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Transmission Suite - the highly anticipated new album from acid-house pioneers and electronic music legends 808 State is out now: a record that remains true to the forward-thinking ethos of this remarkable band three decades after they first formed.

808 State are without doubt one of the most important bands in electronic music. From their 1988 album debut LP Newbuild, (that won them notable early fans including Aphex Twin: “It was the next step after Chicago acid, and as much as I loved that, I could relate much better to 808 State. It seemed colder and more human at the same time”), through collaborations with Bjork and New Order, to the definitive Pacific State, their legacy and influence cannot be overstated. - Bandcamp

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Their new album Transmission Suite reflects the rich backstory of electronic music, but with 808 State being 808 State, they also deliver an innovative and forward-thinking vision. Put simply, Transmission Suite – their seventh album – effortlessly evokes the past, present and future.

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Graham Massey and Andy Barker recorded Transmission Suite, the first 808 State album since 2002, at the legendary former Granada Studios in Manchester. They worked at big, arced desks loaded with synths and defunct TV mixing equipment. 80 TV screens, blank and grey, lined the walls. The building holds special significance for the duo, who, like Joy Division and The Beatles, made their TV debut at Granada, performing their big hit "Pacific State" on Tony Wilson's show, The Other Side Of Midnight, in 1989. The studios are a part of 808 State's history.

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Like Granada, which will soon become a modern complex spanning bars, offices, hotel rooms, and flats, Transmission Suite straddles the past and the present. As well as acid, IDM, and electro bombs, influenced by the sounds coming out of Detroit and Manchester in the '80s and early '90s, there are footwork tracks and contemporary beat experiments, music partly inspired by the duo's love of the Manchester party and label Swing Ting, whose sound is a club-ready mashup of dancehall, reggaeton, garage and UK funky. The album has bags of character and is big on ideas. – Resident Advisor

In spite of the noisy aura it's drawn around itself, there's not much mystery to A Place To Bury Strangers. The New York band has been dishing out slight variations on the same sonic blitzkrieg since its self-titled 2007 debut; the only thing that's changed is the fine tuning. On the group's fourth album, Transfixiation, all of APTBS' trademarks are in evidence. Deadpan vocals float through apocalyptic static. The volume bleeds out. Cacophony reigns. - NPR

Sometimes a musical message is so urgent that questions of recording quality are almost beside the point. Informally recorded in 1969 in a noisy club – Copenhagen’s famous Jazzhus Montmartre – the flavour of this album is ‘documentary’ rather than luxuriantly hi-fidelity, yet the essence of Abdullah Ibrahim’s communication comes through loud and clear. The listener is drawn into the robust rhythms of his solo piano style, as he re-examines the history of jazz from a South African perspective, with echoes of songs of the townships, and vamps that hint of Monk and Duke and much more. African Piano was a highly influential album, and it has lost none of its power. – ECM Records

1 continent, 2 bands, 42 musicians!

Trails to the Cosmic Vibrations is a split LP that brings together two bands from Asia with outwardly contrasting dispositions, while sharing sympathetic resonances.

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On Side A, hailing from Osaka, Japan, we have the ever exuberant postmodern psychrock legends, Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O.! With "Flatwoods Monster A Go Go ~ Cometary Orbital Drive 00∞00", the band presents an immersive and electrifying B-movie experience of extraterrestrial abduction and interstellar travel, a song that is quickly emerging as a standout on their 2018 tour setlists. This is the ultimate Hawkwind tribute, an exhilarating 20-minute ride in a silver machine, zipping across dimensions marked by shifts in tempo. Blasting off from the get-go, the band heads for an early climax before bringing the pace down into a funky skiffle at the eight-minute mark. Five minutes later, things just accelerate, and accelerate, and accelerate into hyperdrive – we're talking upwards and spacewards until we're some 360 beats per minute, or 6 beats per second... towards infinity! The 23-year-old band sounds fresher than it has in years, a large part due to its sensational new rhythm section of throbbing bassist, Wolf, and acrobatic drummer, Satoshima Nani. Third new member, vocalist and "midnight whistler", Jyonson Tsu, brings on board a whacked and outlandish appeal, singing in reckless tongues. We are proud to put this "instant classic" on wax, an epic number even by the stratospheric standards of thee Acid Mothers Temple!

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On Side O, hailing from the impossible city-island-nation-state of Singapore, we have The Observatory, giants of Southeast Asian art rock. "Vibrational" begins with an upbeat euphoria that gradually turns into a melancholia that sinks deeper and deeper into utter despondence. The song is a natural follow-up from their last full-length, the ambitious and penetrating masterwork, August is the cruellest (2016). This expansive, nine-minute threnody was recorded at The Observatory's last major concert in 2017, where members past and present came together, alongside an ensemble of 30 young guitarists, layering tiny tremoloes to create emotional earthquakes. Led by the morose tenor of Leslie Low, "Vibrational" is thematically bleak and anti-social, finding escape only in the "legal high" of the bottle – to hell with society and sobriety, it seems. ­- Bandcamp

A TAV Curator's Pick.

Actress, real name Darren Jordan Cunningham, known to friends as DAZ, returns with a new album, now on Ninja Tune and a new music system called “AZD” (pronounced “Azid”), a chrome aspect journey into a parallel world. An artist who has always preferred to make music than to talk about it, in “AZD” he has achieved another remarkable landmark, one which is as resistant to interpretation as it is demanding of it. Following on from his previous albums, R.I.P, Splazsh and Hazyville, an epilogue poem attached to the press release for Ghettoville was construed by media, commentators and spectators that Cunningham had retired. This led him to conceptualise this mass of conclusion as the key to ‘Giving power back to identity.’

So a few pointers, or possible ways to think about “AZD”. The album is themed around chrome – both as a reflective surface to see the self in, and as something that carves luminous voids out of any colour and fine focuses white and black representing the perfect metaphor for the bleakness of life in the Metropolis as suggested by Anish Kapoors Cloud Gate.

Another way to approach would be through the art of James Hampton and Rammellzee (who inspired “CYN,” which Cunningham also sees as a vision of New York in reverse…) – both of whom, though of different generations of the African-American slave diaspora, created art through “Sourcing castaway materials from their environment and reinterprating them into absolute majesty given from the fourth dimension.” There is also the career-long influence of the Detroit techno pioneers, something which becomes clear on this album “there is a contrast in the type of glow or reflection”.

Alternatively, you could write your PhD thesis on Jung’s Shadow Theory and AZD: “Lots of ideas come from dreams, this isn’t new, but sometimes the conscious mind starts to meld into the universal consciousness through constellation tunnelling.” If that sounds too taxing then you could always fall back on Star Wars and, in particular, the Death Star: “It has a dark dystopian backdrop, with highly sophisticated technology, but it is fading into the ether, still holding on and emitting a powerful energy. The music remaking the embers, binding them together and pulling them apart again.”

Alternatively, just listen. That “glow” Cunningham talks about makes this in some ways more immediate than previous Actress releases. Take lead single, “X22RME” (pronounced “Extreme”) which elegantly plays between the lines of Oriental classic rave and Balinese warehouse Techno machined in a Rotherhithe lock up welding the grooves into a seamless cracked joint.

At the other end of the spectrum is “Faure in Chrome,” a byproduct or development from his collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra, in which he “repatterns” aspect of Faure’s Requiem into a piece which sounds like the very institution of classical music being encased in electronic ice and scanned through a high frequency bandwidth. In between are gems like “Runner,” a personal re-soundtracking of Blade Runner “its from the deleted Fade Runner scene where AZD in a Peckham Cafe realises his barber has over the years etched a faded scroll into his head using early 80s African synthpop as a vexing serum“, or “Falling Rizlas,” an alienated music-box ballad. It’s a remarkable piece of work, that harks back both to Actress’ previous productions and to earlier iterations of the (broadly conceived) “techno” project without being beholden to anything but Cunningham’s forward-facing, individual and disembodied vision. – Ninja Tune

The simplest you could say about “AZD” is that it’s art – the unique creation of a unique mind. There will be few more distinctive, brilliant or visionary suites of music released in 2017. Call him what you will, this is the year that Darren ‘Daz’ Cunningham - aka Actress, aka AZD – asserts more clearly than ever before his complete independence. “Actress has a talent for melodies that snag at you, as demonstrated on the music-box ambience of Falling Rizlas, or Blue Window, on which house music battles to be heard over the sound of tape hiss. He also has an ability to twist the sound of dance music until it sounds private and intimate. Even the album’s most upbeat moment, X22RME, has a strangely introverted atmosphere to it: when the beats drop out, it doesn’t feel like a euphoric breakdown, but rather as if someone’s mind has wandered in the middle of the dancefloor.” – The Guardian

“…for all its artfully-deployed discordance, *AZD *maintains a musicality that holds the listener close. Sometimes this comes through in more danceable techno moments, like the single “X22RME” or the 80s-leaning synth-driven track “RUNNER,”; elsewhere, it’s in the  emotive minimalist breaks of “FALLING RIZLAS” or “THERE'S AN ANGEL IN THE SHOWER.” Cunningham participates in a futurist tradition, following an arc set by artists and writers like Rammellzee and Eshun. But that futurism isn’t predictive, something yet to come; rather, his combination of science fictions, music histories, and socio-spatial realities feels deliriously adjacent to the world we’re listening to it in.” – Pitchfork

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A suite of electronic laments, tone structures and dreamtime rhythms, with a conceptual arc taking in death, life, sleep and religion.

Right from Hazyville, Actress’s music has been deeply marked by London’s rave music heritage. But after the angular dynamics of Splazsh, R.I.P heads out into deep space. The rhythms and pulses are smudged or blurred, or are hinted at by their absence. 2-step garage is collided into gamelan, and freeform interludes explore microtonal spaces and imagined string instruments.

R.I.P underlines Actress’s reputation as one of the most eloquent voices to emerge from the sub-bass nexus of London dance music. His intuitive and original grasp of beats, textures and rhythm puts him on a parallel path to dance music innovators such as Basic Channel, Burial and Aphex Twin. But the way he engages with electronic sound from first principles, realising his own self-contained sonic worlds, hints at less obvious kinships outside the dance music fraternity, with pioneers of homebrewed sound experiments such as Cabaret Voltaire, Pan Sonic and Oval. It moves the body but the sounds also tap into to something more intangible inside you; you dance, but also ‘slip/drift into another realm, probably without even realising.’ – Honest Jon’s Records

“Darren Cunningham is a dance producer who references extroverted, populist music to create a meditative, introverted, immersive experience.…It's not the sound that makes the music, though, but the structure of it. R.I.P. is a deliberately uncoordinated album. Rhythms, basslines, and melodies slip in and out of line with each other. Comparatively straightforward, house-oriented tracks like "Shadow From Tartarus" are situated next to murk and ambience like "Tree of Knowledge". The emphasis here, though, is on "comparative": Even R.I.P.'s steady 4/4 tracks sound grimy and deconstructed. But there's something almost flirtatious in the way he lets the sounds worm around in the dark, looking to hook up with something firm. When they do, it's both mechanical and mystical, like watching a sculpture cut from raw stone.” – Pitchfork

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Doug's newest project, his entry in the Jazz Is Dead album series helmed by Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, takes his unique and timeless art and places it within the context of a musical culture that has always taken cues from his 70s classics. There's no mistaking the musical mind that created legendary albums like Infant Eyes and Adam's Apple, but the encounter of that with the distinctive jazz-hip hop-funk-noir that is the Younge/Muhammad/JID trademark creates something worthy of comparison to Carn's past work but which could only have been made right now. One can detect nods to musical motifs by Carn's jazz peers that have served as frequent sample fodder, but his compositional and improvisational integrity remain indisputable throughout. – Bandcamp

The American Negro is a mammoth project from producer and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Younge: a 26-track part-spoken word, part-orchestral examination of the structural racism underpinning the identity of modern America. It forms just one part of Younge’s current projects on the same theme, including a four-part podcast, Invisible Blackness, and a short film, T.A.N.

Delving into this work of immense depth, Younge harks back to the social consciousness soul of forebears such as Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway on the communal funk of the title track and the twinkling soul of Watch the Children. The propulsive protest rap of Revolutionize updates Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and A Symphony for Sahara showcases Younge’s deft hand at producing a luscious, cinematic score following his work on films such as 2009’s Black Dynamite.

Much more than a pastiche of influences, though, it is Younge’s impassioned spoken-word interludes – dissecting everything from the Frantz Fanon-referencing double consciousness of racial awareness to the creation of racism to solidify class structures – that give this record its unique tone and profundity. It may be an intimidating undertaking, but one that is well worth the time. – The Guardian

This, too, is a story about control. It’s a manual, maybe half Rosetta Stone, half bird guide. It was made the way they made electronic music in the good old days, all analog everything, right after synthesizers shrunk to a manageable size and you didn’t have to trek down to a university to use one anymore. Hard-earned. Tastes different. Our parents’ electronic. And its subject is staying together, that thing we thought was their province. It’s about trying to fix what hurts. It’s about knowing better. Black Noise is men talking to men about women; Lemonade is a woman talking to women about men, and they both orbit around a failure we take for granted like the sun: loving you is complicated. It’s a skill; we forgot.

Adrian Younge calls The Electronique Void an academic album, by which he means it is both instructional and informational. There’s a problem at the heart of it, a woman who’s been told that she’s loved, but she doesn’t recognize that, can’t feel it, may have heard it all before, may be worrying about the wrong things. Jack Waterson, long a guitarist in Younge’s band, plays the role of narrator, sounding professorial and rather superior as he lays out for the woman where she’s erred. That vocoder you hear is Adrian, talking to her on a subterranean level, the way an artist must. There’s a strong sense of rules here, a prescription and a presumption that there is an agreed upon way to do it, and there is also a wrong way, or at least a way that won’t work. And the fact is, as didactic as that sounds, it might be the truth. Maybe everybody who’s alone can be cured. The discourse on the album is the kind of thing that happens when you go blonde and then you can’t keep ‘em off you. These truths are cold and hard, and our hero begrudges the well-meaning advice being rained down upon her as any independent woman would.

The science of love, its formulas and if-then constraints, causal relationships and observable properties, is best taught experientially, but learning it hurts so, so bad. Music, especially electronic music, reliant as it is on abstraction and unrepentant as it is about hijacking your physiological responses to tempo and rhythm and dynamics, is a way to get there without going through it. Electronic music as practiced and developed by pioneers like Dick Hyman and Raymond Scott and Wendy Carlos is precise and intentional. In making his first electronic album, Younge took his cues from them, reminding a contemporary audience what a synthesizer, deep in its heart, really could be.

The lady of The Electronique Void, only ever seen through a man’s eyes, who’s being told what to do by him, sounds trapped by her history and by her position, her ancestors’ trauma echoing through her lineage and booming out of her as a phobia, distrust, misapprehension, rational response to a fucked up situation. Waterson’s text here seems to say that if his character could go back in time, catch her before the damage was done, she would be able to love. And that’s reasonable. Don’t get hooked. Don’t do wifey shit for a fuck boy. Don’t let it go to your head, no. It’s also possible he has no idea what he’s talking about. The lessons for men in The Electronique Void are unspoken but plain as day.

This music is an urgent tutorial. Adrian Younge looks at us and sees the frontline of a crisis, something we only have time to triage right now. This isn’t romantic and it isn’t about settling down. This is the fight of our lives: how to love. – Press Release

“Younge could be accused of dabbling, but he displays total mastery of his machines, whether he's coaxing sinister rhythms or playful melodies out of them. The drums often hit with as much force as his hip-hop productions, and a lot of the keyboard work carries a creeping menace similar to that of his Venice Dawn material. Presented as a sort of tongue-in-cheek guide to navigating romantic relationships, the set of ten, mostly brief tracks is narrated in affable fashion by longtime Younge associate Jack Waterson…

One can imagine this accompanying a film screened in a musty audio-visual room with flickering shots of a young couple flirting on a party line, frolicking in leaves, and hanging at a drive-in or bowling alley. It's stimulating and informative enough on its own, and too accomplished and substantive to be disregarded as a dilettantish novelty.” – Allmusic

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Jamal Moss, aka Hieroglyphic Being, returns for a new second album on Soul Jazz Records, after last year’s debut The Acid Documents. this time under the name Africans with Mainframes.

Hieroglyphic Being and fellow Chicago producer Noleian Reusse have been releasing music under the name Africans with Mainframes for over 15 years now, ever since their debut on Hieroglyphic Being’s own Mathematics Recordings label in 2005. ‘K.M.T.’ is the debut album from the group, a collage of apocalyptic Chicago acid meets industrial and transcendental post-house machine funk.

Both intense and unique, the album of forward-thinking, experimental, boundary-pushing Afro-futurist electronic music shows why Hieroglyphic Being is regarded as one of the most serious purveyors of experimental black music today. You can't stop the prophet! – Sounds of the Universe

“Devastating album of epic dancefloor rituals and visions from Jamal Moss (Hieroglyphic Being) and Noleian Reusse in their prized Africans With Mainframes guise, amounting to their most substantial and impressive collection.” – Boomkat

“…Working with fellow producer Noleian Reusse as Africans With Mainframes, [DJ and producer] Jamal Moss swings from Windy City jazz to Chicago acid at its most caustic. While the duo have released a slew of 12”s dating back to 2001, K.M.T. is their first full-length. Kemetic Modulating Textures is eight tracks of Moss and Reusse at their most unrelenting and there’s a coarseness to every texture that at times might make you mistakenly think it was just slapped together. Yet the frequent references to Egyptology (Googling each track title reveals a profound knowledge of prehistoric culture) suggest a greater thought at work, and if you manage to survive the bruising BPMs of the album's first half, it becomes mesmerizing.

Opener “Anachronistic” sets the table for what lies ahead: everything in the red, a snare fill stumbling and slipping across the grid, the 808’s edges increasingly fuzzy with distortion. And then just when it verges on pure noise, that telltale acid squiggle worms through and the snare coheres into a visceral thrill.

Last year, Moss explained his first encounter with Sun Ra’s music as a shock to the system: “His music wasn’t about making sense: it was just about receiving these transmissions, this knowledge.” It’s a lesson that Moss carries forward with K.M.T., suggesting that while some of his tracks might scan as scrambled transmissions, continued exposure reveals a profound signal beneath the noise.” – Pitchfork

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“Afterglow is the music moniker for local fashion retailer HOAX's owner Julian. Having been involved in the local music scene for years as a guitarist and programmer, Julian has since found his muse in black music. Driven by this newfound passion, his recent music ambitions sees him going back to sounds he grew up with such as Michael Jackson and Prince, to the disco funk of the 70s and 80s, and the "Free Soul" series of Japanese compilations. "Different Light" is Afterglow's debut album, a music amalgam that takes cues from 80's synth-funk/boogie, electro from Street Sounds, r&b from Tabu, fusion from Herbie Hancock, to the sound of city pop greats such as Toshiki Kadomatsu, Tetsuji Hayashi, and Tatsurō Yamashita. A marriage of synths, thumping basslines, and drum machine grooves, the album also features the vocals of both SOPHY Wong and Yeung Tung. In contrast to what one might expect out of a vaporware aesthetic, the result is rather a pop music infused exploration of funk's past and future.” – Bandcamp

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Jazz Sahara is the debut album by double bassist and oud player Ahmed Abdul-Malik featuring performances recorded in late 1958 and originally released on the Riverside label.

Abdul-Malik switches between bass and oud; interacts closely with the droning violin of Naim Karacand, Jack Ghanaim's kanoon (a 72-string instrument), and Mike Hamway's darabeka (a percussive drum); and mixes in Al Harewood's drums and (on three of the four selections) the tenor of Johnny Griffin.

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Decades before the advent of 'world music', bassist-composer Ahmed Abdul-Malik introduced Arabic music into jazz, creating a distinct, unique sound that was far beyond its time. Best known in jazz circles for his solid work with Randy Weston and Thelonious Monk, Abdul-Malik, who is of Sudanese descent, was also the first to use the oud, a pear-shaped, traditional Middle Eastern stringed instrument similar to a lute, as a jazz instrument. Recorded in 1958, with tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin (his bandmate in the Monk quartet), and originally out on the Riverside label, Abdul-Malik's debut solo album Jazz Sahara was a burning fusion of Middle East and West. On 180 gram vinyl. - Soundohm

Ajate is a Japanese band who plays a unique blend of afro-groove dance music mixed with Japanese traditional festival music called "Ohayashi". Formed in 2011 by the band-leader John Imaeda, Ajate consists of 10 Japanese musicians.

Another unique feature of the band is the use of hand-made bamboo instruments as well as traditional Japanese percussion. The "Jahte" is a bamboo-made xylophone or balafon with a piezo pick-up mic attached to each key, connected to a pre-amplifier to obtain a loud sound and to add some touch of dirty distortion to its warm and natural acoustic sonority. The "Piechiku" is also a bamboo-made string instrument inspired by the west-African "Ngoni" or Moroccan "Guembri" instruments. The Piechiku uses strings of the Japanese traditional "Shamisen". This instrument is also played through a pre-amplifier and John sometimes adds some wah-wah effect to it. All these bamboo instruments are designed, made and named by John Imaeda himself.

On Alo you will also be amazed by the exceptional sound of the Japanese Shinofue flute, which was not on the previous Abrada LP.

Now, add to this unique sound some well-crafted Japanese female and male singing and you get a killer mix of Afro-Funk flavored grooves with traditional Japanese music! – Bandcamp

A Japanese rarity from 1984, Benkei is a unique jazz funk session that sees the drummer Akira Toyoda working with a group that features Joe Lovano on sax, Peter Madsen on piano and Dean Johnson on bass. This early document showcases the beginning of Lovano’s career as a fine jazz player as well as being an excellent testimony of the vibrant Japanese jazz scene of the mid-80s that drew many American players to visit the Land of the Rising Sun.

An eclectic album that is sure to pique anyone’s interest. Produced by Alan Parker and Alan Hawkshaw, who is perhaps best-known for composing “The Champ”, which has been widely sampled and emulated by hip hop artists. Cool orchestral funk from the 70s on this LP!

“My Name Is Albert Ayler is the debut album by American free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler recorded in Copenhagen in 1963 and first released on the Dutch Debut label.” – Wiki

“Hearing the soft-spoken voice of Albert Ayler at the beginning of this 1963 recording is spooky. Not because he's gone, but because he's so calm, so young, and so hesitantly articulate: Nothing like the voice of his saxophone playing at all. This session is a reissue of a Fantasy recording, and one which pairs Ayler up with a Scandinavian rhythm section that includes the 16-year-old Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass.” – All Music

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Broadcast from SWR and recorded at the legendary 1967 Free Jazz Meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany this is a collection of four different performances by different line-ups, featuring big names in the European free jazz 60s scene of the time along such top players as Don Cherry, Albery Mangelsdorff, Marion Brown and Evan Parker. – Linear Notes

Alice Clark's highly sought-after Soul Jazz classic produced by Mainstream Records' Bob Shad in 1972. Featuring such classics as "Don't You Care" and "Never Did I Stop Loving You" and remastered from the original tapes, this release is the first official reissue of Alice Clark’s original album for decades, a long-overdue release of one of the best Soul albums ever recorded. – Bandcamp

“This double-LP live set recorded at UCLA in 1978, reveals in total the ambitious and profound free jazz and universal musical frontiers Ms. Coltrane was able to explore in both small and larger groups. The lion's share of the music here features her in a trio setting with bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Roy Haynes. Ms. Coltrane performs on piano and organ. The opening moments of the title track, which opens the album, offer the careening subjectivity through the whole-tone improvisation that Alice Coltrane made her own. Certainly there is the influence of her late husband here, but her sense of phraseological articulation and accent is far different. She moves with one hand over a difficult series of arpeggiattic concerns, creating a strong harmonic line for Workman and Haynes to develop into a rhythmic construct. When a standard modal interlude develops in the rhythm section, Coltrane stretches it to its breaking point until a new one must be developed; it's nothing less than breathtaking…

…The interplay between Workman and Haynes was so telepathic, it pushed Ms. Coltrane into new realms further inside these shimmering harmonics until their shards gave way to a series of symbols and meanings that opened onto new vistas in tonal metalinguistic post-tonalism. It's an exhausting work, but one that leaves the listener in a state of near disbelief at what just transpired. If you can only own one Alice Coltrane record, this should be it.” – All Music

“Transfiguration was recorded live at UCLA in 1978, with Reggie Workman on bass and Roy Haynes on drums. To date, it is the last jazz recording that Coltrane has made. (She has made several subsequent recordings of devotional songs and chants)…

…the best piece here is "Prema", on which Coltrane plays acoustic piano, and is joined by a nine-piece string section (overdubbed) that provides a perfect complement to her slow, gospel-tinged style. Consequently, this track works best as jazz, and also most closely approaches the universal spirituality that Coltrane seeks to convey.” – BBC

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“This LP was recorded in late 1971 and it’s the sixth solo album of Alice Coltrane. It is also considered as being one of the most important and strongest records from her entire music career and ‘’one of the finest moments in jazz from the early '70s’’, as quoted by fellow journalist Thom Jurek. The harp is probably one of the very few instruments that you can reach the most divine and spiritual sound with; and there’s plenty of harp, in each song on this LP. The trilogy of the Galaxies (''Galaxy Around Olodumare, in Turiya and in Satchidananda) travels through time and religion, eventually hypnotizing the listener with its ridiculously rough melody, harmony and love. This album is pure love.” – The Attic

“On the two days in November when World Galaxy was recorded, Coltrane chose drummer Ben Riley, bassist Reggie Workman, violinist Leroy Jenkins, saxophonist Frank Lowe, and timpanist Elayne Jones in addition to a string orchestra of 16 to help her realize her latest vision. Coltrane herself plays piano, harp, and organ on this date, sometimes within a single track, as she does on her glorious post-modal reworking of "My Favorite Things." This was a gutsy move, considering it was one of John Coltrane's signature tunes, but Alice has it firmly in hand as she moves from organ to harp to piano and back, turning the melody inside out wide enough for the strings to whip up an atmospheric texture that simultaneously evokes heaven and hell and skewers the prissy nature of the tune in favor of bent polyharmonics that allow the entire world of sound inside to play. The jazz modalism Coltrane presents on "Galaxy Around Olodumare" is quickly undone by Lowe in his solo and reconstructed into polyphony by the string section; it's remarkable. The harp work on "Galaxy in Turiya" (Alice's religious name) is among her most beautiful, creating her own wash of color and dynamic for the strings to fall like water from the sky into her mix. As colors shift and change, the rhythm section responds, and focuses them in the prism of Coltrane's textured harpistry.” – All Music

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Composer, pianist, keyboard player, harpist and bandleader Alice (McLeod) Coltrane married John Coltrane in 1965. She played in her husband's band until his passing in 1967 but his influence remained strong throughout her music thereafter. Few of her albums reflect this influence more strongly than Huntington Ashram Monastery, recorded in 1969, and World Galaxy, recorded in 1971, here combined as part of the Impulse!/Universal 2-on-1 Impulse! reissue series.

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Huntington captures a trio date with bassist Ron Carter and drummer Rashied Ali, who picked up for Elvin Jones in John Coltrane's band and helped propel 'Trane into his most "free" jazz. Its title track, originally composed as a solo harp piece, and "Parmahansa Lake" pivot their internal (meditative) and external (exploratory) faces upon the fulcrum of Carter's repetitive, throbbing bass, even though their swirling movements and rhythms, especially from Coltrane's harp, sound static, nearly floating. "I am especially pleased with Ron Carter's playing on this album," she wrote in Monastery's original notes. "His ears are harmonically attuned to higher chord progressions."

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Coltrane moves from harp to piano for "Via Sivanandager" and "Jaya Jaya Rama" and the piano's less heavenly, more temporal sound seems to root them in more earthly styles. The spiritual overtones, and multiplicity and sheer volume of her notes, impart such majestic jazz power to "Via Sivanandager" that the comparison to McCoy Tyner, another of her husband's most famous sidemen, seems almost too evident. Her piano roots "Jaya Jaya Rama" in the blood, sweat and tears of the blues. – All About Jazz

After releasing the wondrous Transfiguration in 1978, documenting a live concert with drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Reggie Workman, Alice Coltrane retreated from public life to serve as swamini in an ashram she founded in Agoura Hills, California. Though she resurfaced briefly at John Coltrane tribute concerts during the 1990s and released a final album, Translinear Light, in 2004, it was widely thought she had abandoned music for over two decades. However, during that time, she was playing alone and with others for Sunday "kirtans" (services), and she occasionally recorded devotional chants for her followers. In 2017, Luaka Bop released The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda; its music was compiled from four privately pressed (and professionally recorded) cassettes. The first of these was 1982's Turiya Sings, and marked the first recording of her singing voice, accompanied by organ, strings, synths, and in places, minimal sound effects. Commercially unavailable, it has been streaming on YouTube for years. Kirtan: Turiya Sings, issued by Impulse!, presents that album in a startling new context. This rare mix -- unheard even by Ravi Coltrane until he was producing Translinear Light -- presents Alice's prayerful rendition of nine traditional Hindu chants called "bhajans," offered with only her Wurlitzer organ in support.

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From the opening moments of "Jagadishwar," Coltrane's dignified worship songs seemingly transcend time. They abundantly reflect an earlier period in her own life when she was still in Detroit playing organ in church for gospel choirs and congregations during the early 1950s. That said, they also wed the millennia-old Hindu prayers to the 20th century African American Church and the blues Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey used in reframing gospel music. A striking example here is "Krishna Krishna"; it drones along a skeletal chord progression as Coltrane's instrumental pulse underscores her subdued, vulnerable, almost unbearably tender chant and suggests a country blues. "Rama Katha" adds depth to that impression while being presented in a slightly more dramatic fashion with a taut delivery. Coltrane's jazz training can't resist slipping in unusual chord voicings amid the Wurlitzer's droning growl -- check out "Hara Siva," where she pairs fleeting elliptical ghost traces of chords under an open-throated, deep blue groan that simultaneously reflects yearning and transcendence. Closer "Prandhana" offers seemingly syncopated organ play as chords melt together, transforming them into new utterances. The Wurlitzer hums, rife with airy pedal action as her voice wavers around the resultant overtones. Kirtan: Turiya Sings is more subdued than the original (perhaps they should have been packaged together), but because of the power in Coltrane's singing, it is also deeper emotionally. Rather than a recording designed to project music for a congregation to respond to collectively, it resonates with the personal primacy of private devotional prayer. In sum, it doesn't displace or replace the original, but adds immeasurably to its meaning and dimension. - All Music

“Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana was issued in the mid-'70s by Warner Bros. Forgoing jazz altogether, this set is a series of devotional songs from the Hindu religion that Alice Coltrane practiced. Three of the tracks here are chants, with Coltrane backing a vocal chorus on Fender Rhodes electric piano and organ. They are memorable, catchy, and moving given the near ecstatic joy of the singers. The other two tracks here feature Coltrane's interpretations of Indian songs. On "Ganesha," she plays harp and is accompanied only by Sita Coltrane on tamboura. This is not jazz, but it is engaging, utterly compelling music, particularly notable for Alice's juxtaposition of space against melody.” – All Music

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“Recorded between April and June of 1971, Alice Coltrane's Universal Consciousness stands as her classic work. As a testament to the articulation of her spiritual principles, Universal Consciousness stands even above World Galaxy as a recording where the medium of music, both composed and improvised, perfectly united the realms of body (in performance), speech (in the utterance of individual instrumentalists and group interplay), and mind (absolute focus) for the listener to take into their own experience. While many regard Universal Consciousness as a "jazz" album, it transcends even free jazz by its reliance on deeply thematic harmonic material and the closely controlled sonic dynamics in its richly hued chromatic palette.” – All Music

“Universal Consciousness utilizes transcriptions by free jazz cornerstone Ornette Coleman and features a line of four violinists including Joan Kalisch and Leroy Jenkins. Their presence is immediately felt on the opening title cut, aggressive, near-Modernist twists and darts hastily relieving any nagging suspicions over the syrupiness that can exude from a mal-employed string section. Added weight comes through Garrison’s bowed strings, his textures contrasting with the cascades of Coltrane’s harp. And then shortly after a minute in, the organ arrives with the abruptness of a studio edit; DeJohnette turns up the heat, his intensity rolling across the potency of her solo.” – The Vinyl District

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Manço, Bağcan and Koray have all influenced Altin Gün, but their foremost inspiration is Neşet Ertaş, a Turkish folk musician whose musical legacy is invaluable. Comparisons are almost impossible to make but imagine someone with the same impact and status as Bob Dylan or George Gerschwin and you’re getting close. Many of the songs he wrote have become standards in Turkey, national treasures which are cherished up until the present day. Altin Gün retain the lyrical and thematic structure of Ertaş’s songs, though they often alter their time signatures and add fuzzy bass sounds, sweltering organ sounds and raw saz riffs. Ertaş wrote the majority of the songs on the album even if these are hardly recognisable after all the work Altin Gün have done on them.

The songs have universal themes such as love, death, desire and destiny. It is touching music that makes you want to move and massages your soul all at once. Music that sounds familiar but different. Music that’s deeply emotional even for someone who doesn’t speak a word of Turkish.

Let Altin Gün open that door for you and get ready to indulge in their fresh and beautiful sound. - Bandcamp