MUSIC

600 copies. Lovely crafted tip-on sleeve. Remastered from the original master tapes. ** Sunstroke were Ben Bollaert and Etienne Delaruye, both were obsessed with the burgeoning possibilities of electronic music and it made sense that they collaborate in the studio. The resulting experiments culminated in the 1985 release of Nothing's Wrong in Paradise. The record was conceived as a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist - a sophisticated meeting of post-Berlin-school dreaming, Yen-records hi-tech calm and Impressionist Café music ennui. What makes it most compelling though, is that even while it conjures a seemingly perfect world, something around the edges lets you know that all might not be as it seems. Maybe there is nothing wrong in paradise. Or maybe that’s just wallpapering over the cracks. The rough edges and regret of everyday life cannot help but intrude. Once you have spent some time with it, the whole record starts to seem bathed in a dim half-light, suggesting utopia glimpsed through a smudged lens. Just like the ethereal space in their music Sunstroke only existed for a moment, a second LP was planned but never materialised, briefl

At Richard Swift's National Freedom studios, the live-to-tape ethos allowed the songs on Damien Jurado's 'Maraqopa' to expand and retract like a great beast's breath. Every in-the-moment bell and whistle here is hung with a natural, casual care. And from this, each song offers up its own unique gift: the enchanting children's choir that echoes each line of Jurado's lament for innocence lost on "Life Away from the Garden"; the breezy bossa nova that begins "This Time Next Year" and rises as effortless as a smoke cloud into high-noon showdown pop; "Reel to Reel"'s wobbly, Spector-symphony and its meta themes; the wonderful falsetto vocal work Jurado pulls from himself on "Museum of Flight." The Seattle Times recently called Jurado "Seattle's folk-boom godfather," a praising recognition to be sure. But also a title Jurado might not yet be ready to accept. That's a title for someone who has settled. With each visit to National Freedom, Jurado is exploring, taking risks. He's not only freeing his songs. The gate is opened wide to allow us all into his once-isolated musical universe. One gets the sense he's just now hitting his stride.

Connecting Wasulu hunter music, griot praises, Senufo pastoral dances, Fula and Mandingo repertoire alongside Western psychedelia, blues and afro-beat, Zani Diabaté’s Super Djata Band de Bamako was among Mali’s top orchestras by the late 1970’s well into the mid-1980’s. Tracked live inside Radio Mali’s raw but inspiring studio in January 1982, En Super Forme was briefly available via Côte d'Ivoire’s Musique Mondiale imprint. The album centers around Diabaté and his electric guitar’s pyrotechnics, a relentless shredder that stands shoulder to shoulder with Mali’s fingerstyle gods Ali Farka Touré and Rail Band's legendary Djelimady Tounkara.

Vampisoul present a first time reissue of Los Kintos' self-titled album, originally released in 1970. In the late sixties, a generation of young Peruvian musicians, who were fans of tropical sounds, chose Cuban rhythms over the onslaught of boogaloo and Colombian cumbia. This musical movement attracted a legion of young followers, mostly from popular districts of Lima. In 1969, percussionist Domingo Guzmán Villanueva was commissioned by the MAG record label to get together a group to revive Cuban musical tradition. To lead the project he recruited, Francisco "Pancho" Acosta, founder and guitarist of the Compay Quinto. The new group was baptized Los Kintos, in a nod to their desire to carry on playing in the Compay Quinto style. The link between the two groups appears on this first album, as the group's name is written in two different ways: Los Kintos, on the front cover; and Los Quintos, on the back. Recordings began in 1969 and included the stunning "Descarga Kinto", Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz's original "Pancho Cristal" -- renamed here "Pancho Guzmán" -- and Cuban classics from the repertoire of the historic Trio Matamoros like "Lágrimas Negras" or "Mentiras", all with lead vocals by Kiko Fuentes. The success of their concerts would take them on tours across the country, always recognized as outstanding figures of Cuban music in Peru. This reissue brings back an album that marked a milestone in the history of Peruvian tropical music and revives the fame of the group's legendary live performances.

Ulla Straus is a Philadelphia-based ambient artist who has released a number of masterpieces of acoustic dub/ambient music under the direction of Huerco S. collaboration with Pontiac Streator on West Mineral, a label that is now recognized as a sacred place, caused quite a stir. This album was released in 2020 under a different name from a new label [Experiences Ltd] started by uon, a special guest DJ who is an important acoustic dub act at [West Mineral]. It's so beautiful and so deep, you can sink into it forever. This album is built around chant sampling and piano, and is a further exploration of the world of "Big Room", a masterpiece ambient cassette released last year on [Quiet Time]. Mastered by D&M and amp; cut to perfection. Limited to 400 copies. Don't miss it if you like "Mono No Aware" or "bblisss", not to mention [West Mineral] works!

reversals and slippage toward glass, reconfigured
smasht past it
smeared the oil cross currents
and me
plant rotting its container, or, grains lovingly
no warm water to spit back
no cloth to tie

i glance back
refractions stack right.

a kiss that will stew until it evaporates
scuffed across my feet, feet crossed

bubbled trash that spilt intermittently,
who cleaned the air with a smudgey for you.

Selva Discos fulfills its duty of giving a new life to Fernando Falcão's long lost LPs with the reissue of his album Barracas Barrocas, originally released through Egberto Gismonti's cult record label Carmo in 1987. Somehow, an original copy of this album is even more elusive than its predecessor Memória das Águas and it is a pity that such a stunning piece of music was kept apart from listeners worldwide for so long.

The follow-up to Memória das Águas was recorded in São Paulo after Fernando Falcão returned from his exile in France in 1984. In order to conceive Barracas Barrocas, the musician had the help of illustrious friends, such as singer-songwriter Alceu Valença and singer Tetê Espíndola, alongside brothers Myriam and Daniel Taubkin. At the time, Falcão was still using the sound sculptures he created for Memória das Águas, as he is credited in the liner notes for playing a "water orchestra" and his berimbau variant called balauê.

Barracas Barrocas is an album that works as a more condensed and coherent artistic statement of Falcão's œuvre. Lush strings, swelling brass, glowing production, and humming atmospheres fill the record, adding a beautiful yet subtly linked counterpoint to his previously explosive debut. It is very cinematic, sounding like the soundtrack of a play that only existed in the musician's mind.

For this release, not only the sound was remastered but the artwork of Barracas Barrocas was completely and faithfully restored. Also, the reissue comes with unprecedented liner notes featuring rare photos of the musician and his sound sculptures plus an article that tells the story of Fernando Falcão after returning to Brazil fol

Japanese Balearic Masterpiece ('93) is re-pressed on Clear Blue Vinyl! HIROSHI II HIROSHI" is a unit of Hiroshi Fujiwara and Hiroshi Kawanabe (Tokyo No.1 SOUL SET). This is their chill-out~Balearic classic (EP), which was distributed as a picture disc with a vinyl jacket at the time, and is now a popular and expensive item on the second-hand market. The EP features "H2O," the first track that takes you to a fictional resort with its gentle guitar strumming, and "Beauty & Beast + Bagle (Dub)," an exquisite summer resort dubwise track with melting sounds and the melancholy of the sun in the west. The album also includes six evergreen songs that pioneered the Café Del Mar craze that later spread throughout Japan. The artwork is a faithful reproduction of the CD-era design by Hiroshi Nagai.

The second album released in 1973, with Japanese lyrics on side A and English lyrics on side B. The ensemble with female vocals is also superb on this acid folk masterpiece.

1965 samba jazz gem recorded by Humberto Clayber, Hermeto Pascoal and Airto Moreira in the early days of their careers. Includes the killer ‘João Sem Braço’ featuring Hermeto’s howling flute and Airto’s overwhelming percussion work. This is the only album ever released by this Brazilian all-star group and has remained unavailable for decades. First time vinyl reissue. LISTEN: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEQuvkOzGPg ESCUCHA: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEQuvkOzGPg Auténtica joya de samba jazz grabada en 1965 por Airto Moreira, Humberto Clayber y Hermeto Pascoal, al comienzo de sus carreras. Incluye el demoledor ‘João Sem Braço’ con la flauta aullante de Hermeto y el abrumador trabajo percusivo de Airto. “Em Som Maior” es el único álbum grabado por este grupo all-star de músicos brasileños y ha sido prácticamente inencontrable durante décadas. Nos complace presentar ahora su primera reedición en vinilo.

Mindgames follows Strangelove Music's previous issue of Sjunne Ferger's early singles and soundtrack work on Childrens Mind (SL 106LP, 2021). Occupying its own hinterland within Scandinavia's early '80s electronic/progressive movements, Mindgames navigates a lifetime of musical and personal exploration by Sjunne Ferger. Child jazz drummer prodigy, arts venue operator, music teacher and Aikido practitioner, a bewildering array of personal and creative influences are distilled into the Örebro native's only long player. Written around a new wave context, his own jazz fusion roots and at times with an unintentionally Balearic outcome, Sjunne goes some way to conjuring up a singular sounding album of the time. Narratives of love and loss, calls to self-empowerment and mindfulness, the new age zeal throughout follows Sjunne's own awakening. Its music caught in meditative reflection one moment before propelling into ecstatic revelation the next, with Sjunne's collective Exit providing electric backing throughout. Propelled by the drummer's beat, it's hard not to be caught up with Sjunne's personal vision of a "Polymood Music" LP painstakingly transferred and fully remastered from the original tapes, with new liner notes and photography.

“Our journals and recording equipment were ultimately confiscated and stolen by the MNLF rebels. We escaped with a single cassette, the clothes on our back, and our lives.”―David Blair Stiffler In 1988, David Blair Stiffler risked life and limb to document under-recorded cultural groups living lives of extreme isolation in the mountainous Philippine regions of Nueva Ecija, Aurora, and Luzon. These are the fruits of that expedition. In the grand tradition of ethnographic recordings that made up the majority of Folkways' vast and significant catalog comes Music from the Mountain Provinces. By the mid-1980s, David Blair Stiffler was already a most-decorated recordist, with eight Folkways LPs under his belt. These are among the most obscure documents in the entire Folkways catalog. Although the works of Jose Maceda and Nicole Revel heavily documented much of the Philippines' countryside inhabitants with a thorough and sober effort protracted over the decades, Stiffler brought his own panache into the equation, capturing gorgeous and revelatory moments from some of the archipelago's least visited regions. Even without the harrowing tale of himself and his crew being taken hostage, contained within is a rare aural experience. These masters, originally intended for release on Folkways, were shelved when Stiffler returned home to news of Folkways founder Moses Asch’s death.

One of the biggest classics in housemusic history! Containing 4 masterpieces in the genre by one of its masterminds. It's about time that people become aware of the talents of Larry Heard (aka Mr Fingers). One could easily say that he is the Miles Davis of housemusic. On this remastered release we have Stars, Waterfalls, Slam Dance and For So Long. 4 tracks with unique alienating machine rhythms, intense basslines and overwhelming beauty in an abstract way that was never heard before, untill this release came out. House Classic Must Have!! iframe title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c3eMQB8h-eI" allowfullscreen="" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0">

Nurse With Wound List! Théâtre du Chêne Noir d'Avignon, a French avant-garde group founded in the late '60s by Gérard Gelas, a multi-instrumentalist and actor who plays everything from gongs to synths, drums and organ, released a rare 1971 album on Futura Records, an avant-garde jazz label known for its work with Sahib Shihab, Jacques Thollot and Steve Lacy. This is an official reissue from SouffleContinu, a prestigious label that digs up the life of the French avant-garde, from domestic progressive rock to the niche works of Saravah. The first album was recorded on June 22/23, 1971 at the chapel of the same name in Avignon, southern France (Steve Lacy recorded "Solo" there the following year). It's breathtaking to hear the horrible sounds. With a composition that is liturgical and imaginative, reminiscent of paganism and black magic, the saxophone, flute, electric guitar, percussion, and enigmatic French narratives and cries are intertwined, instantly transforming the sound field into another world. Remastered from the master tape. With an obi. Officially licensed by Futura Records.

First ever reissue of highly sought after french jazz funk fusion nugget from Alain Bellaïche featuring, Jerry Goodman (Mahavishnu Orchestra), John Hicks (Strata-East) & Fabiano (Fabiano Orchestra).
Remastered from the master tapes.
Restored artwork + 12 page booklet.
Licensed from Alain Bellaïche.

A Frenchman who is returning (but who we seem to discover!) from the USA is something unusual. Everything seemed to start out well for Alain Bellaïche: Born in Tunis, childhood in Cannes, studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, his first folk concerts folk in youngsters’ houses and clubs where everyone was well behaved …

Then, in 1973, he left for the States. Bellaïche would settled for around ten years, with, as a soundtrack, the two albums that he would record there. Metropolitain, which was the fruit of his collaboration with the Heldon guitarist Alain Renaud, and Sea Fluorescent. In the catalogue of Asylum, David Geffen’s first label, Bellaïche’s music was listed alongside that of the Byrds, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan.

In a Rock & Folk, interview Bellaïche expressed his regrets as to the prudence of French musicians: “I never had a group… perhaps the guys here are not motivated to play this kind of music”. We should note that the influences of our expatriate were, for example, Led Zeppelin, John McLaughlin, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock, The Spencer Davis Group…

Bellaïche, a multi-faceted and iconoclastic musician, composed Sea Fluorescent just following his desires: from a cosmic ballad (St Andrea), to West Coast funk (California), dreamlike Spanish influences (Spanish Roots), optimistic blues (Foolin’ Myself), a solar track (I’m Angry, Sun Blues) … And the Frenchman was in good company: Jean-François Fabiano (from Fabiano Orchestra) on drums and percussions, Jerry Mahavishnu Goodman on violin on Got My Place In That Country, Wornell Jones on bass or John Hicks whose cascades of notes bring Reggae & Western closer to the ‘reassembled’ jazz that the pianist was playing at the time…

When, finally, after the fabulous declinations of the title track of the album, we hear a bonus on which Bellaïche sings in French, it is time for a Chacha émotionnel on which offers this horrible confession: “I’m not from around here, I come from a backward country”. Thanks to Souffle Continu, France is finally catching up.

In November 1976, Jef Gilson’s phone rang. What a surprise! It was Serge Rahoerson, one of the musicians he had met in Madagascar at the end of the 60s and who had played on his first album “Malagasy”. Rahoerson announced that he was in Paris for a few days. Immediately, Jef wanted to organise a recording session, starting the next day. He thought of a trio including Serge, Eddy Louiss on organ and cellist Jean-Charles Capon, who had also been on one of the trips to Tananarive and so had also known Rahoerson there. Unfortunately, Eddy Louiss –who had already played with Gilson and Capon on the album “Bill Coleman Sings And Plays 12 Negro Spirituals” in 1968- had to drop out at the last minute: he was delayed by a session with Claude Nougaro. Jean-Charles Capon had also become a sought-after studio musician since his trip to Madagascar in 1969. He appeared on several key albums on the Saravah label including the now famous “Comme À La Radio” by Brigitte Fontaine, “Un Beau Matin” by Areski and “Chorus” by Michel Roques, without mentioning the album by his own Baroque Jazz Trio. He was also to be found with Jef Gilson for his album on Vogue with the ex-drummer from Miles Davis’ first great quintet, Philly Joe Jones, or also in the orchestra led by Jean-Claude Vannier for the album “Nino Ferrer & Leggs”. He also played regularly on albums by Georges Moustaki. Jean-Charles Capon and Serge Rahoerson found themselves thus in the studio, with Jef at the controls. He had decided to record the rhythmic structure right away. He would find the soloists later, that didn’t worry him. Serge Rahoerson was on drums. Though a saxophonist by training, Jef remembered that Serge was also capable of great things behind a drum kit: he was the improvised drummer on their cover of “The Creator Has A Master Plan” on the album “Malagasy”... The great memories came flooding back (the nod on the title “Orly - Ivato”), and the old magic worked again. Brought in momentarily from Europamerica, Gilson’s new big band, in which JC Capon also played, the saxophonists Philippe Maté, from France (another Saravah stablemate) and the American Butch Morris (soon to be a key member of David Murray’s band) were invited to record their parts later and Gilson mixed it all as if it had been one single session (as he had already done on other albums, with the tracks by Christian Vander recorded before the creation and success of Magma). The album would not appear until 1977, on Palm, Jef’s own label, and was dedicated to the memory of Georges Rahoerson, Serge’s father, who had also played on the album “Malagasy” and who had died prematurely at the age of 51 in 1974. “I only received my own copy of the album in 1981 when I came to live in France definitively”, a still-moved Serge Rahoerson told us in 2013. “I was playing in a club one night and Jef turned up by surprise with a copy of the album for me, I was so pleased to see him again. When I arrived in France, I told everyone that I had played with Jef Gilson a few years previously, and I was surprised to learn that so few people knew of him. For us, he was of one of the great jazz visionaries.” Jérôme “Kalcha” Simonneau

To write these few lines, we spoke to saxophonist François Jeanneau, an old friend of Jacques Thollot who also played on several of his albums, including the “Watch Devil Go” which interests us here. He told us a story which, according to him, sums up the personality of Thollot. A noted studio had reserved three days for a Thollot recording session. The first morning was devoted to sound checks and putting some order in the score sheets which Jacques would hand out in a somewhat anarchic manner. Then everyone went for lunch. When the musicians returned to the studio, Thollot had disappeared. He wasn’t seen again for the three days. When he reappeared, he had already forgotten why he had left, The music of Jacques Thollot is in the image of its’ author: it takes you somewhere, suddenly escapes and disappears, returning in an unexpected place as if nothing had happened. Four years after a first album on the Futura label in 1971, Jacques Thollot returned, this time on the Palm label of Jef Gilson, still with just as much surrealist poetry in his jazz. In thirty-five minutes and a few seconds, the French composer and drummer, who had been on the scene since he was thirteen, established himself as a link between Arnold Schoenberg and Don Cherry. Resistant to any imposed framework and always excessive, Thollot allows himself to do anything and everything: suspended time of an extraordinary delicacy, a stealthy explosion of the brass section, hallucinatory improvisation of the synthesisers, tight writing, teetering on the classical, and in the middle of all that, a hit; the title-track - that Madlib would one day end up hearing and sampling. “Watch Devil Go” was in the right place in the Palm catalogue, which welcomed the cream of the French avant-garde in the 70s. But it is also the story of a long friendship between two men. Jacques Thollot and Jef Gilson had known and respected one another for a long time. Though barely sixteen years old, Thollot was already on drums on the first albums by Gilson starting in 1963 and would play in his big band (alongside François Jeanneau once again), ‘Europamerica’, until the end of the 70s. In a career lasting half a century and centred on freedom Jacques Thollot played with the most important experimental musicians (Don Cherry, Sonny Sharrock, Michel Roques, Barney Wilen, Steve Lacy, François Tusques, Michel Portal, Jac Berrocal, Noël Akchoté...) and they all heard in him a pulsation coming from another world.

Killer JPN New Age/Walearic! Shigeru Suzuki's alias works are back on LP!

This LP reissue is the most new age of Shigeru Suzuki's works from 1987, which debuted as a guitarist for Happiendo, produced many songs, and supported the Showa music history and new music scene.

The conceptual content, which advocates resort ambient with a graceful touch, has recently been reevaluated in the context of "Japanese Rarealic" ("Japanese mono" + "Balearic"). It is a well-known masterpiece that is popular both domestically and internationally. The music is provided by Tetsuji Hayashi, Mari Iijima, Kazuo Zaitsu, Hajime Mizoguchi, Meiko Nakahara, and Asami Kado.

Jake Muir’s by-now classic debut for sferic is a thing of spectral wonder; a luxurious set of gently phased and looped edits and field recordings based around gutted Beach Boys samples cast adrift in a sea of atmospheric shimmers. Followers of work by Jan Jelinek, Pinkcourtesyphone, Andrew Pekler or even Rhythm & Sound should be all over this one - a highly immersive exercise in blissed worlbuilding.

sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir, an artist and field recordist hailing from Los Angeles, California, who has quietly become one of the more interesting operators in this crowded field. His conceptual approach to sampling follows a lineage of artists at the very top of the game - from Fennesz’s re-imagined cover-versioning on his pioneering ‘Plays’ (also using the Beach Boys as source material), to DJ Olive’s quietly radical Illbient movements in the mid 90’s, to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding heyday a decade or so later. Muir isn't so much interested in making sounds for mindless zoning-out, but instead evaluates the very essence of sound itself, in a way that feels like a microscopic view of the very fibre of popular music.

On ‘Lady’s Mantle’ Muir combines these elements with aqueous field recordings made everywhere from Iceland to the beaches of California with results that limn a wide but smudged sense of space and place. With fading harmonic auroras and glinting, half-heard surf rock melodies, the album is rendered in an abstract impressionist manner that suggests a fine tracing of in-between-spaces, perhaps describing the metropolitan sprawl giving way to vast mountain ranges and oceanic scales.

In effect the album recalls the intoxicated airs of Pinkcourtesyphone (a.k.a L.A. resident Richard Chartier) and Andrew Pekler’s sensorial soundscapes and even the plangent production techniques of Phil Spector and the subby sublime of Rhythm & Sound. For all its implied sense of space, there’s a paradoxically close intimacy to 'Lady’s Mantle’ which feels like you’re the passenger in Muir’s ride, and he patently knows the scenic route...

(Boomkat) 

Daydream Nation was Sonic Youth’s sixth full-length, their first double-LP, and their last for an indie label before signing with Geffen. 

Widely considered to be their watershed moment, the album catapulted them into the mainstream and proved that indie bands could enjoy wider commercial success without compromising their artistic vision. 

More recently, Daydream Nation has been recognized as a classic of its era: Pitchfork ranked it #1 on their “100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s”; Spin listed it at #13 on their “125 Best Albums of 1985-2010”. Daydream Nation was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry in 2006 and it was voted "One of the Greatest Albums of All Time" by Rolling Stone. 

Masayuki Takayanagi was one of the truly iconoclastic musicians to emerge from Japan, or anywhere else, in the 20th Century. Though he won acclaim in the 1950s and '60s as a master of the electric guitar and jazz improvisation, Takayanagi was a restless spirit, deeply engaged with the era's new movements in contemporary art, music, literature, and philosophy. His work, beginning in the late 1960s placed him on the leading edge of these developments; he began expanding on the most radical elements of American and European free jazz, infusing them with the raw feedback and dissonance of electronic and avant-garde music. With his various New Direction groups, Takayanagi broke free of traditional structures and developed a new theory of music that embraced an aggressive and unrelenting style of playing that has remained almost completely unparalleled in its ferocity. Of all the albums to be released during Takayanagi's lifetime, 1975's Eclipse was perhaps the most enigmatic and sought after. Released in an edition of only 100, it almost immediately disappeared and became a holy grail for Japanese connoisseurs of adventurous music, and rightly so. It's first side contained a two-part realization of Takayanagi's "Gradually Projection" modality -- a searching interplay between instruments -- slowly emerging from a sparse open field and building with the tension of a looming thunder storm. The second side contains an epic performance of a "Mass Projection", a high energy, densely layered barrage of sound that in its 25 minutes, never once slackens its intensity. It would be another 31 years before this key album in Takayangi's oeuvre would finally have a (slightly) wider audience through a CD release by Japan's P.S.F. Records. Black Editions present a deluxe vinyl edition of this masterwork, revealingly remastered from the original tapes by Elysian Masters. The album is packaged in a heavy double tip-on gatefold jacket that pays tribute to the original handmade packaging and features a previously unseen studio photograph of Takayanagi by Tatsuo Minami. Recorded in Tokyo, March 14, 1975. Engineer: Mikio Aoki. Cover, photographs and design by Kazuharu Fujitani. Gatefold photograph by Tatsuo Minami. Insert Notes by Yasunori Saito. Produced by Satoru Obara, Yoshiaki Kamei, Nihon Gendai Jazz Ongaku Kenkyukai. Originally released in an edition of 100 by ISKRA Records, Japan in 1975. Remastered from the original master tapes by Dave Cooley, Elysian Masters, and produced by Peter Kolovos. Deluxe heavy tip-on gatefold LP with matte black paper, second tipped-on metallic gold wrap and insert.

A silken, minimalistic stream of electrified soul, Magnetic Eyes is Jeff Phelps’ peerless contribution to the tapestry of analog drum machine music that graffiti’d the mid-‘80s. Tracked in his Missouri City, Texas, bedroom studio in 1985, Phelps effortlessly steeps together the electro stylings of Afrika Bambaataa with the matured caress of Anita Baker’s soulful R&B. This 2021 edition presents fresh remasters of the album’s second mix, completed after discovering flaws in the initial 1985 pressing, all housed in replica tip-on jacket with artwork that remains just as evocative as the music it represents. Enjoy this technically perfect, artist-approved version of a visionary techno-adjacent masterwork.

〈Record Store Day〉限定商品！オリジナルは五万円越えの高値もつける鬼レア盤につき絶対にお見逃しなく。1970年にイギリスのアーティスト、Christine Harwoodによって、同国のスモール・レーベル〈Birth〉からリリースされた唯一のアルバム『Nice To Meet Miss Christine』がアナログ・リイシュー。King Crimson OBのIan McDonald（サックスとフルート）に、天才ドラマーPete York、Roger Suttonを始めとした英国のプログレとサイケ・フォーク・シーンの銘酒をフィーチャーした傑作であり、ブルーアイド・ソウルからアシッド・フォーク、ヨット・ロック・マニアまでも必見の一枚！

Samba Esquema Novo is the 1963 debut album by Brazilian artist Jorge Ben. It includes the original recording of the international hit “Mas Que Nada”. It was listed by Rolling Stone Brazil as one of the 100 best Brazilian albums in history. While many of the performers during the heyday of Tropicalia and the rise of MPB (música popular brasileira) opted for a more radical stance in their challenge to Brazil’s political and cultural authorities, artists like Jorge Ben took a more understated approach. Rather than use overly theatrical performance to shock the audience or write songs loaded with political content, Ben became known as one of the country’s great musical alchemists, a furiously eclectic songwriter who combined elements of indigenous Brazilian music with a groove from the west coast of Africa. Never a controversial figure in the manner of the tropicalistas like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Ben became one of the most respected and resilient figures in Brazilian pop. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1940, Ben took up bossa nova guitar playing after hearing João Gilberto but found the style too complex to execute. This led to his developing his own approach to the bossa nova that focused on playing the guitar as one would a bass — his early recordings are in fact bass-less. His first big hit as a singer/songwriter came at the age of 23 with “Mas, Que Nada.” The song’s subtle bossa nova groove proved so seductive that it was quickly covered by a number of Brazilian artists, most successfully by Sergio Mendes. During the military dictatorship’s cultural crackdown in the late ‘60s Ben, whose music wasn’t scrutinized as rigorously as that of tropicalistas like Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, was able to perform without too much trouble into the early ‘70s. Still, he felt the long arm of Brazilian censorship when a 1971 performance was stopped in midsong because censors felt as though Ben’s backup singers were dancing too suggestively. Benjor It was from the late ‘60s to mid-’70s that Ben established himself as a songwriting force within Brazil. Over the next ten to 15 years he expanded his reach, with varying success, to Europe and America (he’s more popular in Europe than America). In 1989 he released the album Benjor, simultaneously announcing that he was changing his last name to Benjor. During that same time period Ben realized his dream of working with prominent African musicians when he collaborated with Nigeria’s King Sunny Ade, and also was represented on an anthology of Brazilian music compiled by former Talking Head David Byrne. Although not as politically radical as many of his contemporaries, Ben proved that in certain contexts and under unusually repressive restraint, music takes on a radical political dimension. – Allmusic.com