MUSIC

A quarter century since their 1998 debut, No Fear of Time finally reunites one of the greatest hip-hop duos of all-time, Black Star. Group members yasiin bey and Talib Kweli first joined forces to deliver their iconic breakout, Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star, which quickly became one of hip-hop's most revered works and launched both already-rising stars into the stratosphere. Although each has since enjoyed success and acclaim in their individual careers, they've never realigned for a sophomore follow-up to that release until now. Produced entirely by renowned beatsmith Madlib, No Fear of Time has a future vibe with vintage soul. The 9-track album was recorded guerrilla-style in hotels and dressing rooms around the globe, and initially saw a non-traditional release, being made available exclusively on a subscription-based podcast platform. Now, the album is officially available on physical formats for fans worldwide to own and appreciate the triumphant return of Black Star.

Releasing now for well over a decade - Neue Grafik: known to friends as Fred, has successfully transplanted from Parisian rookie to one- man London Institution. Beginning as a solo producer and DJ, Fred spread his wings upon relocating to South London - at first with his Neue Grafik Ensemble and later with his now iconic twice-weekly Orii Jam - the latter of which has given agency to an entire new generation of musicians; spawning an aesthetic, nurturing a unique sound and becoming a launchpad for countless artists.

Dalston Tape Volume 1 is Fred’s attempt to fall back in love with beatmaking - taking it back to the roots of where the project began. I say “attempt” because he’s simply learnt too much and made too many friends along the way to make a mere DIY beat tape. Since his early MPC-led productions on Parisian label, Beat X Changers, Fred has learnt to play the keys to a concert hall standard, he has become proficient in double bass and built up a dense network of collaborators who he has composed, recorded, engineered and produced for both at home in SE London and in the iconic Total Refreshment Centre Studios in Dalston.

This experience adds unavoidable dimensions to his toolbox - resulting in something more akin to a miniature-magnum-opus than a simple beat-tape. Yes, we hear the influences of Pete Rock, Mad Lib, J Dilla and Al Dobson Jr but we also hear the musicality of D’Aneglo, James Blake and live contributions from an ever growing army of young graduates of the Orii School.

Beats are finely crafted, virtuosically finished and at times - excruciatingly short! So short it’s almost a flex - but a humble one at that. If this is what Neue Grafik can do on his lunch break imagine what he could do with enough time and budget!?

The “ Volume 1” suffix reassures us more is to come, and the “tapes” suggests that whilst these may be brief sketches , there’s nothing throw away about them - on the contrary, we’re witnessing an artist in full flow, moving solo as nimbly as he does with an orchestra, a man with too many ideas and not enough time offering us a brief glimpse into his musical world and reminding us that despite all he has learnt he is, at his core - a beat maker.

The only question which remains is whether he is intentionally teasing us with these bite size nuggets or inadvertently elevating the art-form to new heights. That, is for you to decide... 

990x has been blurring the line between rap and ambient for almost a decade, breaking up his subby, saturated 808 kicks and itchy percussive trills with effervescent pads, levitational loops and the kind of ghostly contrails you'd expect to hear on a Grouper record. He's never sounded quite as liminal as he does on 'Ruins', though, an album produced in recovery as he contemplated the healing process, shifting between one state and the next. As part of the recently formed label clique The Citadel, along with Sauron and IJI, he hones in on decentralised, defocussed sounds linked across continents by the internet’s rhizomatic networks, repping a certain slant on the sound that originated with Lil B and diffused via soundcloud to become a key node in the contemporary definition of what Brian Eno termed a “scenius”; a collective intelligence that transcends the sum of its parts. Throughout ‘Ruins’, 990x deploys all the hallmarks of the aesthetic - glyding 808 bass and sibilant trills, vaporous pads, and noctilucent melodies - with a melancholic grip all his own. According to classic cloud rap convention, the 8-part, 40 minute suite evinces a liminal, weightless state of mind with immersive structures that appear to float, buoyed by subs that plunge all the way down, whilst his ambient soul wraps the head in high tog puff stuffed with hopes and dreams. Shimmering echoes of Lil B and Clams Casino’s early works perfuse ‘Forest of Silence’ in his use of guzheng-like string motifs diffused to the rafters on diaphanous subs, and Yungwebster’s screwed diagonals come to mind in the vertiginous bliss-out ‘Fallen’. A tempered ecstasy thieves thru the saturated cinematic panorama ‘June Lovers’ and gives way to the ruder ballast of ‘Crates’ while the fractal hi-hats on ‘Sonar’ ultimately get subsumed by saturated waves of bass and screwed ambient dub on the album’s longest cut, the subtly optimistic 8 minute parting shot ‘Wisdom’, deploying a horizontal dembow rhythm that can't help but remind us of Kelman Duran's epochal '1804 Kids'.

In 2003, MF DOOM introduced us to one of his most intriguing alter egos, Viktor Vaughn. As the story goes, Viktor Vaughn was an interdimensional time-traveling MC from another realm where Hip-Hop was banned. He’d been exploring time and space looking for new dimensions to sharpen his MC skills, which eventually led him to 90s era NYC, where he found himself stranded from a mechanical mishap with his time machine. He began hitting open mics and small venues, battling other MCs and picking up side-hustles in order to raise the funds to repair his time machine.Vaudeville Villain is a concept album like no other, where MF DOOM re-envisions himself as a younger, hungrier, more brazen persona in order to explore a different point of view. Of course, developing a second self from a more technologically advanced universe, he took a new approach to the production too. Viktor Vaughn fittingly raps over next-school beats that move freely in spaces between Electronica and Hip Hop, courtesy of Sound-Ink producers King Honey, Heat Sensor and Max Bill, along with one track from RJD2. Vaudeville Villain is one of the more uniquely creative entries in the MF DOOM universe.

Thus far, Zach Saginaw's releases as Shigeto have been fragments, albeit singularly satisfying fragments--EP-length glimpses into the Brooklyn producer's creative psyche. After filling two EPs on Ghostly International, Shigeto's lush, sumptuous take on instrumental hip-hop has fully materialized. Full Circle, the artist's first full-length album, completes the journey begun with Shigeto's Semi-Circle EP, synthesizing the drummer/producer's signature themes of family, continuity, and musical boundary-pushing into a vibrant, fully unified artistic statement. The sounds on Full Circle come from four years of obsessive field recording and collaboration. Saginaw brought his Tascam mini-recorder with him everywhere, capturing the "glasses, chains, breathing, children, family meals, monks singing in cathedrals, walks in the south of France, and good friends offering their musical skill" that would all find homes in the record's compositional nooks and crannies. As a result of Saginaw's constant documentation, the songs on Full Circle play like chapters in an ongoing story--as in "Escape from the Incubator", whose initial rhythmic claustrophobia opens up into a boom-clap nocturnal chase, or "French Kiss Power Up", whose romantic digital strut gives way to discord and fragmentation as the waves of synthesizer give way to a shaky, neurotic coda. Full Circle is framed by the "Ann Arbor" diptych, a pair of beat suites named after Saginaw's hometown (one featuring a sample of Detroit MC SelfSays), all double-thick synths and triple-strength kick drums. Saginaw plays the majority of his rhythms by hand, and Full Circle's consistently deep pocket is the record's secret weapon, thumping and breathing like a living being. Having set the stage with Semi-Circle and What We Held On To EPs--twin treatises on Saginaw's Japanese grandmother's escape from a US internment camp--Shigeto is clearly ready to draw the tale to a close and take center stage. "This release represents the end of the beginning--or perhaps that there is no end and no beginning at all," says Saginaw. Regardless, Full Circle is the start of something great.

UK hip-hop artist Roots Manuva's two classic albums Roots Manuva's two classic albums are reissued by Big Dada to commemorate the 25th anniversary of their release.

‘Sorrow’ is the third in the ‘Aquarii In Dub’ series from musician and producer Joe Armon-Jones, written and produced by Joe in his own studio and released on his own label Aquarii Records.

As well as Liam Bailey and James Mollison, Sorrow features Morgan Simpson on drums, bassist Luke Wynter, and Mark Mollison on guitar.

Produced and mixed by Joe Armon-Jones, mastered by Noah Priddle.

UK hip-hop artist Roots Manuva's two classic albums Roots Manuva's two classic albums are reissued by Big Dada to commemorate the 25th anniversary of their release.

To dwell within a land that's meant for many men not my tone, I must pay attention to the least-paid-attention-to

Honour’s debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora and brushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, Àlàáfíà is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from the poetic profundity of God, remembered dreams, unexpected casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, and personal archives. The result is an impressionistic vision in Black and Blur that both exhausts and implicates language and that sublimates boundaries between everywhere and nowhere; history and the present; the individual and the universal.

On "SHAME", producer 2K88 (Przemysław Jankowiak, fka 1988) invokes the era and spirit of PL SOUND, a local genre inspired by British soundsystem music but infused with the social, urban, and sonic themes that developed during Poland’s post-communist transformation. "SHAME" is a progressive, bass-fueled transmission built from scraps of hip-hop’s past; it’s a cinematic vision of Y2K Polish rap that’s in constant flux, where every detail is just as important as the whole structure. Sampling the Polish canon of beats from the low-rent districts of the nineties, 2K88 plunders tracks already based on samples and channels the experiences of the generations that grew up with those sounds, struggling and celebrating with them. And just as he did with his previous projects Etamski and 1988, 2K88 draws out, processes, and ages his elements in an echo chamber, asking questions and formulating answers. Jankowiak works on the fringes of genre: traces of ambient, dub, rap and jungle flicker into low-lit urban rhythms, chunky nightclub basslines and paranoid production touches. This is in keeping with his new, futuristic handle, 2K88. Not for a second does he succumb to today’s omnipresent nostalgia, instead putting reconstruction before deconstruction — he finds whole worlds in his scraps, and in the long-gone turn-of-the-millennium period, whose liminal qualities feel like a precursor to the unease of the present moment. The end-of-the-20th-century paranoia has only intensified in the past 30 years, and paranoia, as Philo Gant once said in the 1995 sci-fi film "Strange Days", is “just reality on a finer scale”. By that logic, 2K88 offers a picture of the grittiest reality blown up to truly awe-inspiring proportions. ______________________________________________________________ 2K88— fka 1988, aka Przemysław Jankowiak — is a music producer, graphic designer, and audio director raised in the Poland of the 1990s and on the pioneering rap records of that time. The rawness, chunkiness, and paranoia he took from this period have always been an integral part of his music. They were there when he made his first homemade beats and stayed with him when, in the following years, he distanced himself from hip-hop, going deeper into the world of sampling experiments and the post-genre avant-garde. Later, he and Robert Piernikowski created the universe of the duo Syny - an irreal spectral/ontological phenomenon built out of memories, dreams, and bass, rap, dub, and smoke. Since the end of Syny, Jankowiak has let loose his beatmaker impulses on a collaborative record with Warsaw’s legendary MC Włodi, created the album Ruleta [Roulette] with over 30 featured guests, and struck up a dialogue with the electronic soundsystem work that’s fascinated him for years on the Ring the Alarm EP. He’s also created chart-topping avant-pop with Brodka and a mimetic soundtrack to “Splinter”, but it is SHAME that is the album we might call his sonic résumé.

One of UK Grime’s most shadowy figures comes of age with a killer full length debut released in collab between True Panther and DJ Python’s Worldwide Unlimited, brimming with an incandescent energy arcing from OG to contemporary eras. It's fully addictive gear, joining unexpected dots between hook-heavy pop and weirder modes, on a tip somewhere between Vegyn, Dean Blunt, Playboi Carti, Klein & Junior Boys - just v v good!!!! Previously appearing on these pages as a guest (alongside Charlotte Church!) on Klein’s stunning ‘Harmattan’ album, Jawnino has been actively issuing prime zingers since 2019’s cult self-release ‘It’s Cold Out’, building a robust rep for his effortless and unique takes on grime, drill, jungle, and rap. Noted for his animated style of “melancholic chaos”, Jawnino flows ambidextrous on whatever’s in front of him, and ’40' gives him a whole new playground in which to romp; spelling out his dare-to-differ slant on a colourful instrumental palette supplied by new hands - Woesum, HNRO, Brbko, 3o, and Cold - alongside more experienced guest features and remixers - James Massiah (aka Babyfather’s DJ Escrow), Bok Bok (remixing here as One Bok), Airhead, Evilgiane - with breezy fresh steez and classic storytelling that transcends eras. Blessed with a naturally uncompromising yet broad appeal, Jawnino’s music speaks to life in 2020’s London with an observantly perceptive quality, delivered behind a mask of anonymity. His music is also artfully aware, exhibiting an appetite for variation that sees him glyde equally well on ohrwurming choruses on ‘2trains’, as he does at soulful grime for the club in ‘Dance2’ - an update of his ‘Good Thing Bad Thing Who Knows’ EP nugget that we swear sounds like Junior Boys - while also finding a wry humour in broken Britain on the timelessly drizzly melancholy of ‘It’s Cold Out’, a new expansion of his debut cut produced by Poundshop, Oliver Twist and Cold - and that’s only the opening trio. Characteristic of his generation’s attraction to the most salient aspects of the preceding 20 odd years, Jawnino proves just as adept at jumping on tight D&B to tell tales of weekend excess (‘Lost My Brain’) as screwed boogie forging binds with US spar MIKE (’Short Stories’), or shuffling in the twilight of ‘90s R&B (‘Wind’). A particular standout of drill drama ‘Westfield’ characterises his ability to boost the energy by factors, and likewise dial it right down and draw us closer in on his description of popping percocet, molly and shrooms in ‘sentfromheaven’, also here in Bok Bok’s finely retuned version, nagging ’til the end beside Airhead’s piquant retweak of ‘Cant Be’. For anyone losing faith in rap soundalikes, Jawnino reaffirms a love for classic forms pronounced in new ways.

MM..FOOD, a 2004 concept album "about what you find at a picnic or at a picnic table," released by underground rap's greatest voice MF DOOM on Rhymesayers, is back in analog form! The fifth studio album, which debuted at #17 on Billboard's Independent Albums chart, features guest appearances by Count Bass D, Angelika, 4ize, and Mr. Fantastik.

Honour’s debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora and brushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, Àlàáfíà is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from the poetic profundity of God, remembered dreams, unexpected casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, and personal archives. The result is an impressionistic vision in Black and Blur that both exhausts and implicates language and that sublimates boundaries between everywhere and nowhere; history and the present; the individual and the universal.

The singular musical spirit Joseph Deenmamode aka Mo Kolours presents an exciting new body of work. A catalog of critically acclaimed records, including his self-titled debut (2014), ‘Texture Like Like Sun’ (2015), 2018 album ‘Inner Symbols’ and three companion EPs, established Deenmamode as a prodigious musician and vocalist. Pitchfork extolled his “hypnotic, tribal-infused dance grooves”, DJ Mag appreciated the “colourful celebration of soundsystem culture”, and Resident Advisor advocated that “no one sounds quite like Mo Kolours”. Musical analogies were drawn by The Guardian as “The best album Curtis Mayfield never made with A Tribe Called Quest and Lee Perry” and Mojo as “like Marvin Gaye produced by J Dilla”. Five years ago, Deenmamode moved to the Japanese countryside. Far away from familiarity, he contemplated his place and further questioned his identity. “I had none of my ‘own’ people around. I had time to really find what makes me tick musically. Japan has helped me go back to those subconscious leanings, really go deep, and reflect the aspects that make up my story”. The tracks on ‘Original Flow’ have been constructed from sessions, improvisations and soundbites captured around the world during this time; collecting contributions from musicians including Deenamode’s brothers Reginald Omas Mamode and Jeen Bassa plus Andrew Ashong, Charles Bullen, Dwaye Kilvington, Eddie Hick, Stefan Asanovic, Myele Manzanza, Ross Hughes, and Tom Dreissler. Deenamode says “I’m proud of this album’s creative process. Coming from a tradition of scouring through hours of records, I wanted to create my own samples, to find that perfect loop that no other producer could put their hands on. I decided to invite a group of friends and acquaintances, who also happen to be incredible musicians, to a studio in Crystal Palace to improvise based on some loose ideas I had. We spent all day, and recorded everything”. ‘Original Flow’ is an album of UK street-soul nouveau, future indigenous jazz fusion, Rasta Segga, Nyahbinghi jazz, Malagasy Hebrew hip hop. While retaining a spirit of exploration and improvisation, it sees Deenmamode grow and flex beyond beat tape brevity, expanding composition and stretching his musical muscle to play live with other musicians. Themes of empowerment, overcoming adversity, and mental liberation coexist with notes from ancient history, futurism, and science, as well as musings on family and togetherness. ‘Magik Momentum’ springs from a discussion that features at the start of the song, an inspiring mentor answering a question from Deenmamode about improvisation and what role it plays in life when planning and manifesting the future. ‘Rockets to Mars’ questions the lack of care for the billions of people with nothing, while governments plan to explore space. “This sparked a comparison in my mind to a Sonny Okuson song that I would reference when performing. Okuson’s song talked of the lack of resources in many communities in the world, while governments go to the moon”. He says the music behind ‘The News These Days’ is “possibly my favourite on the album”. Looped like he would a late sixty jazz-fusion sample, there was nothing added and the track was complete within a matter of minutes. “It was the first and best moment from the entire Crystal Palace session”, he adds. The album’s contrasting title track with minimal instrumentation played solo by Deenamode. While frustratingly searching for gems in past recordings, he thought in a burst of ego, “I don’t need no-one else to make a dope beat!” picked up his ravanne, (the traditional frame drum of his fathers home-land of Mauritius), pressed record, and started to play. He says, “In my thoughts were the rhythms of the Nubians in Upper-Egypt and Sudan, the swing of the huge drums played by Mauritanian women, of-course the Sega beat of Mauritius, and the ever inspiring beat of James Yancey”. Driven by UK broken beat, Cuban congas, Nigerian and Mauritian inflections, ‘Love Vibration’ follows the concept that all emotions carry a vibratory frequency and pays homage to the frequency of creation and the power of love. The two part ‘Tatamaka’ tells of the history of Deenmamode’s ancestors, the maroons of Mauritius. “We are people who managed to run from our oppressors and find refuge in a corner of the island called ‘Le Morne’ where they could not reach us. One bloody day they came in numbers to re-capture, to revenge. Many of us chose to jump to our deaths, rather than be taken back into subjugation. The poem by Creole Richard Sedley Assonne says; “there were hundreds of them, but my people, the maroons chose the kiss of death over the chains of slavery”. Tatamaka was the name of a famed maroon leader who was murdered for claiming his, and our people’s freedom. The song is the imagined journey of escape and freedom by an ancestor of the maroons of Le Morne”. Born in the west midlands and raised on the traditional sega music of his father’s Indian Ocean homeland of Mauritius alongside records by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Santana and Michael Jackson; his influences expanded with late 90s jungle and drum and bass nights in Bristol, experiments at art college in Camberwell, and the rich culture of Peckham, “at the time we called it the Afro Quarters of London” says Deenmamode, adding hip hop, dub, soul and soundsystem styles to his individual sound. He explains, “I love drum music, from hand-drums to 808s. I love music from the ancient past, heritage music, indigenous music, traditional music passed down from the beginning of time. Music from the body, hand claps, grunts and foot stomps. Music with audible depth, busy, bustling, highly charged. Music from the soul, the music from beyond. I love music from the islands and the mountains. The music of the streets, hustle music, alleyway beats. Club music”. He describes the creative process as thinking in images. “The visual world and the world of sound seem to intermingle in my thought process. When I play the drum with my eyes closed, a world of imagery dances and moves with beat. Improvised drumming feels like I am listening to what I want to hear, rather than trying to play what I want to hear. Following the rhythm and finding new pathways to walk within the patterns is what I experience. In this way I often feel I am just a listener, instead of the player”.

Originally made as a contribution to the Blowing Up The Workshop mix series, subsequently given a cassette release in 2019, now finally receiving a limited vinyl LP pressing. "A trip across the frequencies of Bristol's pirate radio stations via cut-ups of broadcasts, taken from the late 1980s to the early 2000s ~ also a love-letter to my childhood, an audio document of the years I spent growing up in the city."

Brooklyn's illbient cult Sensational meets Kyoto's composer unbuilt.

A brief EP released mainly as an attack on Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Live by Yo Rep is an interesting if hard-to-find relic of Three 6 Mafia's early years. Its release followed that of Mystic Stylez, and a couple group members get solo showcases: Koopsta Knicca and Killa Klan Kaze. There's nothing all that essential here, granted, but Live by Yo Rep is nonetheless a worthwhile novelty for fans of this era of the group. ~ Jason Birchmeier

MM..FOOD, a 2004 concept album "about what you find at a picnic or at a picnic table," released by underground rap's greatest voice MF DOOM on Rhymesayers, is back in analog form! The fifth studio album, which debuted at #17 on Billboard's Independent Albums chart, features guest appearances by Count Bass D, Angelika, 4ize, and Mr. Fantastik.

Brooklyn's illbient cult Sensational meets Kyoto's composer unbuilt.

Coby Sey is a highly rated experimental musician, producer, vocalist and DJ from Lewisham, South London. Sey is known for recording lo-fi piano instrumentals and leftfield club music. However, debut album ‘Conduit’ sees him creating slow, soulful grooves underpinned by heavy bass, and topped by vocals which moves between speech and rap. The production retains the fuzzy lo-fi quality.

"Every day, the skies of New York City fill up with unseen clouds of radio signals spreading over immigrant neighborhoods. These culturally charged clouds of radio energy burst with a flow of content that continually shifts and transforms, following the lifecycle and rhythm of the streets. In Brooklyn, the signals alight on Flatbush Avenue, blasting from radios in dollar vans, bakeries, churches and on street corners and kitchen tables. By accessing an analog technology that (outside of the radio itself) is essentially free for the listener, economically marginalized communities avoid the subscription and data fees built in to the conveniences of the digital life. Listeners, often the elders of the community, extend metal antennas and position the radios just so, trying to catch the elusive vibrations of crucial music, news and information that are seldom felt in New York City’s legal and mostly corporate owned media soundscape. In Flatbush, stations broadcast primarily to Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Grenadians and Orthodox Jews. The Haitian stations are particularly active in East Flatbush with just under a dozen broadcasting daily in Kreyol to the large Haitian community. “I came across it at a very young age. There was this really popular station back in the late 80s, Radio Guinee, and it was based in Brooklyn.” says Joan Martinez, a young Haitian-American born in the US and a former program host on some of the unlicensed Kreyol language stations. “Nobody knows where it was, there are suspicions. But all I know is from Friday night all the way to Sunday night, you would just hear a series of these stations every weekend and it would be the place where you could listen to the latest in Haitian pop music, rap music. It was also the news, my parents and their friends would all sit around the radio and they would just be politicking in the living room getting really loud, you know, dancing, singing along that sort of thing. It was just like a meeting ground and the radio was guiding it.” This phase of New York City pirate radio rose from the ashes of a previous scene dating to the late sixties: a dozen or so stations sporadically run mostly by white teenagers: a mix of hippies, radicals and electronically inclined misfits. By 1987, this loose collective of friends and rivals devolved into infighting after a short-lived attempt to broadcast from international waters off Jones Beach. This created room for new pirate radio voices from diverse communities that were increasingly being pushed off the legal airwaves by high costs, format consolidation, and “the low power desert”, an FCC-led phaseout of small community broadcasters. The local pirates joined a growing national wave of progressive pirate radio activity taking advantage of a new generation of cheap FM transmitters imported from China or home-brewed in makeshift workshops by free radio activists. By the early 90’s, immigrant community-focused broadcasters In New York City flipped the unspoken rules of the earlier pirates who broadcast mainly late at night on a few pre-determined “safe” frequencies, instead filling the FM dial from bottom to top, day and night. In 2000, under pressure from a nationwide increase in pirate radio activity, the FCC introduced a new license class: Low Power FM (LPFM) but opposition from National Public Radio and the National Association of Broadcasters shut down the issuing of new licenses. That severely limited LPFM’s availability in major urban markets due to rules requiring LPFM’s to be “three click aways” from existing stations. Local pirates felt they had no alternative but to continue broadcasting and some stations in Flatbush have been on the air for decades. Despite the passage of the Local Community Radio Act in 2011, opening a new licensing window with relaxed spacing requirements, few new frequencies were available in NYC due to an already crowded dial. The continued pirate presence is enabled by a sort of safety in numbers, an FCC enforcement team hampered by a low budget and a bureaucratic process of enforcement. Interference aside, FCC commissioners and staff publicly fume at the pirates for a range of potential public safety violations, some more theoretical than others and claim they are somehow harming their own communities, and wonder finally, why don’t they just stream on the internet. By viewing radio piracy purely from a legal perspective, critics miss the cultural and historic forces driving the Haitian pirates. During the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986) Haitians had access to only two stations broadcasting in Kreyol, rather than French, the language of the elite. One was Radio Lumiere, a religious station and the other Radio Haiti-Inter, a fiercely independent voice whose director Jean Dominque was assassinated in 1999. “The peasant in Haiti, while he’s working on his farm you know he had a transistor.” Says Dr. Jean Eddy St. Paul, Director of the Haitian Studies Institute at the City University of New York. ‘And many peasants, they don’t have money to buy tobacco to smoke, but they will have money to buy the battery to put in the transistor. The first generation of migration, in the US, was during the 1960s and for many of those people the culture of transistor was part of their everyday life, so they’re still maintaining the culture of transistor. For them, having a radio station is very important.’ In July 2019, on a side street in East Flatbush, I met a man calling himself “Joseph” aka “Haitian” (“because I’m a pure Haitian!”), part of a group that keeps Radio Comedy FM on the air. “There’s no owners and committee. It’s a bunch of young guys”. Joseph says, “We have to do something positive for our community. Right now the Marines are in Haiti and we don’t know what’s next! CNN don’t show you this! BBC don’t show you this! So what we do, we have people in Haiti that call us and tell us what’s going on and will send us pictures. This is how we get our information. And bring it to the people…. I have family over there, my mother’s still there. So I have to know what’s going on. At this point in the digital age, it’s an open question how long these analog pirate stations will remain relevant, as their audiences age, neighborhoods gentrify and younger listeners gravitate to social media platforms. The answer seems to lie with their elderly and impoverished listeners. “They don’t have enough money to buy the newspapers understand?.” Joseph says.” For him that makes it worth it to keep Radio Comedy on the air despite a crackdown from the FCC backed by the PIRATE Act signed into law in 2020 that increases fines to $100,000 a day up to $2 million. But the legislation lacks funding to enforce the new regulations. With a federal statute still in place reducing fines down to the ability to pay, it’s unclear whether the PIRATE Act will be anything more than another in an escalating series of scare tactics. Though the FCC has recently suggested the possibility of a new round of LPFM licenses in the future, the already crowded nature of NYC’s FM band makes it unlikely that new frequencies will be made available to the current pirate stations. In addition the FCC doesn’t want to be seen as rewarding illegal activity by granting a license to former pirate broadcasters, which was a prohibition in LPFM’s earlier licensing periods. And for the moment, Joseph, who’s been running unlicensed stations since 1991 (‘it’s an addiction’) is equally unlikely to cede the airwaves. He sees Radio Comedy as not just a radio station, but a community lifeline. “You know many children we save? There was a bunch of guys…Jamaican, Trinidadian, Haitian trying to form a gang. We talked to them, bring them to the station. Most of them have a diploma now. Without the radio, most of them probably get locked up or dead.” Even with the PIRATE act on the books, the number of stations on the air in Brooklyn has remained steady with an average of about 25 per day and the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic has only sharpened their mission. In March 2020 as the spread of Covid-19 lead to NYC’s lockdown, the unlicensed Haitian broadcasters and the other West Indian stations in Brooklyn took a step closer to their listeners, increasing their air time and enhancing their formats to deliver information about the virus both in New York and in their countries of origin amid the heavy toll it took on the community."

Originally made as a contribution to the Blowing Up The Workshop mix series, subsequently given a cassette release in 2019, now finally receiving a limited vinyl LP pressing. "A trip across the frequencies of Bristol's pirate radio stations via cut-ups of broadcasts, taken from the late 1980s to the early 2000s ~ also a love-letter to my childhood, an audio document of the years I spent growing up in the city."

On his full-length drink sum wtr debut, Standing on Giant Shoulders, Sam splits the difference between Snoop Dogg and D' Angelo, Curren$y and David Ruffin. The songs reveal a forward-thinking sensibility rooted in ancestral soul. He creates spiritual hymns for the streets that tap into universal ideals and irrepressible groove. In an era plagued by short-term thinking, his ambitions reveal a crate-digging depth of music history and a meticulous ear for detail.