The Balek Band and Abstrack Records's first album, Médecines, is the product of a
magma of influences, the emanation of large decade of music infused lives.
The emotional tessitura is wide: the dark meadows of “The Balek Bad” reach us through
like a mantra from the end of a dark tunnel, while just three track earlier it was a caribbean
Zouk euphoria which ruled the world. Inbetween, it’s a wide spectrum of hybrid epiphanies :
"Hagen & Again" is a progressive Dub jewel, even Krauty to an extent, where the instruments
play the lead role. "Cosmic Barry" is across the Channel : thick and broken club music,
sweating with subs, yet always disputing it to the Funk accent of the the keys and the slap
bass.
This list of geographical and stylistic hybridations simplys goes on, and it’s the 54
minutes of the album that put an end to it. But beyond the never-ending list, this first album
is alive: its gets us breathing the therapeutical air which fills the world of its creators.

TRACKLIST:

A1. Introspection
A2. Charbon Alcool
A3. Balek Zouk
B1. Blanc Nuit
B2. Hagen & Again
C1. The Balek Bad
C2. Lenteur
D1. Cosmic Barry
D2. Kenesam More

Continuing his journey, the former member of Egypt 80 and last trumpeter of the Black President Fela Kuti releases his
second album: APP (Accumulation of Profit & Power).
Muyiwa Kunnuji and his band Osemako, which has been extensively recasted since Moju Ba O - which had already laid
the foundations of his afroclassicbeat - have had quite an evolution, and are eager to share a recipe that has been
patiently elaborated and stewed, both on stage and in the studio.
A complex mix of deep musical and cultural heritages as well as a claimed and combative Pan-African culture, APP sets
the bar still one step higher in the message, but also and especially in terms of composition and polyrhythms. Inspired by
Western African highlife as well as the purest afrobeat of the Afrika 70 era, and even incorporating elements of South
African marabi or Central African soukous, the whole does not sound less perfectly personal, tailored, with a natural and
disconcerting ease.
But this easiness is only an apparent as Muyiwa devoted himself body and soul to the composition and harmony during
the gestation of these tunes so widely inspired and yet intensely personal.
APP will thus delight fans of African music in the broad sense as well as connoisseurs, and just as much fans of funk
grooves or jazzy solos; it is a deeply plural album. Multi-influenced, multicultural, multilingual, a slice of life as much as an
initiatory journey, on which hovers the spectre of Covid, which has also largely inspired this second ‘effort’. Standing
against absurd sanitary rules or the accumulation of profits by the powerful of this world and other
pseudo-philanthropists, APP, again, reminds us of the great Fela, as much by the use of an acronym to entitle the album
as by the themes addressed or the mixing of genres. A warrior album, filled and full of revendications, but also of calls for
open-mindedness. An intensely human, sincere, combative album, and however radically enthusiastic and optimistic.

TRACKLIST:
A1. Bro Hugh
A2. Oshelu
A3. Meeting Point
B1. Recipe Of Death
B2. G.O.A. (Giant Of Africa)
B3. Sanitize Your Heart More

Flock is a brand new collaboration between five leading musicians from London's open-minded jazz and experimental scenes: Bex Burch (Vula Viel), Sarathy Korwar, Dan “"Danalogue"” Leavers (Soccer96, The Comet Is Coming), Al MacSween (Maisha) and Tamar Osborn (Collocutor).

Tracklist CD / LP
01 / A1: EXPAND
02 / A2: PREPARE TO LET GO
03 / A3: SOUNDS WELCOME
04 / B1: IT’S COMPLICATED
05 / B2: WHAT PURPOSE
06 / C1: MURMURATION
07 / C2: BOLD DREAM
08 / C3: MY RESONANCE
09 / D1: HOW MANY ARE ONE
10 / D2: FULLY BREATHED More

Being somewhat of a conceptual experiment. All the artists on this album were asked to imagine fusing Acid and House with the Virtualsex LP which was released on Buzz in 1993. A 303 sound would be welcomed but not essential with an emphasis on soulful emotion and melody.

Each record comes with a individual digital download code More

A soundtrack of Sudan's revolution and the first ever international release of the Beja sound, performed by Noori and his Dorpa Band, an unheard outfit from Port Sudan, a city on the Red Sea coast in eastern Sudan and the heart of Beja culture. Beja Power! is a living archive of the finest, most heartfelt Beja songs—a six-track portal to another time and place, of melodies long forgotten and never before interpreted by an electric and brass-driven ensemble. Few older Beja recordings were produced. Even fewer, if any, remain. Electric soul, blues, jazz, rock, surf, even hints of country, speak fluently to styles and chords that could be Tuareg, Ethiopian, Peruvian or Thai—all grounded by hypnotic Sudanese grooves, Naji's impeccable, airy tenor sax, and of course, Noori's tambo-guitar, a self-made unique hybrid of an electric guitar and an electric tambour, a four-string instrument found across East Africa. A truly ancient community, Beja trace their ancestry back millennia. Some say they are among the living descendants of Ancient Egypt and the Kingdom of Kush. They are even depicted in the hieroglyphics. Beja melodies—nostalgic, hopeful and sweet, ambiguous and honest—are thousands of years old. Yet their sounds are also reminiscent of Dick Dale's 1963 "Misirlou" and jazz great Charlie Rouse's 1968 "Meci Bon Dieu". This album could be 6,000 years, 60 years, or 6 months old. Along with his Dorpa Band, formed in 2006, Noori's instrumental Beja music forms the latest link in an unbroken chain of an inherited, arresting sound that is local as it is global, a gift of a storied past and the exchanges of the well-traveled Red Sea. Ostinato Records is honored to bring the nearly forgotten Beja sound in all its nostalgia, sweetness, honesty, and power, recorded and mastered to maintain the warmth of Sudan's signature aesthetic, to your sound system. More

An aura of mystery is hidden on this magnificent album released on EMI Nigeria in 1974 and today a collector’s cult object was the only one named Moonrakers Band.

Steve Black tells: “We were the original members of The Moonrakers and were based in Zaria, then in 1972 we left band management and started The Elcados. The original management of The Moonrakers sold the name to his elder brother who had a club in Kano and they brought Prince Bola Agbana to get other musicians to continue The Moonrakers while we moved in as The Elcados.”

Moonrakers Band and Elcados were the two bands that inflamed northern Nigeria in the early 70s with a more rocking and virtuoso sound, and especially with tons of rare grooves, then everything else around it.

Coming to the album content tracks like Wait For Me, Cut Your Coat According To You Size, Yara Manyan Gobe, but also Enia Sa Pele and Move on, will make floating camels appear on the dancefloor, or in your house. More