Killer EP. Next-level Shackleton.

Taking off from Beaugars Seck’s foundational sabar drum rhythms — recorded by Sam in Dakar in February 2020 — Shackleton has constructed a trio of intricately layered, luminous, enchanted, epic excursions. The second is more dazzled and meandering, with jellied bass, insectile detail, and discombobulated jabbering; the third is more liquid, fleet of foot, and psychedelic, with a grooving b-line and funky keyboard stabs, scrambled eastern strings and hypnotic vocalese.

The harmonium in The Overwhelming Yes sounds like Nico blowing in chillily from up the desert shore. The overall mood is wondrous, twinkling with light, onwards-and-upwards; an uncanny, dubwise mix of the ancient and the futuristic. Mark Ernestus’ Version is stripped, trepidatious, mystical, and stranger still, with just a snatch of the original melody, extra distortion and delay, and crystal-clear drum sound.

Twenty minutes of startlingly original music, with Shackleton the maestro at the top of his game, and a characteristically evilous dub by Mark Ernestus. Mastered by Rashad Becker; handsomely sleeved.

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Tony Allen’s drumming centered, adventures into Techno-Jazz fields w/ Max Loderbauer More

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Mark Ernestus, one half of the Basic Channel, Maurizio and Rhythm & Sound teams, inaugurates our series of reworkings of tracks from Tony Allen’s Lagos No Shaking album. Mark’s Mix is not a nowadays-style remix, more an extended mix in the classicaltradition headed by Tom Moulton, back in the days when Francois Kevorkian was his teaboy, and there was a cupboard in his office stuffed with Studio One master-tapes. Mark’s Disco Dub is its dub.

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’At its darkest and most driving. The opener cuts deep into jazz, its darting trumpet melodies sinking the impulsive and questing approach of On-The-Corner Miles into the nocturnal longing of Lift To The Scaffold. Dark is a monolithic steppers’ in slo-mo, dense and dread. Set to the soft throb of a four-to-the-floor kickdrum, third track Club is the album’s explosive heart, twelve minutes of heady Berlin techno; and in finale Yangissa a soft African brass polyphony is spiced with nyabinghi–style drums, deeply dubwise, for fourteen minutes playing out an intrigue between chaos and control. The group is clear and unanimous — this is their best yet.’ More

“We started with the principle – the cosmic idea that we were taught by our father from a very young age – that the stars and planets make a sound, that deep in outer space there is audible harmony.”

With its cathedral-like, richly resonant acoustics, the new HBE album is a brilliant expression of this interplanetary principle. The album is by turns urgent and contemplative, funky and reflective, varied in its textures; but entirely of one piece. Underpinned by concepts of our earth’s place in the cosmos, held in place by meditation, swirling with notions of history, science, theology, ancestry, there is a rich conceptual brew here. But always, what talks loudest is the music. The album rings with what back in the 1950s the jazz critic Whitney Balliet called “the sound of surprise”. At a time when the phrase Spiritual Jazz threatens in some quarters to become a tired cliche, this is a record that makes you believe again in the genre’s validity.

Talking to Cid, one of the Ensemble’s two trombonists, one phrase recurs: “back to the beginning”. “We wanted to go back to the beginning, when we were kids, real young, and our father would wake us up at 5 AM to practice for two hours before breakfast.” One outcome – initially unplanned but subsequently embraced – is that unlike their two previous albums on Honest Jon’s, this is an album without a drummer. “When we started, as Wolf Pack, just brothers on the street with our horns, there wasn’t a kit in sight.” Book Of Sound retains plenty of rhythmic heft, but the absence of a drummer opens up space for a notably varied instrumental palette. Acoustic guitar, piccolo, synthesiser, alto sax – none of them typical HBE Instruments – all have their place on the album. Most striking perhaps are the vocal lines that thread through the album and give it a palpable warmth. “In Wolf Pack, we rapped and played, this time we took it a step further.”

Sessions were recorded in Brooklyn and Chicago, and brilliantly mixed at Abel Garibaldi’s studio in the Loop (“Abel was like a musician on this record”), and it’s the Hypnotic’s hometown that permeates. For Cid this is a deeply Chicago record: “it’s got the vibe of the lake, the vibe of the prairies opening up to the west”. It also has the vibe of those Sun Ra Arkestra albums recorded in Chicago in the 1950s, and – of course - the Phil Cohran albums from the 1960s.

It’s Phil Cohran (the father of all seven members of the Ensemble and their first teacher, and not just in music) who is the album’s guiding spirit. For Cid it’s a major regret that, in the months before their father’s death early in 2017, Phil was not well enough to play on the album. “He loved the whole idea, and we had the perfect place for his zither”. But Book Of Sound is a magnificent testament to their Cohran legacy. “You know, it’s tough trying to satisfy everybody with our music. It’s hard enough satisfying ourselves, let alone the jazz scene, the hip hop guys, what have you. With this album we just dropped all that as a consideration, and tuned into deeper principles.”’
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Meditative, absorbing dance music in true Moritz style — at times seemingly transfixed by its own elements, and minimal almost to vanishing-point, but quickly back ticking, kicking and amassing, with the lethal dubwise density of the classic Berlin sound. Twelve minutes long, trenchant and forbidding but sharply alive, the dub itself is a kind of deep Fort-Da gambit which scoops your brain out for a quick sluice, before replacing it slightly skewiff. Don't drop your guard because of the Tresor.

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Like a dream, but authoritatively, this remix from Jamaica magnificently crosses the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti with the grounation reggae tradition of Count Ossie. The flip, Uhuru Pujama is a new recording, another warrior charge down Wareika Hill by this veteran of Light Of Saba and The Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari (Honest Jon’s Label). More

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Musically, this new stepper appears to swell out of thin air. Immense and minimal, the propulsive groove monstrous child of Krautrock is overlain during its twelve minutes with the blues abstraction of Tikiman's guitar, the swing and effects of Marc Muellbauer's double bass, Delay's digressive steel
percussion, and the otherworldly keys of Loderbauer and von Oswald. With characteristic intensity, (Digital Mystikz) Mala's rebuild ratchets up the drama and dread. A mounting barrage of bleeps rains down on a vicious, clopping drum pattern and steely synths. The bass is transfixing. An immensely powerful record.
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