper
Love Is What I Need

As keyboard maestro James Taylor arrives at his 40th year leading his
Quartet, he has re-signed with his original label Acid Jazz and is embarking
on a series of the most radical projects he has ever worked on.

Following his first classical album ‘Shadows and Dreams’ earlier this year,
he brings the Quartet together for a remarkable new album.

‘Te Deum’ sets the ancient, 4th-entury Christian text to intense jazz, funk,
and Latin grooves. The music sees the James Taylor Quartet working
alongside the children of the Benenden Chapel Choir, and a guest horn
section and legendary Acid Jazz percussionist Snowboy.

Lead track ‘Have Mercy On Us’ mixes Brazilian samba with Gregorian
chants, ‘The Comforter’ sounds like a Donald Byrd with voices Blue Note
Records experiment, and last year’s radio favourite ‘Wildflower’ mixes
bossa nova with sunshine pop harmonies and a positive message.

TRACK LISTING

1. Have Mercy On Us
2. We Praise Thee Oh
God
3. Save Thy People
4. The Comforter
5. Wildflower
6. Find A Way
7. Heaven and Earth
8. Glory Of The Father

Volume 3 of the Jazz Sessions is here and brings the original Acid Jazz star James Taylor into play, and on the 40th Anniversary of his solo career.

Formerly a member of the Prisoners, who split in 1986, he recorded his first single as the James Taylor Quartet - a take on Herbie Hancock’s ‘Blow Up’ - later that year for Acid Jazz-precursor Re-Elect The President, before working extensively with the label in the foundation of his lauded career and beyond. It is apt that the anniversary of that session is marked with James’ first release in a Trio format.

’The Truth’ sees him working with noted players Theo Carasco on drums and Orlando Flemming on upright bass, to recreate a sound influenced by the records that Les McCann, Hampton Hawes and Lonnie Liston Smith were making in the early ‘70s.

The sound world of the trio involves an extensive interaction with analogue electric keyboards, be it the Fender Rhodes - James lead instrument throughout - the Solina string synthesiser and Hammond Organ. The trio is joined by Aref Durvesh’s Tablas and on three tracks, vocals are added by gospel-trained singer Liz Jai.

The material includes takes on Vince Guaraldi’s ‘Lucy & Linus’ and ’Thus Sprach Zarathustra’, as well as the inspirational vocal title track and the cosmic jazz of 'Aref’s Space’.

A fitting continuation of James Taylor’s catalogue on Acid Jazz, as he returns to the label that started his career.

TRACK LISTING

1. Linus & Lucy
2. The Truth
3. Elevation
4. Get Carter
5. Thus Sprach Zarathustra
6. Another Day
7. Aref’s Space
8. Nothing Else

Alexis Taylor releases a new album on Domino. It is a very new, very individualist and – yes – very beautiful reflection of a life that's changed immeasurably since Alexis first started out in music. This is a musician, writer and singer who has carved his own unique path through the music of the 21st century, completely avoiding getting trapped along the way in dumb oppositions of pop vs avant-garde, dancefloor vs intellect, retro vs modernist and so on. He has worked with living legends from major pop stars to free improvisors in the furthest left field, played huge arenas and tiny clubs without ever privileging one over the other, and through all of it, never stopped listening and learning. All of this accumulated experience is put to work on Beautiful Thing in pursuit of something subtle and elusive but ultimately quite profound and beautifully human. Taylor’s fourth album also represents the first time Alexis has made a solo album with a producer, that producer being Tim Goldsworthy, co-founder of Mo Wax and DFA Recordings and member of UNKLE.

The record is a bold and confident step forward for Alexis both sonically and in terms of his songwriting abilities. It has electronic thrills, dark spaces, memories of dancefloors, heartfelt writing; it's composed, it's improvised, it's accidental, it's strange, but it's also very immediate. It is a beautiful thing itself: a moving, modern and unique sounding long-player, to get lost in on repeated deep listens.

Alexis Taylor is one of the UK’s most distinctive singer-songwriters. A singular voice, he’s built a substantial body of solo work over the years. 'Paris In The Spring' is his most revealing album yet, baring sentiments both specific and universal. The subject matter doesn’t shy away from hard-hitting themes, but musically, it’s carefree, brightly-lit and contemporary, drawing on elegant disco-house, voluptuous basslines and Vangelis-inspired soundscapes.

Testament to his skill as a curator, he’s called on some impressive personnel to help create its effervescent sound world: Air’s Nicolas Godin, The Avalanches, Lola Kirke, Oli Bayston, Étienne de Crécy, Elizabeth White of Pale Blue and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, to name but a few. In this world, the confessional style of country is charged by the pop melodicism of Paul McCartney, the futuristic funk of Sly and the Family Stone and, as Taylor puts it, “synthesisers left out in the rain”. It’s where British Americana meets Gallic flair, somewhere on Mars.

Thankfully, no synths were harmed in the making of the album. The title references a psychological test where things are not as they seem. “You have to look for those double meanings, or what’s hiding under the surface.” Ultimately, this is an album about freedom from constraints, from preconceptions, from genre. Taylor experiments with all different musical styles – country, folk, disco – and has weaved it together here into something unique.

TRACK LISTING

1. Your Only Life
2. I Can Feel Your Love (produced By The Avalanches)
3. Out Of Phase Feat. Lola Kirke
4. Wild Horses
5. Colombia
6. For A Toy
7. On A Whim (with Green Gartside Of Scritti Politti)
8. Fainting By Numbers
9. Mp3s Can Make You Cry
10. Black Lodge In The Sky

Alexis Taylor is one of the UK’s most distinctive singer-songwriters - both individually, and as part of pop giants Hot Chip. Paris In The Spring proved Taylor’s most revealing album yet, peeling back the layers of his psyche to reveal sentiments both specific and universal. The subject matter doesn’t shy away from hard-hitting themes but musically, it’s carefree, brightly lit and contemporary, drawing on leftfield pop, country, elegant disco-house and Vangelis-inspired soundscapes.

“Marea (Blessed Madonna) and Pat Alvarez and I got together in a small underground studio and put together the embryonic version of this song in a moment of first (musical) connections, quite quickly. Marea told me she never let her own voice be on records usually, but Pat and I encouraged her to include her singing. It’s beautiful.

“Even touching time isn’t time enough” is her own hypnotic riddle and is a fascinating hook I think.

The lyrics and melodies beyond that came from me - a song I was writing about someone losing their mother. Imagined scenarios dealing with death and loss and a life being remembered and honoured. You know, cheery stuff for a house banger.

Pat and I worked on the music on further sessions with his Solid Wall partner Lucas, and I enjoyed trying to give the guitar an underwater feel; Neil Young’s ‘Will To Love’ was being channelled for that element, and the Beach Boys’ ‘Til I Die’ also with the added (Mellotron) vibraphone parts.

I think the song is an unusual and emotive mix of powerful epic ballad with house- leaning dancefloor track. Who knows how to dance to such a thing?” - Alexis Taylor

TRACK LISTING

A1. Alexis Taylor, The Blessed Madonna & Pat Alvarez - Time
A2. Alexis Taylor, The Blessed Madonna & Pat Alvarez - Time (Sasha Remix)
B1. Alexis Taylor, The Blessed Madonna & Pat Alvarez - Time (Solid Wall Remix)
B2. Alexis Taylor - Black Lodge In The Sky (Jack Lever Paris On Fire) 

Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip and producer Mike Simonetti—founder of Troubleman Unlimited and Italians Do It Better, and one-half of Pale Blue—have joined forces for a new collaborative EP on Smugglers Way. The release pairs a transcendent cover of Bonnie "Prince” Billy’s 'I See A Darkness' with the luminous original 'Perfect Kiss', plus remixes by claire rousay and Black Forces.

TRACK LISTING

1. I See A Darkness 
2. I See A Darkness (Claire Rousay Remix)
3. Perfect Kiss
4. Perfect Kiss (Black Forces Remix) 

Attia Taylor is a NYC based musician, writer, and content producer. She is the founder of Womanly Magazine, The Dorothy and a member of The Art Dept Collective. Her work is rooted in social justice, art, and design, to bring inclusive and culturally relevant content to sound, print and digital realms. She is passionate about building and cultivating communities through journalism, music, storytelling, and research. “Space Ghost” is her debut solo album, recorded with Jeff Ziegler (Kurt Vile, The War on Drugs) in Philadelphia.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Seventy
A2. Mildest Winner
A3. Basic Economics
A4. Space Ghost
A5. Broad And Cherry
B1. Dog And Pony Show
B2. Baby Ain’t Nobody
B3. Wanna Go
B4.Wanderer
B5. Alone

A landmark recording from one of Ghana’s great musical architects, Ebo Taylor’s 1977 self-title release marked the first solo LP by the legendary guitarist, arranger, and composer after years behind the scenes shaping the sound of modern highlife.

Emerging during a pivotal era in Ghana’s cultural and political life, the album finds Taylor fusing his roots in Fante traditional rhythms with the electric groove of American funk, soul, and jazz - a sound honed during his time studying in London and comparing notes with the likes of Fela Kuti and members of Osibisa.

Recorded for the Essiebons label, Ebo Taylor label, Ebo Taylor brims with richly layered horns, deep Afrobeat-inspired grooves, and a melodic sophistication that speaks to Taylor’s gift as both bandleader and storyteller. Unjustly overlooked at the time, Ebo Taylor has since become a touchstone for cratediggers worldwide, with tracks like 'Heaven' achieving cult status among DJs and collectors.

Now reissued by Strut Records, this release includes newly restored and remastered audio by The Carvery and See Why Audio, as well as new liner notes containing an interview with Taylor’s son, Henry Taylor.

TRACK LISTING

1. Saana
2. Ntsir A
3. Bra
4. Ohye Atar Gyan
5. Heaven
6. Amponsah

BBE Music unearth ‘Palaver’, a long-lost, previously unreleased 1980 album from Ghanaian guitarist and songwriter Ebo Taylor. If Fela Kuti was the king of Nigerian Afrobeat, then Ebo Taylor, 83 and still playing hard, is the king of Ghana Funky-Highlife. No doubt whatsoever. Much of Ebo’s beautiful 70s and 80s output has been reissued, as more and more Afro music lovers are being converted to his unique pan-West African sound. In 1980 while on a club tour of Nigeria with his regular touring band, Ebo bumped into Chief Tabansi of Tabansi Records. They agreed that Taylor would record a one-album session to be released exclusively on Tabansi. Within a few days the deal was signed, the session completed, the tapes signed off, and Ebo and his band went on their way to complete their Nigerian tour. But for reasons that no-one (including Ebo) can now fully recall, the master tapes got shelved in a dusty backroom in Tabansi’s Onitsha HQ. Where they remained, undisturbed, unreleased, unplayed, for almost forty years. Last year, Peter Adarkwah of BBE Music signed off on a major multi-album reissue deal with Tabansi and its affiliated labels. ‘What about unissued material, if we find any?’ Joe Tabansi, Chief’s son and current administrator of the label, casually asked. Yes, replied Peter- but WHAT unissued material? Upon which, Joe produces these masters. The tapes are rushed to the redoubtable Carvery vinyl remastering and pressing plant in East London, and all at BBE soon realised that they had a masterpiece on their hands. All-new material, all Ebo’s own compositions, all recorded with Ebo’s crème-de-la-crème touring and recording players, including George Amissah. Mat Hammond, George Kennedy and George Abunuah among others. Here it is, for the first time, anywhere. Ebo Taylor’s Lost Nigeria Sessions.

TRACK LISTING

1. Palaver
2. Make You No Mind
3. Abebrese
4. Help Africa
5. Nyame Dadaw

Ebo Taylor, the Ghanaian guitarist, composer, bandleader, and producer is a seminal figure when it comes to highlife music. Remined is proud to present these two classics as a 45 for first time, in conjunction with Mr. Bongo. "Will You Promise" and "Maye Omama" are both taken from Taylor's 1976 release "My Love And Music." Grab doubles and watch the dance floor fill up.

TRACK LISTING

A. Will You Promise
B. Maye Omama

Ghanaian music legend Ebo Taylor returns with perhaps his finest album to date. But don’t take our word for it. That’s coming straight from the man himself, and he should know after more than 60 years in the business!
The 81-year-old composer, arranger, guitarist and vocalist has been a key figure in the evolving afro-funk sound since the Seventies, working with the likes of Apagya Show Band, CK Mann and Pat Thomas. Famously, he rubbed shoulders with Fela Kuti while studying in London in the Sixties, before going on to lead the Ghana Black Star Band (featuring Osei and Sol Amarfio from Osibisa) and later the Uhuru Dance Band back in Ghana.
Like Fela, he is always pushing forward, constantly reconceptualising his sound and attuning it for a new generation. Part teacher, part messenger, listen to "Yen Ara" and you will not only hear the high-energy afrobeat, sweet highlife, jazz and konkoma influences that he’s famous for, but also a disco pulse and hard-hitting percussive edge to the tracks, which were produced by Justin Adams (Tinariwen, Rachid Taha, Robert Plant) and recorded in the live room at Electric Monkey Studio in Amsterdam.
His group, the Saltpond City Band, are all handpicked local musicians featuring two of his sons. An appropriate line-up on an album whose titles means “we”. And they are on fine form, ripping through tracks such as ‘Krumandey’ (a surefire party starter) and ‘Mind Your Own Business’ (a simple message delivered over a frenetic drum rhythm).
Elsewhere, ‘Aboa Kyirbin’ will please fans of tough afrobeat grooves, while Taylor could well be inciting a riot at his next gig with ‘Mumudey Mumudey’, We hear him calling for ‘preshaaah’ and leading us into a call and response as the trumpet takes us higher. And the lift of those horns on ‘Ankoma’m’ evokes some of his finest work such as ‘Love & Death’ and ‘Come Along’, the latter recorded with the Pelikans and featured on a recent Mr Bongo reissue.

TRACK LISTING

Poverty No Good
Mumudey Mumudey
Krumandey
Aboa Kyirbin 
Mind Your Own Business
Ankoma’m
Abenkwan Puchaa
Yen Ara 
Aba Yaa

Revered for his Hammond organ work, soul-jazz grooves, and his three decade career leading The James Taylor Quartet, maestro keyboard player
James Taylor releases his first album of classical works.

His long association with Acid Jazz Records continues, as the label also
steps into the classical world for the very first time.

Recorded solo on a Steinway grand piano, Taylor performs some of his
favourite pieces from the classical cannon, with familiar tunes alongside
lesser-known works on this beautiful, atmospheric recording. His
interpretations show a deep love of classical music.

Always one to evolve, just as the James Taylor Quartet introduced Herbie
Hancock to the indie scene of the late ‘80s, Taylor in turn introduces his
audience to a new repertoire, with a remarkable, fresh and modern solo
classical piano album.

TRACK LISTING

1. JS Bach - Polonaise In G Major BWV 130
2. Beethoven - Sonata No.20 Opus 49 'Leichte Sonate’ First Movement
3. Beethoven - Sonata No.20 Opus 49 'Leichte Sonate’ Second Movement
4. CPE Bach - Solfeggietto In C Minor
5. Beethoven - Sonata No.8 Sonate Pathetique Second Movement Adagio Cantabile
6. JS Bach - French Suite No 5 Gavotte
7. Mozart - Sonate KV 545
8. Scarlatti - Allegretto In E Minor
9. Beethoven - Sonata No. 14 Opus 27 ‘Moonlight Sonata’

The James Taylor Quarter were the original group on the Acid Jazz scene, and 'In The Hand Of The Inevitable' was their 1995 triumphant Top 40 return to the Acid Jazz label.

Recorded over a year, produced by James Taylor and Acid Jazz Records founder Eddie Piller, it was a thrilling compendium of everyone’s favourite musical influences, from Hammond grooves, funk rock, and Mizell Brothers inspired fusion. It became James’ best-selling album, and in retrospect his most popular album amongst his fans.

The original vinyl issue was missing two tracks that were on the CD and this 30th Anniversary Edition is released on double vinyl with those two tracks now included. The release includes picture sleeve inner sleeves with in-depth sleeve notes by Acid Jazz’s Dean Rudland and new pictures from the album sessions, housed in a wide-spine sleeve.

TRACK LISTING

1. Love Will Keep Us Together
2. 3 Mile Island
3. Free Your Mind
4. Haitian Breakdown
5. Good Thing
6. Let’s Get Together
7. Segue No. 1
8. Stepping Into My Life
9. Whole Lotta Love
10. Journey
11. Sounds Of Freedom
12. Keep On Moving
13. In The Hand Of The Inevitable
14. Astral Plane*
15. Love Ballad*

*CD Only

To mark the 35th Anniversary of the label, Acid Jazz has been reissuing seminal records from their catalogue on colour vinyl.

The second James Taylor Quartet release in the series, following ‘The Money Spyder’, this version of ‘Mission Impossible’ is pressed on a fitting red vinyl. 

The original release track-listing showcases JTQ’s sixties soundtrack odyssey – driving organ instrumentals from the beginnings of Acid Jazz.

Alongside Lalo Schifrin’s iconic title track appear tracks by Herbie Hancock, Paul Simon and Bacharach & David, before the Taylor-penned original ‘The Stooge’ closes out this lean, hip collection.

TRACK LISTING

1. Blow Up
2. Mission Impossible
3. Goldfinger
4. The Cat
5. Mrs. Robinson
6. Alfie
7. The Stooge

The amazing story of the home studio that helped launch some of Britain’s most beloved bands. The Sheffield space age began in 1961, when local mechanic Ken Patten won a tape-recording competition by recreating the sound of a rocket launch using a pencil and a bicycle pump. In the decades that followed, the makeshift home studio he constructed became the launch pad for a group of young musicians who would shape the futuristic sound of 1980s pop.

The Human League, Heaven 17, Pulp, ABC and others made their early recordings with Ken, whose DIY ethic was the perfect fit for a city facing industrial decline but teeming with ideas. Studio Electrophonique tells the story of a generation seeking new frontiers in music, using everything they could lay their hands on – from science fiction novels to glam rock, Dada art and cheap electronics – to get there. Drawing on original interviews with Jarvis Cocker, Martyn Ware, Mark White and others, it brings to light a world of humour, charm, creativity and unfounded yet undaunted self-belief.

British guitar virtuoso and powerhouse singer-songwriter Joanne Shaw Taylor returns with her electrifying 10th studio album, 'Black & Gold'. Reuniting with legendary producer Kevin Shirley (Iron Maiden, Journey, Joe Bonamassa), Taylor pushes the boundaries of blues rock, weaving in threads of Americana, indie rock, and retro '80s pop. From heart-wrenching ballads to hard-hitting blues rock bruisers, the album is a masterclass in emotional depth and raw energy.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hold Of My Heart
2. All The Things I Said
3. Black & Gold
4. Who's Gonna Love Me Now?
5. I Gotta Stop Letting You Let Me Down
6. Summer Love
7. Grayer Shade Of Blue
8. Hell Of A Good Time
9. Look What I've Become
10. What Are You Gonna Do Now?
11. Love Lives Here

Two tracks from the short-lived Twinight label from Chicago that peaked in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, their biggest star being the super soulful Syl Johnson.

Featuring ‘Is It Worth A Chance’, the flipside of Josephine Taylor’s 1969 single ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind’, original copies of which go for anything between £30 and £100 these days.

A brass peppered funker with a driving bassline behind Josephine’s strutting vocal, it was the climax of her short career that started with three 45s for the Mar-V-Lus label.

Cut with Krystal Generation’s 1970 side ‘Satisfied’, the B-side of their ‘Is It Meant To Be’ that goes for around £75 if you can find a copy.

A female four-piece from Chicago featuring Darlene Arnold, who recorded several sides in her own right as well as half a dozen with Krystal Generation, who also released a couple of singles on Gene Chandler’s Mister Chand label.

‘Satisfied’ revolves around Darlene’s lead vocal, some glorious harmonies and some sassy Staxlike horns.

Slightly slower paced than Josephine Taylor’s cut - more soulful but just as funky.

TRACK LISTING

Josephine Taylor ‘Is It Worth A Chance’
Krystal Generation ‘Satisfied’

One of UK soul’s most fascinating artists, most enigmatic figures and most under-appreciated talents, Andrew Lewis Taylor is a prodigious multi-instrumentalist and eclectic polymath. He enjoys a fiercely loyal following which, over the years, has included celebrity champions like Bowie, Elton and D'Angelo. Numb is Taylor's sixth album, initially released on his own label Slow Reality (an anagram of his name) and licensed to Be With for this long-awaited physical edition. It captures Taylor's wholly unique, intoxicating take on lush, late-night psychedelic soul music.

Lewis wrote and recorded these 10 brand new tracks after a 17 year break from making music, although the album came together over a two-year period. The years away have done nothing to dull Taylor's unique musical vision. He still astounds. The lyrical themes, however, have shifted. Understandably, more than a decade and a half of soul searching and unflinching self-examination cannot fail to influence this most honest of songwriters, and boy does it show. Numb marks a return to the darker, more mysterious side of his output: "Brian Wilson-channels-Smokey Robinson atmospheres", as Mojo put it recently.

After playing a rapturously received gig at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC in 2006, Lewis unceremoniously walked away from music and disappeared completely. An interview in 2016 shed light on some of the reasons for Taylor’s withdrawal from the business, but there was no hint of a return anytime soon. Then in June 2021, news emerged out of the blue that he was readying new music alongside Sabina Smyth with whom he had worked first time around.

On Numb, Lewis deftly balances stark, soul-bearing lyrics with moody mid-tempo pop-soul sheen. He deals candidly with depression, mental turmoil, even thoughts of suicide - clearly more personal than Taylor's earlier songs. The music is rich, warm and layered, with infectious melodies and hooks that stick with you. A true grower of an LP, it really does reward repeated listens. As Jim Irvin in Mojo reflected, "despite the depths these plumb, it's a curiously uplifting experience, unfurling like a concept album about life's challenges with an optimistic beauty at its heart."

Triumphant dubwise horns ring out yet, almost instantly, “Final Hour” takes on a dark, downbeat vibe. With lyrics that confront (and, seemingly, confound) death head-on, Lewis ensures the groove is still there, the beats still swing and your head still nods, strings glissade. Woven around delicate yet insistent piano and subtle strings over a killer bassline, the title track “Numb” is a good example of the lyrical themes throughout the album. As Taylor reflects, "So removed I feel no pain / And for all I know I could be having the time of my life" with a coda that feels very much in conversation with Brian Wilson's finest harmonies. "Feels So Good" is sophisticated 90s-sounding soul of the highest order. The music and vocals feel simultaneously optimistic and despondent. Downlifting. A neat trick, and one Lewis has been so adept at over the years. "Apathy" is a mini-epic, a symphonic-soul gem which builds and glides and, eventually, soars. “Worried Mind" is another slow-builder, creeping out the gate in a sketchy, discordant fashion before climbing to half-crescendo but never quite breaking free of its disorientating restraint.

The brighter "Please" presents a more hopeful mood, with the refrain "I still believe" ringing out as Lewis harmonises with himself. "Brave Heart" quietly struts from step one, as Lewis's falsetto swaggers over a downtempo backdrop with ace echoey drums, beautiful strings and serene electric guitar. Closing out Side C, "Is It Cool" answers its own (non-) question with a spellbinding five and a half minutes of swoonsome deep soul that oscillates between a restrained, barely-there backdrop and a lushly full musical accompaniment of acoustic and electric guitar and organ over bass and slick drums. The penultimate track "Nearer" is a magical, soul-stirring ballad in which Lewis sings of reaching a sweet salvation and achieving a peace of mind. If the hairs on the back of your neck aren't standing up by the midway point, you might need to check your pulse. Album closer and true tear-jerker "Being Broken" places Lewis's gorgeous voice high in the mix and the wordless falsetto and melodies invite you to ponder what Pet Sounds might sound like if it were refashioned as a dubby 21st Century electronic soul album. Astonishing.

Simon Francis’s vinyl mastering spreads out the ten tracks over a double LP so, as ever, nothing is compromised. And as usual, the records have been cut by Cicely Balston at Air Studios and pressed at Record Industry. Turn it up and let the Lewis Taylor sound envelop you.

TRACK LISTING

A1 : Final Hour (4:59)
A2 : Numb (5:35)
A3 : Feels So Good (4:29)
B1 : Apathy (5:30)
B2 : Worried Mind (5:17)
C1 : Please (5:42)
C2 : Brave Heart (5:21)
C3 : Is It Cool (5:31)
D1 : Nearer (5:45)
D2 : Being Broken (4:58)

Sometimes when I drink wine out of a globulous glass with the thinnest of rims, blocking out the fact it's billed at £14 a pop, I think of baby Becky. Hair so blonde it's neon white, cheeks so chubby you can't see her eyes. What must she think right now? She must think she made it.

We're a great big adult person. That was always the plan, right?In her extraordinary debut, with her trademark lyricism and razor-sharp wit, Ivor Novello Award-winning musician and artist Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka SELF ESTEEM) takes us on a journey through womanhood - whatever the hell that means. Through the notes, lyrics and biting observational prose for which Taylor has become renowned, A Complicated Woman offers itself up as a subversive anti-Bible for any woman who has ever cracked under the weight of impossible expectation; who has done unto others the damage that has been wrought upon her; and who has discovered deep within herself a resilience that surprised her.

A Complicated Woman is a cathartic scream of a book that gets to the heart of being a woman in the world today, and cements Taylor as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.

One of the finest hip-hop albums ever made, A Tribe Called Quest's debut record (featuring stone-cold classics like "Can I Kick It?" and "Bonita Applebum") took the idea of the boasting hip-hop male and turned it on its head. For many listeners, when this non-traditional, surprisingly feminine album was released, it was like hearing an entirely new form of music. In this book, Shawn Taylor explores the creation of the album as well as the impact it had on him at the time - a 17-year-old high-school geek who was equally into hip-hop, punk, new wave, skateboarding, and Dungeons & Dragons.

All of a sudden, with this one album, the world made more sense. He has spent many years investigating this album, from the packaging to the song placement to each and every sample - Shawn Taylor knows this record like he knows his tattoos, and he's finally been able to write a fascinating and highly entertaining book about it.

The vinyl edition of Surge Studio Music gives punk and glam rock pioneer Spider Taylor's archival pornographic soundtracks the physical presence they deserve. Sourced from his 1985-86 work for Al Parker and Steve Scott's iconic Surge Studios, these tracks, which were crafted with drum machines, analogue synths and Steve Conrad's engineering, unfold with tactile depth. The reverb-soaked ambience of 'Rainforest,' the nocturnal pulse of 'Tech' and the sleazy, cinematic grooves take on a new dimension and highlight Taylor's adventurous blend of post-punk, synthwave and erotic atmosphere. Wrapped in Gwenael Rattke's striking artwork and with detailed liner notes, it's a definitive document of a lost queer musical world.

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
1."Stairs"
2."Rain Forest"
3."Cobra"
4."Coming Soon"

Side 2
1."Slow Bug"
2."Tech"
3."Hi Tech"
4."Strange Places, Strange Things"

What made the Beatles so extraordinary? The secrets of their genius, celebrated and explained by a leading psychologist. There has never been a band like the Beatles. How did these four young musicians come together at exactly the right moment, and how did everything fall into place so perfectly that they became the most innovative and successful band that the world has ever seen, and a cultural phenomenon that still shapes the world today? Was it simply a series of lucky coincidences, or were there larger reasons for their success? Steve Taylor, a renowned scholar of psychology and spirituality, and former professional musician, retells the story of the Beatles through the lens of their creativity.

He explores the synchronicities and synergy that generated their success, and the flow state they cultivated as a group, their relentless self-development, and their spontaneous and prolific creativity. He shows how their transpersonal creativity elevated them above their peers, and how they opened their minds to connect to the spirit of the 1960s, becoming transmitters of a creative energy that transcended themselves. Across the Universe is a thrilling new look at the psychological, cultural, and spiritual forces behind the Beatles’ genius.

Wildly enjoyable, and packed full of surprising insights into the Beatles’ story, this is an invitation to experience the Beatles’ brilliance anew.

Following the great reception of “Hiverned 01” here's the second installment of Hivern's edit series.

In the A Side, TB's “Invitation To Love”, a highly anticipated track that's finally released after becoming a fixture in John Talabot's sets. Based on Twin Peaks OST's “Laura Palmer's Theme”, the track rephrases Angelo Badalamenti's clas- sic from an acid house perspective. Adding analog rhythms and a crispy bassli- ne to the ethereal chords of the original composition, this refix manages to keep the dream-like atmospheres of the song while transforming it into dancefloor- ready groove. The idea is simple, the results are magic.

On the flip, Marc Piñol repeats appearance on the series revamping some lost australian minimal-wave track. In the vein of his previous “Wheels” edit, the track conjures gloomy atmospheres and sparse rhythms with gritty synth melodies. On the top of it, the barcelonian producer adds dialogues from spanish cult art- house film “Arrebato” (hence the title) multiplying the obscure ambience of the tune.

Once again, the release comes in a limited edition 10” wrapped in a handmade silk-screened sleeve. No digital and no-repress.

TRACK LISTING

A1. TB – Invitation To Love
B1. Marc Piñol - Arrebato

Tea Breaks is based in Todmorden in the north of the UK. Although it's a small market town, it's well known for its pub, The Golden Lion, and the quality DJ bookings it gets. The label is proving just as good with yet another great collision of legendary hip-hop sounds and global beats. 'Breathe & Stop' has Bollywood vocals and classic East Coast bars, 'Tea & Beer' has drunken rhythms and world percussion with silky female rap tones, 'Broad Nod Factor' rolls deep with a golden-era edge and sunny flutes and 'Ms Fat Booty' shuts down with dark soul swagger. Four great mash-ups.

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
Breathe & Stop
Tea & Beer

Side 2
Broad Nod Factor
Ms Fat Booty

Invada Records announce the release of Team Brick's debut album "Alogon". Team Brick is vocalist / multi instrumentalist Matt Williams who has over the past couple of years been quietly making a name for himself in the Bristol music scene, not least his involvement last year on Portishead's "3rd" album. Along with Geoff Barrow and Billy Fuller, Williams is also a member of Beak whose debut album will be released on Invada later this year. If you haven't heard or seen this man play out or heard any of his music this is a good a place as any to check him out. The man cant be compared to anybody or anything, but if you're a fan of the following artists... John Zorn, Merzbow, Mr Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3, Steve Reich, Dalek, Cardiacs etc etc you may wish to explore what he has to offer with this album. Making comparisons from Robert Wyatt to Gastr Del Sol to Sunn O))) Wire magazine concluded; 'There are plenty of would-be mavericks currently operating on the fringes of the UK music underground, most of whom are labouring under delusions of adequacy, never mind grandeur. Matt Williams is the genuine article.'

TEAM DRESCH ARE BACK with a NEW FUCKING RECORD, 30 years after their last full-length release. Sure, yeah, that’s a long time between releases. BUT, aren’t you dying to hear what 30 years of living, laughing, loving, and losing collagen sounds like? This album SOUNDS LIKE lungs full of grief expelling, eyes and guts wide open, yearning to be one with animals and nature, metal-flange-goth-grunge-punk-ass-rock-and-roll, loaded with inimitable vocal melodies and harmonies, Donna Dresch’s soaring guitaring that grabs you by the heart, so many other rad guitar parts all orchestrally intertwining, ass-thumping bass, and drumming mastery that deserves its own Grammys. The songs are wildly dynamic, compelling, moving, and just… BIG, in feeling and sound. Team Dresch is Donna Dresch, Jody Bleyle, Kaia Wilson, Marcéo Martinez, and Melissa York. Bleyle and Wilson share vocal duties, while Martinez and York take turns bashing the shit out of their drum kits. Bleyle, Dresch, and Wilson all take turns with guitars and bass on this record. Well, Kaia played bass on just one song (but not on the song 'One Song'). The lyrics tell stories of loss and grief, transition and transience, and telling the Christian Right to fuck right off, again. They paint landscapes rich in flora and fauna. In one way or another, these songs are all LOVE songs, when you look at love as the multitude of meaning that it is. If you’re already familiar with Team Dresch’s now widely considered classic emo-queercore sound, this record will give you some of that, but it’s going to take you on some unexpected twisted turns as well.

TRACK LISTING

1. One Song
2. Growing Underground
3. Heard A Bang
4. I've Really Become Some Thing
5. Jamie
6. Still Your Room
7. And Now Your Face
8. I Won't Tell
9. (Where Do) I Belong
10. Every Owl Leaves
11. Last One At The Party
12. Protectors

Second album from Sunderland punk band Tearjerker.

Built from the foundations of their self-titled debut album, 'Ghosts' is a labour of love and heartbreak; an album shaped by reflection, loss and everything left unsaid. Bigger, louder, and more emotionally charged, this record pushes Tearjerker’s sound further than ever before — raw, honest, and straight from the heart.

TRACK LISTING

1. Introvert
2. Imposter Syndrome
3. Ghosts
4. Siren
5. Not the One
6. Out of Touch
7. If
8. Untamed
9. Humble Pie
10. Jezebel
11. Grand Delusions
12. Pictures of You

The new album from Tears For Fears, Songs For A Nervous Planet, features four new studio tracks plus live recordings of Tears For Fears on tour and at their best. The album features live performances of hit songs like “Shout”, “Head Over Heels”, “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”, “Mad World” & more. Spanning all eras of the band from The Hurting to The Tipping Point and beyond, this record takes you on the incomparable sonic journey that is a Tears For Fears live show and their career to date.

TRACK LISTING

Standard CD
01. Say Goodbye To Mum And Dad *
02. The Girl That I Call Home *
03. Emily Said *
04. Astronaut *
05. No Small Thing
06. Tipping Point
07. Everybody Wants To Rule The World
08. Secret World
09. Sowing The Seeds Of Love
10. Long, Long, Long Time
11. Break The Man
12. My Demons
13. Rivers Of Mercy
14. Mad World
15. Suffer The Children
16. Woman In Chains
17. Bad Man’s Song
18. Pale Shelter
19. Break It Down Again
20. Head Over Heels
21. Change
22. Shout
*New Studio Tracks

LP Formats
Side A
01. Say Goodbye To Mum And Dad *
02. The Girl That I Call Home *
03. Emily Said *
04. Astronaut *
05. Tipping Point
Side B
06. Everybody Wants To Rule The World
07. Sowing The Seeds Of Love
08. Break The Man
09. Mad World
Side C
10. Woman In Chains
11. Bad Man’s Song
12. Pale Shelter
Side D
13. Break It Down Again
14. Head Over Heels
15. Change
16. Shout
*New Studio Tracks 

'Songs From The Big Chair' is Tears For Fears' iconic second studio album, originally released in February 1985. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Mine says: Now here's a question... Is this the best album ever made? Dark but heartfelt pop songs, incredible song writing and musicianship and insanely good production. Ticks all the boxes for me.

TRACK LISTING

1LP Tracklisting:
1. Shout
2. The Working Hour
3. Everybody Wants To Rule The World
4. Mothers Talk
5. I Believe
6. Broken
7. Head Over Heels
8. Listen

2LP Tracklisting:
1. Shout
2. The Working Hour
3. Everybody Wants To Rule The World
4. Mothers Talk
5. I Believe
6. Broken
7. Head Over Heels
8. Listen
9. Shout (Alternative Mix)
10. The Working Hour (Piano Version)
11. Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Alternative Single Version)
12. Mothers Talk (Early Mix)
13. I Believe (A Soulful Re- Recording)
14. Broken (Demo)
15. Head Over Heels (Hughes 7" Edit)
16. Listen (Clean Intro)

3CD Tracklisting:

CD1 - Original Album & B-Sides:
1. Shout
2. The Working Hour
3. Everybody Wants To Rule The World
4. Mothers Talk
5. I Believe
6. Broken
7. Head Over Heels
8. Listen
9. The Big Chair
10. Empire Building
11. The Marauders
12. Broken Revisited
13. The Conflict
14. The Working Hour (Piano Version)
15. Pharoahs
16. When In Love With A Blind Man
17. Sea Song

CD2 - Edited Songs From The Big Chair:
1. The Way You Are
2. Mothers Talk (Short Version)
3. Shout (Alternative Version)
4. Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Single Version)
5. Head Over Heels (Dave Bascombe 7" N.Mix)
6. I Believe (A Soulful Re- Recording)
7. Everybody Wants To Run The World
8. The Way You Are (Edit)
9. Mothers Talk (U.S. Remix)
10. Shout (U.S. Single Edit)
11. Everybody Wants To Run The World (Running Version)
12. Head Over Heels (Hughes 7" Edit)
13. Mothers Talk (Video Version)
14. Shout (7" Edit)
15. Listen (Clean Intro)
16. Rolan & Curt Interviewed

CD3 - Remixed Songs From The Big Chair:
1. The Way You Are (Extended)
2. Mothers Talk (Long Version)
3. Shout (UK Version / Extended Version)
4. Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Extended Version)
5. Broken / Head Over Heels / Broken (Preacher Mix)
6. Mothers Talk (Beat Of The Drum Mix)
7. Shout (Extended)
8. Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Urban Mix)
9. Mothers Talk (Alternate U.S. Remix)
10. Shout (US Dub Version)
11. Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Instrumental)
12. Shout (Acapella)

Tears for Fears debut album The Hurting was released on 7 March 1983, and peaked at No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart in its second week of release. The album reached Platinum status in January 1985 and contains Tears for Fears’ first three hit singles – “Mad World”, “Change”, and “Pale Shelter” – all of which reached the top five in the UK. 

Tears for Fears debut album The Hurting was released on 7 March 1983, and peaked at No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart in its second week of release. The album reached Platinum status in January 1985. The album contains Tears for Fears’ first three hit singles – “Mad World”, “Change”, and “Pale Shelter” – all of which reached the top five in the UK.

This half speed was engineered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios using a half-speed mastering technique which produces a superior vinyl cut.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
The Hurting
Mad World
Pale Shelter
Ideas As Opiates
Memories Fade
Side B
Suffer The Children
Watch Me Bleed
Change
The Prisoner
Start Of The Breakdown

Some forty years into one of music’s most impactful, sometimes tense and yet curiously enduring partnerships, Tears For Fears have finally arrived together at The Tipping Point – the group’s ambitious, accomplished and surprising first new studio album in nearly two decades.

And now, at very long last, Tears For Fears find themselves back in peak form at The Tipping Point, an inspired song cycle that speaks powerfully and artfully to our present tense here in 2021. This is an album that vividly recalls the depth and emotional force of the group’s earliest triumphs. Imagine a far more outward-looking take on TFF’s famously introspective 1983 debut album The Hurting set in an even more mad world, or 1985’s Songs From The Big Chair bravely confronting even bigger issues in our increasingly unruly world. Or even 1989’s The Seeds Of Love that sows a mix of love and other emotions.

The Tipping Point is the bold, beautiful and powerful sound of Tears For Fears finding themselves together all over again.

TRACK LISTING

1. No Small Thing
2. Tipping Point
3. Long, Long, Long Time
4. Break The Man
5. My Demons
6. Rivers Of Mercy
7. Please Be Happy
8. Master Plan
9. End Of Night
10. Stay

Debut album from Tears In X-Ray Eyes, it’s an understated mixture of heartfelt vocals and cinematic arrangements, half life exquisitely captures a sense of suburban lostness, exploring feelings of frustration and restless ambition. If you haven’t heard the singles, think the Smiths / Flaming Lips / Magnetic Fields.

Official replica re-issue of a South African jazz-funk rarity from Teaspoon & The Waves.

Released in 1977 on Soul Jazz Pop, a subsidiary label of Mavuthela Music Company / Gallo, Teaspoon & The Waves’ self-titled album is an absolute masterpiece.

Best known for the song ‘Oh Yeh Soweto’, which is an astonishing adaptation of Lamont Dozier’s anthem ‘Going Back to My Roots’, this track has become a contemporary underground club classic in recent times and has been featured in sets from a cross-section of DJs.

With such a massive calling card song, it could be easy to write off the album as a typical one-tracker (like so many records often are), but that is a long way from the truth. Each of the remaining four tracks are super strong and, for us here at Mr Bongo, this has to be our favourite South African record of this era. ‘Saturday Express’ is a jazz-funk/disco stomper which will soon be lighting up dancefloors again.

‘Wind and Fire’ is true afro-jazz-funk excellence, with great spacey synths and reggae-inspired guitar grooves riding throughout. The opener, ‘Friday Night’, also has a slightly reggae-tinged tropical groove, whilst ‘Got Me Tight’ finishes off the session with a feel-good jazz-funk workout that features cool, quirky, Patrick Adams-esque synths.

Saxophonist Teaspoon Ndlela has had an amazing and rich musical career. Releasing albums on records labels Soul Jazz Pop, Hit Special, Gallo GRC, alongside working with and writing for South African artists such as Mpharanyana, Stimela, Sipho Gumede and Sgu. He also features on the Paul Simon track ‘Gumboots’ taken from the iconic ‘Graceland’ project.

Though best known for ‘Oh Yeh Soweto’ we hope this re-issue helps demonstrate that there is much more magic in this wonderful musician’s repertoire to discover.

TRACK LISTING

Friday Night
Wind And Fire
Saturday Express
Oh Yeh Soweto
Got Me Tight

Upon examining the eventful life of Can bassist Holger Czukay, one might conclude that this intrepid musician was a loner. His turbulent career exuded an enduring eccentricity governed by a boundless free spirit. Yet Czukay, who passed away unexpectedly last year at the age of 79, constantly emphasized that his creativity was always contingent upon a musical partner, whether that was a skin-and-bones counterpart or an anonymous manifestation that interacted with him through radio waves or, as happened later, the internet. Nonetheless, most of his partners were of flesh and blood.

His oeuvre, which is in itself cinematic in nature, boasts a cast worthy of a Martin Scorsese film. Only the most interesting character actors were cast: Brian Eno, Phew, Rolf Dammers, David Sylvian, Annie Lennox, Jah Wobble, his Can bandmates… the list could go on and on.

Many of these masterpieces are now out of print, so Groenland Records, who already released the highly acclaimed retrospective ‘CINEMA’ to mark the occasion of Holger’s 80th birthday at the beginning of the year, has taken it upon themselves to release reissues of Holger’s music in order to make it accessible once again.

Technology + Teamwork’s fizzling synths, interweaving textures and punchy rhythms are beguiling on their long-awaited debut album We Used To Be Friends. However, at the heart of it all it’s the connection between the group’s two members, Anthony Silvester and Sarah Jones, the friendship the much-travelled duo have managed to maintain for nearly 15 years and a showcase of the slow-burning construction of the electronic world that they’ve surrounded themselves with.

We Used To Be Friends is ultimately the tale of two storied artists in their own right, holding onto each other through personal and career twists and turns, relocations and broader movements through respective phases of their lives. Silvester and Jones first met and then collaborated as part of biting post-punk five-piece XX Teens in 2008, eventually breaking off to forge their own path together even as the latter’s demand as a drummer grew. Performing with everyone from Hot Chip, Harry Styles and Bloc Party among many others, Jones has been a constant percussive presence across the sphere of alternative UK pop music – she’s also found time for her own solo project Pillow Person and played on records by the likes of Puscifer and Kurt Vile. Silvester meanwhile has performed in art galleries across Europe including: Fridericianum in Kassel, Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, and Vleeshal in Middelburg, as well as providing sound design and composing work for several art films.

Technology + Teamwork is the constant throughout all of that though. “Technology + Teamwork's name perfectly describes how we work” Silvester explains. “Sometimes the teamwork is between each other and sometimes it’s between us and the technology.” Although going by the name Technology + Teamwork as far back as 2014, two events conspired that pulled the project into focus for the pair of them: firstly, Silvester spent a year constructing a soundproof studio shed on the border of London and Essex where he lives. Secondly, inevitably, the pandemic brought the globe-trotting Jones back home to just seven miles away from her long-time collaborator and friend. “We probably hung out more than we had for a few years” says Silvester. “Also, after all her Pillow Person releases Sarah had gotten really good with recording vocals and knowing what did and didn’t work and had a really good home studio set up. We still worked separately though, exchanging ideas via email and WhatsApp.” As with many artists through 2020 and early 2021, working separately was a new necessity that they were forced to adapt to. However, it became clear that there were creative benefits to it. “It really changed our sound and our sounds became a lot more focused as a result” Jones says. “I wanted to use the same ideas of improvisation that I might use while playing the drums for myself and apply that to melodies and lyrics.” The album bristles with hyperpop modernity. You can hear it in the manipulated vocals most prominently on Big Blue’s disco strut and on Moving Too’s heady mix of pitched up voice and burrowing sub bass. However, the pair also looked to San Francisco and the West Coast synthesis movement of the 60s, Silvester inspired by the likes of Suzanne Ciani and Don Buchla. The plaintive lo-fi and melancholy of Amsterdam incorporates Mutable Instrument’s Marbles by Émilie Gillet which – inspired by Buchla’s own synthesis work – outputs random voltages to give the track an air of unpredictability. It’s something that occurs throughout the album, the duo revelling in the happy accidents that disrupt the flow of their hook-laden pop.

“The ‘Buchlian’ ideas of music having randomness and uncertainty, completely freed us up” Silvester explains. “It felt a bit like having more members in the band, machines that didn't do what you expected or intended.” Perhaps more subtly, is the influence of 17th and 18th century Baroque music, with Silvester drawing a line between it and the 90’s R’n’B he and Jones both love – exemplified perhaps best on K+B’s percussive claps and sultry grooves. The portentous juddering synthpop of the title track, meanwhile, alludes specifically to Handel’s Sarabande. It’s typical of an album that only needs a scratch of its seemingly glossy surface to unearth a myriad of contorted touchstones and reference points that’ve fermented beneath it. Thematically there’s an anxious sense to the record, with tracks often balancing above a quiet sense of unerring tension even at their most bombastic. Moving Too is the result of an existential doubt that hit Silvester while out cycling, with the outro refrain "it's not enough to die you also have to be forgotten" a take on something Samuel Beckett once said. These worries are echoed on the album’s closing track What A Year, which borrows a lot of lines from the late drag performer and fashion designer Dorian Corey including the grimly defiant "you're gonna leave your mark somewhere in this world just by getting through it”. Those clouds offer a counter point to We Used To Be Friends, but then isn’t that what great pop albums do? Technology + Teamwork undoubtedly love the craft of the hook and the song, but they always position themselves left of centre, prepared to scuff things up, pull something out of shape or manipulate something to leave it sounding warped. Much like their friendship, nothing here is particularly linear – and it’s all the better for it. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Big tip here for fans of Confidence Man / ITOP, with snappy synths and killer vocals perfectly interwoven, resulting in a hypnotic adventure perfectly pitched for the darkened dancefloor.

Höga Nord Rekords kindly welcomes Teecwa back to the label, following up his last full length-album “Beyond the Altai” with “Elysian on Moon Lake”. He is still exploring the intersections between house, electro, techno and dub and once again he manages to harness the analogue electronics in his machines to produce modern psychedelia.

“Elysian On Moon Lake” is rawer, less airy and not as sparkling as his last album. This is a tighter, and slightly darker experience than Teecwa’s previous work, maybe caused by being in quarantine for extensive time during production, letting some of the dreaminess aside for the harsher reality in a pandemic world. Still, you get a mind-altering experience in a lot of tracks since the album starts off in a lighter tone than how it later develops. Switching from the A to the B-side works as a rite of passage going from dusk to night; the sun rays through the blinders are replaced by neon light dancing on the walls and ceiling.

Regarding the dramaturgy of “Elysian On Moon Lake”, this album has movielike qualities; a well-directed piece from the opening impact and setup through the confrontational part where intensity builds up to the climax in “Hythmdoser” to the cooling down effect of the peaceful closer “Celestial Trails”. The trip eventually ends up in a safe and happy place after the cathartic finale.

This is not a just collection of songs, this is an album made to experience in full length without interruptions. 

TRACK LISTING

A1. Never, There. Was
A2. Tropic Notations
A3. No Lies To Her Fire
A4. Hunting Lights
B1. Solar City
B2. Welcome Dystopia!
B3. To Reach Apogee
B4. Hythmdoser
B5. Celestial Trails

The wait is finally over for new music by Teebs, aka Mtendere Mandowa. It’s been 5 years since his last body of work, but 25 October will mark the release of his next full length album “​Anicca”.​ With the help of a host of musical friends including ​Panda Bear (Animal Collective), Sudan Archives, Ringgo Ancheta aka MNDSGN, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Anna Wise, daydream Masi, Former Boy, Pink Siifu, Jimetta Rose and Thomas Stankiewicz, the 4​7 minute LP fuses Teebs’ signature bright and fluid productions with the grounded and colorful elements of his collaborators.

With roots at the ‘My Hollow Drum’ collective, Dublab, and Low End Theory, Teebs is a staple in Los Angeles music. “My creative family in LA is so important,” he explains. “It’s a part of who I am when I step outside and how others in LA view me. I love the feeling of community and trying to understand how I can be useful in it.” A consummate artist with a completely unique style, his ideas seemingly flow from a cloudy hidden realm of the ether straight through the medium and onto the canvas. As both a producer and a painter, his projects possess a flawless consistency that pull one deep into the worlds he creates.

Reflecting on his 5 year hiatus from releasing music, he says: “It feels like it [the music] comes from a different place now. My inspiration to work has changed and my choices with it. I’ve explored more with what tools and instruments I used and tried to be more open to collaboration.” ​The record showcases just how effortlessly his work lays landscapes for his guests’ contributions to blend in with his own production and Teebs himself is full of admiration for his collaborators. For example, of Panda Bear from Animal Collective, who is featured on lead single ‘Studie’ he explains that: “Everything he decides to do is pure gold or fine wine.” It’s a similar story with kindred spirit Sudan Archives who graces ‘Black Dove’ - of whom he says, “She really is a scary genius who deserves the world’s ears and eyes.”

The album was recorded mostly at home using his Roland SP-404 sampler, Mellotron M4000D synthesizer, seprewa (Ghanaian harp-lute), guitar and laptop - “If you listen closely you might hear my daughter speaking or my wife typing on a laptop on the record,” Teebs says smiling. Family is at the heart of Mtendere’s life now and they are his primary source of inspiration. “My daughter was born the year after ‘Estara’ and taking time to watch her grow meant everything to me...” he explains. “Also my relationships with my wife,mother, brother, and the friends around me, and the mistakes I’ve made through my life have all inspired Anicca.” He also cites the American poet David Antin and his 1976 work “Talking at the Boundaries” as a notable read and a quote about art, nature and form from Hans Arp’s “Notes from a Dada Diary” that struck a chord with him during the making of the record.

As for the title - “Anicca” - it describes the impermanence of all being in Buddhism. Recognition of the fact that ‘anicca’ characterizes everything is one of the first steps in the Buddhist’s spiritual progress toward enlightenment. “It’s a reminder to myself that nothing is permanent,” he says.

A highly respected visual artist, Teebs created the artwork for “Anicca” just as he has done for his previous albums. “I’m using the two disciplines [music and art] together to explore the worlds of communication and semi abstractions” he explains. The artwork for “Anicca” started as a drawing about his wife and mother and evolved into an enamel pin that transformed again as he collaborated with his friend Megan Geer-Alsop to make a stained glass replica. That work later got photographed and digitally enhanced to make the cover. “The artwork is so special to me because of all the hands working together to create an idea,” says Mtendere. “The piece went through so much change and landed in a state of constant change being made out of glass with its colors and reflections… no matter how you look at it or what time of day it is, it’s always something different, yet the same... quite like nature works. It felt like life, like semi abstractions and like the album title.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Millie says: Five years of waiting ‘Anicca’ doesn’t disappoint one bit, drenched in electronic gold and ambient glistening vocals. Teebs’ creative process revolves around a close knit of community and family, creating a dimensional art within his music.

TRACK LISTING

1. Atoms Song (feat. Thomas Stankiewicz)
2. Black Dove (feat. Sudan Archives)
3. Shells
4. Threads (feat. Anna Wise)
5. Studie (feat. Panda Bear)
6. Mirror Memory
7. Prayers I
8. Prayers Ii
9. Universe (feat. Daydream Masi)
10. Marcel
11. Mmntm (feat. Ringgo Ancheta And Former Boy)
12. Daughter Callin' (feat. Pink Siifu)
13. Slumber
14. Muted (feat. Thomas Stankiewicz)

Estar (the Spanish for ‘to be’) refers to where someone is at - physically or mentally - at a specific moment. In truth, ‘E s t a r a’ (the spaces are intentional) takes its name from the house where much of the record was created, so it’s the perfect title for the second full-length album from Mtendere Mandowa, better known as Los Angeles-based producer Teebs, as he is right now.

‘E s t a r a’ finds Teebs returning to Flying Lotus’ genre-bending Brainfeeder imprint, following 2011’s ‘Collections01’ and 2010’s full-length ‘Ardour’, an effort that came together in the midst of personal turmoil and the death of his father. In contrast, ‘E s t a r a’ encapsulates a time when the producer (and painter) has been making art entirely on his own terms. That freedom has not only strengthened his creative voice, but led to some of the finest work of his career and a remarkable album in its own right, featuring Prefuse 73 (Warp / Sons Of The Morning), Lars Hornveth (Ninja Tune, Jaga Jazzist), Jonti (Stones Throw) and Populous.

In 2010, Jamison, the person behind Teen Daze, had no idea what Four More Years would bring. That debut EP, a collection of blissful home recordings, was the work of a carefree 24 year-old. By 2012, things had changed, as they tend to do: relationships dissolved, illness affected his family, windows for outward communication were closing. The gravity of it all made for constant output; he reached for futuristic utopia with All Of Us, Together, found a devotional sanctuary inside The Inner Mansions, and embraced hibernation on Glacier. In hindsight, this was an artist coping through various forms of introverted escapism.

While proud of the material, Jamison sought to break this cycle when approaching the next record. He knew it would take a few leaps of faith, most directly: out of his bedroom… out of his comfort zone. For the first time, he gave up some control, inviting the input of others. Bearing over 30 demos, Jamison joined one of his musical heroes John Vanderslice at Tiny Telephone, his all-analog studio in San Francisco. Beyond the immediate sonic advantages of recording to tape, the sessions with Vanderslice and co-producer Simon Bridgefoot encouraged a new positivity and confidence to his craft.

The result is Morning World, eleven fully built, balanced, and expressed songs, the most vulnerable and honest Teen Daze LP to date. Thematically, Jamison paints a familiar picture: a Garden of Eden, a place of transcendent, painfree beauty, but with one key distinction... it’s not real and time there is finite. With vocals boldly up front—surrounded by strings, piano, guitar, and live percussion—he details a realm that, for the first time, has room for more than one. “Where does life go when it’s done,” he poses in the closing moments of “Post Storm”, before lending an answer that evokes the omnipresent wisdom of All Things Must Pass: “a moon replaces morning sun.

TRACK LISTING

1. Valley Of Gardens
2. Pink
3. Morning World
4. It Starts At The Water
5. Post Storm
6. Life In The Sea
7. You Said
8. Garden Grove
9. Along
10. Infinity
11. Good Night

If TEEN’s 2016 album Love Yes was a bursting, harmony-infused synthpop thesis on embracing love, then its follow-up, the even more joyous and melodic Good Fruit, is its opposite, a look at what happens after love fades. The Lieberson sisters—Teeny, Lizzie, and Katherine—have, with their fourth album, crafted a dynamic, hook-stuffed take on the oft-trodden breakup album; as on prior releases, there are frequent meditations on death, capitalism, and womanhood.

The sisters—and Boshra AlSaadi, a longtime TEEN member who left a year into songwriting to focus on her own music—spun together Good Fruit in a few places, over roughly a year, as they aimed to break free of the notorious write-record-tour cycle. At a week-long session in Montreal in February 2017, they began working on “Radar,” a Lizzie-penned ballad that explores a previously unmentioned formative trauma. Another Montreal week in April 2017 birthed a large chunk of Good Fruit, and a five-day expedition in upstate New York led to “Putney,” a slinky, bassy bop that deals with how projected ideals and personal fantasy play into sex and misogyny.

“Runner” came last, arising from an environment where the sisters surely feel the most comfortable: New York, the city where they’ve lived for over a decade. Perhaps the album’s most bursting, beatific, synth-driven track, “Runner,” which reflects on fleeing a relationship as a partner wants to become closer, jelled just before the album was completed, in an NYC home studio belonging to TEEN collaborator Miles Francis.

While recording Good Fruit, the sisters employed a self-described “reductive approach,” strove to create space within their songs, and, for their first time, self-produced the album (save a few co-productions from Francis, who also played on some songs). These techniques explode the glistening, sprinting glamour of “Only Water,” a deceptively upbeat number about death and the loss of a loved one. They inform Good Fruit’s handful of ballads too, including “Pretend,” which rings with a vast, unsettling static fuzz even as Lizzie beautifully recounts the disappointment of realizing a partner wasn’t all she’d built them up to be.

When love fades, TEEN soars. “A lot of what ties Good Fruit in...is forging new paths for ourselves and letting go of old ways of doing things,” Teeny says. The band’s intentional amendments to its longtime formula have resulted in its most mature, nuanced, and exhilarating statement yet.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The synth gods have been good to us this week not only delivering the psychedelic sounds of Pond, but gracing us with the off-kilter funk and shimmering synthetic soul of 'Good Fruit' from the ever-superb 'Teen', comprising of Lieberson sisters Kristina, Katherine and Lizzy. Shining sidechained synths, driving percussion and swooping melodies all topped with beautifully harmonised athletic vocal lines.

TRACK LISTING

1. Popular Taste
2. Ripe
3. Only Water
4. Radar
5. Connection
6. Luv 2 Luv
7. Shadow
8. Runner
9. Putney
10. Pretend

Teen Suicide’s seventh LP marks the band’s first full-length release in three years, following 'Honeybee Table At The Butterfly Feast', which found renewed attention through tracks like 'You Were My Star', a breakout success on TikTok. Originally formed in 2010 as a side project of Sam Ray, Teen Suicide gradually evolved while remaining a passion-driven endeavor. Since 2017, the lineup has included Kitty Ray, and in 2022 the band officially became a full-time project with the addition of drummer Niko Wood. Together, the trio began writing and recording their LP, 'Nude Descending Staircase Headless'.

The album represents a series of firsts for the band: their first record recorded in a professional studio, their first release written and recorded as a full-time band, and their first since 2012 to feature a dedicated drummer throughout. It also marks the beginning of a fully shared writing process between Sam and Kitty Ray, who married in 2016 and collaborated from the ground up on the entire record, splitting both songwriting and vocal duties.

Described by Sam Ray as the band’s “career highlight so far,” 'Nude Descending Staircase Headless' explores the endless pursuit of fulfillment through creation, threading motifs of death and rebirth with themes of embracing joy in the wake of immense loss. The record reframes the self not as an isolated object, but as a single strand within a larger, interconnected web. Standout tracks include 'Idiot', which leans into direct, literal storytelling, and 'Spiders', featuring Kitty Ray on lead vocals and introducing a darkly feminist undercur- rent to the album’s broader narrative.

Musically, the band draws inspiration from artists such as Nirvana, Radiohead, Shellac, and Helmet, channeling the intensity and experimentation of late-’80s and ’90s heavy rock. Their recent tours with DELTA SLEEP further highlight Teen Suicide’s growing incorporation of math rock and metal influences into their evolving sound.

TRACK LISTING

1. Anhedonia
2. Idiot
3. Suffering (Mike’s Way)
4. Spiders
5. The Knives
6. Everything In My Life Is Perfect
7. Candy / Squeeze
8. Living Death
9. Keeping Her Keys
10. Hypnotic Poison
11. Kindnesses
12. Not Born To Run
13. Come And See The Clown

Originally released on Creation Records, this long out of print classic has been re-mastered for the first time from the original tapes at Abbey Road Studios, London under the guidance of the band, Norman Blake, Gerard Love, and Raymond McGinley. Packaged in a faithful re-production of the original vinyl artwork and available on heavyweight 180g single vinyl. 

This is one of a series of five releases, and for each the band have also selected rarities, favourites and tracks previously unavailable on vinyl to include on a 7” with each album. These 7” singles each feature two tracks and are only available with the initial pressing of each album.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Teenage Fanclub finally slow up with this year 2,000 record. It's still sweet, supremely well crafted, and in Raymond's "My Uptight Life" in particular, extraordinary, but it was no surprise that this release closed a particular chapter for this much-loved band.

TRACK LISTING

1. I Need Direction
2. I Can’t Find My Way Home
3. Accidental Life
4. Near You
5. Happiness
6. Dumb DumbDumb
7. The Town And The City
8. The Sun Shines From You
9. Straight And Narrow
10. CulDe Sac
11. My Uptight Life
12. If I Never See You Again

Bonus 7”
1. Thaw Me –‘Dumb DumbDumb’ B-side, First Time On Vinyl
2. One Thousand Lights –‘Dumb DumbDumb’ B-side, First Time On Vinyl

Teenage Fanclub reissue two more of their classic albums on vinyl – Man-Made and Shadows. Both packaged in faithful re-productions of the original vinyl artwork and available on heavyweight 180g single vinyl.

The band have also selected rarities, favourites and tracks previously unavailable on vinyl to include on a 7” with each album. These 7” singles each feature two tracks and are only available with the initial pressing of each album. 

TRACK LISTING

LP
1. It’s All In My Head
2. Time Stops
3. Nowhere
4. Save
5. Slow Fade
6. Only With You
7. Cells
8. Feel
9. Fallen Leaves
10. Flowing
11. Born Under A Good Sign
12. Don’t Hide

Bonus 7”
1. Falling Leaf
2. Please Stay

Teenage Fanclub's new album, Nothing Lasts Forever, is a beautifully rich and melodic album, the sound of a season’s end, of the last warm days of the year while nights begin to draw in and thoughts become reflective and more than a little melancholy.

That reflection is everywhere on the record, whether on the autumnal folk rock of Tired Of Being Alone that repositions Laurel Canyon to somewhere deep in the heart of the Wye Valley, the William Blake quoting Self-Sedation or on the song that preceded Nothing Lasts Forever’s completion, last year’s I Left A Light On, where a spark of hope is kept alight at the end of a relationship.

One of the recurring themes on Nothing Lasts Forever is light, as a both a metaphor for hope and as an ultimate destination further down the road. Although the band’s songwriters Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley found themselves touching on similar themes, it was pure coincidence.

Raymond: “We never talk about what we’re going to do before we start making a record. We don’t plan much other than the nuts and bolts of where we’re going to record and when. That thing about light was completely accidental; we didn’t realise that until we’d finished half the songs. The record feels reflective, and I think the more we do this thing, the more we become comfortable with going to that place of melancholy, feeling and expressing those feelings.

Norman: “These songs are definitely personal. You’re getting older, you’re going into the cupboard getting the black suit out more often. Thoughts of mortality and the idea of the light must have been playing on our minds a lot. The songs on the last record were influenced by the breakup of my marriage. It was cathartic to write those songs. These new songs are reflective of how I’m feeling now, coming out of that period. They’re fairly optimistic, there’s an acceptance of a situation and all of the experience that comes with that acceptance. When we write, it’s a reflection of our lives, which are pretty ordinary. We’re not extraordinary people, and normal people get older. There’s a lot to write about in the mundane. I love reading Raymond Carver. Very often there’s not a lot that happens in those stories, but they speak to lived experience.”

The band recorded Nothing Lasts Forever - Blake, McGinley along with Francis Macdonald on drums, Dave McGowan on bass and Euros Childs on keyboards during an intense ten-day period in the bucolic Welsh countryside at Rockfield Studios, near Monmouth in late August. You can hear the effect of that environment on the record - it’s full of soft breeze, wide skies, beauty and space.

One of the most striking lyrics on the record is on the closing track I Will Love You. A gorgeous seven minute almost Kosmiche acoustic daydream drone, it looks to a point beyond the fury and polarisation of our modern discourse, to a time when “the bigots are gone/after they apologise/for all the harm that they’ve done”. Looking for positives while faced with the grim realities of the 21st century feels very Teenage Fanclub - a band who’ve been a force for good for over three decades and who can effortlessly turn melancholy into glorious, chiming harmony.

Teenage Fanclub have announced an extensive touring schedule with a handful of dates in the Summer followed by a full UK & European tour in October and November. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Hazy folky slide guitar and Euros Child's silky keys, classic Teenage Fanclub melodies and swooning vocals make for one of the most immersive TF albums in years. A beautifully rendered, optimistic vision from Blake & co, and one that is a familiar as it is inventive.

TRACK LISTING

1. Foreign Land
2. Tired Of Being Alone
3. I Left A Light On
4. See The Light
5. It’s Alright
6. Falling Into The Sun
7. Self-Sedation
8. Middle Of My Mind
9. Back To The Light
10. I Will Love You

Teenage Fanclub’s 'Do Not Dare To Dream' takes its name from Norman Blake’s 'I Do Not Dare To Dream', an infectious anthemic song driven by ringing acoustic guitars, joined at the end by duelling electric guitars that wrap around each other like a reassuring hug. Blake says that the title is meant to mock those memes that urge people to “dare to dream,” which to him are “kind of ridiculous... I don’t think the world works that way.”

Teenage Fanclub’s 13th album is full of songs that are calmly resolute, taking stock of the fraught state of the world without succumbing to despair. Blake’s warm, organ washed midtempo ballad 'Day In The Sun' and Raymond McGinley’s 'Over And Over' both speak to how everyone can find a renewed sense of purpose by opening their hearts. “We can still be cheerful and optimistic in the face of things not being great,” McGinley says. “My parents’ generation lived in Glasgow when there were bombs falling out of the sky. And here we are, however many years later. Things change.” Blake and McGinley are joined on 'Do Not Dare To Dream' by their bandmates Euros Childs (keyboards and vocals), Francis Macdonald (drums) and David McGowan (bass). This quintet has played together long enough now that neither of Teenage Fanclub’s principal songwriters and guitarists feel the need to fuss over their songs or work up arrangements before they enter the studio. They’d rather wait for the rest of the group’s input.

The initial sessions took place over 14 days at Black Bay Studio, in the township of Kirkibost, on the Scottish Outer Hebrides island of Great Bernera. Teenage Fanclub likes to take advantage of what a studio has available to use, and at Black Bay the band found a Domus church organ (prominently heard on many songs, including 'Over And Over') and a lot of different synthesizers. Euros Childs on keys brings a lot of sonic colour on this record, from the ’70s sound of the Solina String Ensemble on 'Tomorrow People' to the Mellotron flutes on McGinley’s gently reflective 'Take Time', and across every other song. Add to that the musicality of David McGowan’s counterpoint melodies on bass and Francis Macdonald playing so freely and expressively on the drums and you can hear how it all adds up to the confident collective identity of the band that McGinley was talking about.

As longtime fans are likely aware, Teenage Fanclub record each album in a new place so that they can let its unique atmosphere influence the music. Great Bernera is their most remote recording location yet, which helped the band focus on the work but also put them in a place of awe, surrounded as they were by the crashing sea and ancient ruins. Blake recalls “not too far from the studio, on the adjacent island of Lewis, there’s an ancient monument called the Callanish Stones, which is older than Stonehenge. The whole area is kind of magical.” McGinley expands, “it’s a place where they had a lot of Neolithic monuments. Later on it was a Viking area. And on our time off, we’d go see these things which are like, I don’t know, 5000 years old. Some of us went for a walk every morning, ‘round over the hills and stuff. I think all that plays into the feeling on the record, being in this kind of timeless landscape with connections to unknown civilizations from a long, long time ago. All those things that make you feel small, but in a good way.”

The result is a collection of songs suffused with the proper perspective of musicians who have been around for a while, recorded in a place that has been around even longer. As Blake puts it, “I think what happens is you just move from one thing into the next and before you know it, 30 years have passed. McGinley adds: “Yeah, it’s been a while since we started doing this thing we do, but to us it feels like no time at all. In the place where we made the record people would have been singing thousands of years ago. Life is short, but music is eternal.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Another suite of jangling guitars, bright melodies and breathy organs, all topped with the unmistakeable vocals of Norman Blake. Mournful minor-key melodies are tempered with wafts of classical-adjacent strings (though they've got a bit more of the Solina-style high frequencies from that lovely Moog Opus) and syrupy harmonies throughout. Another supremely coherent, beautifully forged album from one of the great bands in indie and rock.

TRACK LISTING

1. There Was You
2. Tomorrow People
3. Over And Over
4. Be With You Tonight
5. The Same Air
6. I Do Not Dare To Dream
7. Take Time
8. Day In The Sun
9. Somewhere To Land
10. Young And Wise

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2014 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

RSD 2014 exclusive.

First vinyl reissue of the recordings of Teenage Filmstars, one of the early bands of maverick pop artisan Ed Ball, also a member of 'O' Level, Television Personalities and The Times.

Munster Records presents, in a co-release with Discos Alehop!, the three official singles of the British band Teenage Film Stars reissued on vinyl for the first time: '(There's A) Cloud Over Liverpool' (Clockwork Records), 'The Odd Man Out' (Wessex Records/Blueprint Records) and 'I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape' (Fab Listening Records). After self-releasing two records with his band 'O' Level, in 1979 Ed Ball continued the path of 60s-influenced new wave pop already present in that band's 'The Malcolm EP' (1978), now under the name Teenage Filmstars. In this new adventure he was accompanied by his school friends Dan Treacy and Joe Foster (both members of Television Personalities). With their help Ball released a first single inSeptember 1979 featuring two songs: the A side is taken by '(There's A) Cloud Over Liverpool' (a tremendous chorus-song ) and the B side contained 'Sometimes Good Guys Don't Follow Trends' (a comment on youth culture). The song '(There's A) Cloud Over Liverpool' received support by John Peel and reached certain fame in the UK and the United States, where it was interpreted as an homage to John Lennon.

This compilation also includes two tracks never released on vinyl until now which were recorded in April 1979, in the style of 'O' Level: 'He's A Professional' (antimilitary punk-pop) and the folk-punk anthem 'The John Peel March', dedicated to the legendary BBC radio host and great supporter of new bands. This retrospective is completed with a recording session dated in November 1980 which produced three tracks ('Storybook Beginnings', 'Dressing Up For The Cameras' and 'The Sun Never Sets') which further explore the power pop-mod sound that Ed Ball would develop in his next band The Times.

Robert Pollard, head lunatic of the Guided By Voices' asylum, has a surfeit of original thoughts. (Most people are lucky to have even one, ever). That this even needs to be expressed is evidence enough for its "truth," as only obvious or obviously untrue things can ever hope to be true. Or to approach the truth. Something Pollard does with uncanny regularity, and which is further on display on every track on the gloriously unkempt, roiling-with-ideas More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush, the second record Pollard has released under the nom-de-rock Teenage Guitar.

Here's a song title: "Matthew's Ticker and Shaft a. come to breakfast b. the girl's c. division of swans d. when death has a nice ring." It starts with distorted guitar over a primitive snare-and-bass-drum beat (all instruments on all songs played by Pollard), shifts into an out-of-tune piano clumping along a simple seven-chord progression, lurches into a wall of distorted guitar as two tracks of Pollard wail wide-panned in each speaker, before finally resolving in a pretty harpsichord (or some synthesized version thereof) figure inelegantly trips over itself before trailing off into the next track: "The Instant American," which presents a multi-tracked Pollard vocals chanting over a background of what sounds like a bunch of people at a party drinking. These are not the two strangest tracks on the fifteen-song album, which clocks in at just over thirty minutes.

If there are times when Pollard's musical ambition seems to overwhelm his ability to present his ideas coherently, that's a feature, not a bug. The spazzy machine-generated beat of "A Guaranteed Ratio," the ham-handed church organ of "Good Mary's House," the off-key crooning, the awkwardly plucked possible-banjo on "All You Fought For" the general (but not always) sloppiness, the rumbling toms and slashing power chording of "New Light": it's all of a piece, and that piece adds up to a sense of urgency and what sounds an awful lot like unconstrained joy suffusing every single track on More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush. For those who like their Pollard stately, tuneful, and elegiac – sure, he can do that without effort, but that's not what Teenage Guitar is about. Teenage Guitar is about trying hard without seeming to try hard.

The result is that rare thing: a completely original album. Which is also a true delight, a sky-blue gem, a timeless and untimely cabinet of wonder. And by some few miles the greatest musical artifact your ears will have the pleasure of encountering this year.

TRACK LISTING

CD DISC 1 & LP – More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush:

1. Go Around (The Apartment Dwellers)
2. Spliced At Acme Fair
3. A Guaranteed Ratio
4. Good Mary's House
5. Skin Ride
6. Full Glass Gone
7. All You Fought For
8. Gear OP
9. No Escape
10. Matthew's Ticker And Shaft
       A. Come To Breakfast
       B. The Girls Arrive
       C. Division Of Swans
       D. When Death Has A Nice Ring
11. The Instant American
12. Normalized
13. New Light
14. Birthplace Of The Electric Starter
15. A Year That Could Have Been Worse

DISC 2 – Force Fields At Home:
1. Court Of Lions
2. Come See The Super Moon
3. Current Pressings Colors And Styles
4. Still Down Stairs
5. 8 Bars Of Meaningless Mathilda
6. Harvest Whale
7. Strangers For A Better Society
8. It Takes A Great Promise
9. It Doesn't Mean I'm Underground
10. Baby Apple
11. Peter Pan Can
12. Alice And Eddie (Fabulous Child Actors)
13. Alfred Never
14. Gymnasium Politics
15. Atlantic Cod
16. Suburban Cycle Saccharine
17. Postcard To Pinky
18. Let Me

Teenage Waitress returns with the new album 'Your Cuckoo'. This album is the follow up to the critically acclaimed debut Love & Chemicals. “Melodies and storytelling. . basically" is how Daniel J. Ash of Southampton’s Teenage Waitress describes his eagerly anticipated second album Your Cuckoo. “It’s a bunch of characters singing songs about love, youth, drugs, boredom and of course, dancing”. ‘Your Cuckoo’ is a leap forward in every way for Teenage Waitress. Ash’s trademark ‘story songs’ are set to a backdrop of irresistible melodies, colourful arrangements and impeccable production. While noticeably a more focused effort than Ash’s previous effort Love & Chemicals, this album still offers a little something for everyone. For the recording of ‘Your Cuckoo’ Ash recruited some of his musical friends to join him in the studio, adding a rich new layer of musicianship to his latest songs. “We basically wanted to go a step ahead from where we got to last time. . and I think we’ve done that” smiles Ash “I’ve been a perfectionist in every sense and annoyed a lot of people to get to this point. I hope it was worth it!” 

TRACK LISTING

1. Baby Blue
2. Maggie
3. Grey Sky
4. Girl, I Want You To Kill Me
5. Bedroom Waltz
6. I Like The Way You Fall In Love
7. Big Smoke
8. Back Seat
9. Too Much Of A Good Thing
10. Hold Me In The Afternoon
11. Salutations

In a short space of time Teenagersintokyo have come from nothing to quickly rising as one the bands to watch in 2010; selling out venues across the UK, bagging support from the likes of Zane Lowe and the NME; and most recently topping the Hype Machine chart with The Horrors remix of ‘Peter Pan’. Following the celebrated release of their self-titled EP in 2009 the band caught everyone’s attention, landing themselves international acclaim, support slots with CSS, The Slits & Gossip, a record deal with Backyard and a move to the other side of the world. This is their debut long player album which was produced by Bat For Lashes producer David Kosten.

New signing to Back Yard, Australian goth poppers Teenagers In Tokyo bring us this new 12". "End It Tonight" comes remixed four times here, with the Mad Decent leading the way with a funky electrohouse refix. Lex outfit Heartbreak come up with a darker, driving 80s inspired electro-pop rework. On side B Tybalt dip another toe in the electrohouse pool, with Sidechains bringing up the rear with a stompy, synthy rave refix.

In Frank Herbert’s 1973 novel Hellstrom’s Hive, the Dune writer tells of a sinister narrative surrounding the maverick scientist Nils Hellstrom, who has created a meticulously constructed Hive underneath his Oregon farmhouse. Therein, he oversees a subterranean order of 50,000 insect-human hybrid life-forms. Ultimately his plan being for the inhabitants of the Hive to usurp humanity and take over the world.

The decade thus far may not have seen anything quite so daunting, but it’s provided more than its fair share of challenges. Yet in such dystopian environments, Teeth Of The Sea flourish. This band has created a kaleidoscopic inner world all its own in Hive, their sixth and most outlandish album.

Fundamental to Teeth Of The Sea’s mission thus far is that this band can go anywhere and make short work of any obstacles in their path. Unfettered by genre distinctions or expectations, the only limits of this trio - comprising Sam Barton, Mike Bourne and Jimmy Martin - are those of its imagination. It therefore follows that inspiration flowed into Hive from all dimensions, with the band’s sphere of influence - the science fiction, trash culture and cinematic atmospherics by which they’ve fuelled their mission thus far - expanding to take in everything from Italo-disco to minimal techno, from dubbed-out studio madness to their most brazen forays thus far into pop songwriting. Here is a headspace where the psychic charges from records by Labradford, Nurse With Wound, Vangelis, The Knife, Nine Inch Nails and John Barry can happily co-exist.

These disparate pathways cohere and coalesce to create a vivid experience rich with emotion and intrigue. A commission to create a live soundtrack at London’s Science Museum for a documentary on the Apollo Moon Landings gave flight to the trilogy of tracks - Artemis, Æther and Apollo which are summarily imbued with the dreamlike wonder and existential peril of the mission itself. A collaboration with vocalist Kath Gifford (Snowpony, The Wargs, Sleazy Tiger) set loose Butterfly House, which transmutes synthpop stylings into something uniquely radiant, haunting and melancholic. Get With The Program - sung by Mike Bourne - is meanwhile no less than a noise-fuelled, speaker-shaking electro-industrial banger.

Megafragma, meanwhile, is the most experimental track this band has yet created, a collaboration with engineer and co-conspirator Giles Barrett that morphs form and structure in search of new epiphanies - ‘Simple Headphone Mind’ and Roxy Music’s ‘The Bogus Man’ may have formed some of the cues for this nine-minute avant-epic but its trajectory was one the band were happy to submit to external forces.

Hive is more than just a transformative force from subterranean origins. It’s an alchemical headspace where monochrome animates into vivid colour. It may not be a carefully ordered insectoid militia set to overthrow society, but it’s a transmission which transcends anything Teeth Of The Sea have thus far offered in their time on Earth.

Step inside Hive, if you dare.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Teeth Of The Sea are back! With bold strokes of post-punk and kosmische synthwork and swirls of psychedelic wonder, 'Hive' is their most compelling work to date. The ever-reliable Rocket Recordings on fire as always.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1: Artemis
2: Get With The Program
3: Butterfly House
4: Liminal Kin
5: Æther
Side B
1: Megafragma
2: Powerhorse
3: Apollo

Teethe re-emerges with 'Magic Of The Sale', a soft but steely full-length album where the Texas band’s four distinct songwriters, singers, and artists ask a series of interlocked questions about what it means to build a life in a time of shared collapse. The result is a sad and beautiful self-built world of Southern slowcore, where four people turn toward one another and drift forward, together. 'Magic Of The Sale' follows Teethe’s 2020 self-titled debut, a loose and warm 12-track collage of exquisite existential blues and twilit harmonies from which few early cassette runs turned into several sold-out vinyl editions, unlikely name-drops from mega-stars, and several tours across the United States and Europe. 'Magic Of The Sale' represents Teethe’s natural next step: a second album, a record label, a slew of guest collaborators (Xandy Chelmis of Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, Charlie Martin of Hovvdy and several other veteran musicians) who represent their Texas roots and new friends they’ve made in recent years. Still, Teethe took special care to preserve the part of the process that made their debut so special, now with expanded toolkits. On 'Magic Of The Sale', they’ve boosted their gear and home studios and dug into the craft of composition and production. Eliding an outsider producer or engineer, the band’s Boone Patrello spent four arduous months mixing the record–taking the patchwork of tracks from each member and their collaborators and funneling several visions into one complete picture. From a long-overlooked pocket of Texas’ musical wealth, Teethe returns with a deeply layered and collaborative work that makes the weight of the world feel a little lighter to lug.

TRACK LISTING

1. Tires & Bookmarks
2. Magic Of The Sale
3. Anywhere
4. Push You Forever
5. Holy Water
6. Iron Wine
7. China Day
8. Lead Letters
9. Ammo
10. Funny
11. Build & Crash
12. Hate Goodbyes
13. Make It Red
14. Matching Durags

Identical twin sisters Tegan and Sara Quin released their debut album "Under Feet Like Ours" in 1999 and have since released a further three albums. They've toured with numerous artists including Neil Young, Rufus Wainwright, The Killers, Ryan Adams, Cake, Hot Hot Heat and Gogol Bordello. They've also earned the patronage of The White Stripes, who covered their US radio hit "Walking With A Ghost" for a 2005 EP of the same name. This album is their first for Warners and follows their 2004 album "So Jealous". Produced by Death Cab For Cutie guitarist Chris Walla with Tegan and Sara, "The Con" finds the twins on captivating form throughout a set that focuses on angsty, literate lyrics married to infectious new wave pop. The album's first single, "The Con" is a great example of their sound, being punchy, insistent and immediate. Other highlights include the album's opening track "I Was Married", the addictive hook of "Back In Your Head" and the pure melody of "Hop A Plane".

Compilation of rare cosmic Italian Library recordings. Vintage DIY library electronics. Follow up to Teisco’s phenomenal library-punk LP, 'Tuscan Castle & Country Seat'. Includes liner notes and rare photos.

The last time we checked in with Italian musician Teisco aka Rimauri, aka Marco Melchiori, was quite possibly also the first time many of you checked in with this most singular of characters. For The Roundtable imprint’s reissue of his blasted ‘70s Italian library classic, 'Tuscan Castle & Country Seat', managed to be both a blast of fresh air for the library and soundtrack palate, and a defining moment in early 21st century reissue culture. But Tuscan Castle only tells part of the story. Enter 'Musiche De Teisco', a compilation of mind bending electronics drawing from three obscure library albums: firstly, the cosmic classic, 'Fly In 5° Dimensione / Plane Beta Ø', the freakish malnutritioned Moog-scapes of 'Inchiesta Sul Mezzogiorno', and finally, the aerated synth drone of 'Dossier Special'. Think the power and mystery of the most sainted of Krautrock and cosmic sides - Popol Vuh, Sand, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Conrad Schnitzler etc sitting alongside jerry-rigged basement Moog experiments. Experience further exploration into the strange and highly distinct world of this intriguing library music character.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sfida Sul Mare
2. Luce Notte
3. Dimensione Apha
4. Vaticano
5. Raggi Solari (Emisfero)
6. Paessagio Vulcanico
7. Lamentazione
8. Plane Beta 0
9. Quartiere Moderno Del Sud
10. Industria Meridionale

Psychedelic rock group TEKE::TEKE are intimately familiar with duality, of splitting reality between past and present, complex melodies and hushed interludes, intense action and lingering response. After building their sound through careful assembly of countless splinters of Japanese folk, psychedelia, Brazilian surf rock, and other far-flung touchstones, the Montreal-based seven-piece indulged in and learned from stretching out in free-floating experimentation on the road. With the release of their sophomore album, 'Hagata' in June 2023, TEKE::TEKE moved fully in the space between, embracing the power of mythic pairings and identities lived at once. Matching muscly intensity with moments of cloudy meditation—like a world-class high jumper finding bliss at the apex of their leap—the group frame expressive compositions with regal flute, rich horns, ecstatic guitar, and a thumping rhythm section. Revisting 'Hagata' with the release of 'Hagata Delux' (digital only) and it’s companion LP, simply titled 'Delux', TEKE::TEKE has expanded their overall vision, including brand new song 'Meimu' along with remixes and reiterpretations of 'Hagata' tracks from the likes of SUUNS and Holy Fuck, as well as adding on and a collection of Hagata-era tunes available together on vinyl for the first time!

TRACK LISTING

1. Meimu
2. Visible Lights
3. Corpse Pose
4. Bankrobber
5. Chidori
6. Doppelganger (Version Française)
7. Jinzou Maria (Live In Concrete Version)
8. Gotoku Lemon (SEI Remix)
9. Onaji Heya (Holy Fuck Remix)
10. Yurei Zanmai (SUUNS Remix)

Following the acclaim of Cathal Coughlan's long-awaited solo album "Song of Co- Aklan" in March 2021, Dimple Discs is proud to present the debut album by Telefis, the label's most ambitious album to date, and one that features two of Ireland's most beloved figures in popular music. Part celebration, part satire, Telefis (pronounced Tele-feesh, the Gaelic word for Television) is an exploration of Irish nostalgia and modern global hierarchies, strange characters and caricatures springing from Coughlan's fertile imagination, while Jacknife Lee creates irresistible electro-funk backdrops full of melodic, squelchy synths and thunderous basslines. A unique electronic pop collaboration between two Irish iconoclasts – acclaimed producer Garret "Jacknife" Lee (U2, REM, Two Door Cinema Club) and singer-lyricist Cathal Coughlan (Microdisney, The Fatima Mansions)

TRACK LISTING

SIDE 1

1. Seo É Glór Na Teilifíse
2. Mister Imperator
3. We Need
4. Falun Gong Dancer
5. The Symphonies Of Danny La Rue
6. Archbishop Beardmouth At The ChemOlympics

SIDE 2

1. The Imperial Angelus
2. Sex Bunting
3. Ballytransnational
4. There Goes Waterface
5. Picadors
6. Stampede
7. Stop The Lights

Following the incredible acclaim at UK press and radio of the two Telefís albums in 2022 and the tragic death of Cathal Coughlan in May, Jacknife Lee has collected all of the band’s remixes and alternate versions to create a commemorative companion piece called 'Special Report'.

A 22-track set across 2 CDs, 'Special Report' contains remixes and appearances from Basement Jaxx, Howie B, Thomas Leer, Jah Wobble, A Certain Ratio, Jacknife Lee and more.