$32.00
DJ, record label impresario and former Swedish champion b-boy, Mad Mats knows a thing or two about finding good music. As well as iconic underground imprints Raw Fusion and GAMM, Mad Mats is a partner in the highly regarded Local Talk label, making it highly probable that most of the world’s influential DJs have at least one of his discoveries in their record bags.
For his first compilation on BBE, Mats has put together a diverse selection of cuts; from reggae, hip hop and soul to boogie, electronica and house, reflecting his open-minded approach to DJing. “The compilation is very mixed, just like how I like to DJ...all freestyle. Yes, I play a lot of house clubs nowadays because of Local Talk, but at heart I've always been a so called "eclectic" selector. Most of these tracks are tunes I’ve played all over the years, sprinkled with some brand new discoveries.”
Coming from a strictly vinyl background, when Mats embraced Serato around 2005, he carried his crate digger’s mentality with him. Believing firmly that digging should always about the discovery of great music regardless of the format, the concept of ‘Digging Beyond The Crates’ was born.
Ranging far and wide in terms of genre and tempo, the album is tied together by one common factor; this is feel-good music made for dancing. “I'm just as hungry (probably even more so) to find my personal gems as I was back in the day, I just look for them with more variation. This album is dedicated to those select few individuals, just like myself: highly driven music lovers, collectors and DJs that truly are DIGGING BEYOND THE CRATES!” – BBE on Bandcamp
Label: BBE – BBE417CLP, Local Talk – BBE417CLP |
Format: 2 × Vinyl, 12", Compilation |
Country: UK |
Released: 11 Aug 2017 |
Genre: Electronic, Hip Hop, Jazz, Reggae, Funk / Soul |
Style: House, Deep House, Funk, Jazz-Funk, Disco |
$39.00
As mellow, warm, and welcoming as the day they patented the Ultramarine sound, the duo of Ian Cooper and Paul Hammond return after a long 15 years off with This Time Last Year, an album filled with enough high-grade, home-listening electronica to rival their beloved debut, 1992's Every Man and Woman Is a Star. The difference here is that big, hooky, Blue Room numbers like "Saratoga" and "Honey" have given way to smaller, more meditative music that reflects the indie, post-Boards of Canada world outside, but it's still sweater weather out there, and if Ultramarine have lost their "cute," they've certainly filled that space with grace and sophistication. Soft, broken beat gems like "Technique" are more complicated and artistically rewarding than the average Every Man cut, as that opening number suggests that Tangerine Dream's synths, Carl Craig's sequencers, and Prince's drum machines have all surrendered to Ultramarine's control. "Find My Way" anchors the album with some hazy, '70s-flavored vocals that represent the duo's equal love of the acoustic and the electronic, while all the analog moments give the album a nostalgic, wistful spin, as if these electronica spacemen have embraced home after years of orbiting Earth. The drifting here is all slowly downstream and not the weightless, otherworldly kind an astronaut experiences, so fans who always thought of them as a transitory, Orb-like, pre-club group should turn the car around and head toward the couch. It's best to trade those dancing shoes for comfy slippers, because This Time Last Year is the mature, delicious, and filling sound of the elder Ultramarine. - All Music
Label: Real Soon – RS-024 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, 180gm vinyl |
Country: UK |
Released: 30 Sep 2013 |
Genre: Electronic |
Style: Deep House, Post Rock, Ambient, IDM |
$39.00
“From an artist in their seventies, you probably wouldn’t expect to hear an album like this. But Brazilian drumming legend Ivan ‘Mamão’ Conti has been experimenting and innovating for the last half a century. As one third of cult Rio jazz-funk trio Azymuth, Mamão was at the root of the group’s ‘samba doido’ (crazy samba) philosophy, which warped the traditional samba compass with jazz influences and space age electronics. Even with his lesser known jovem guarda group The Youngsters, Mamão was experimenting with tapes and delays to create unique, ahead-of-its-time sounds, way back in the sixties. More recently Mamão recorded an album with hip-hop royalty Madlib under the shared moniker ‘Jackson Conti’.
With his first album in over twenty years, and the first to be released on vinyl since his 1984 classic The Human Factor, Mamão shares his zany carioca character across eleven tracks of rootsy electronic samba and tripped out jazz, beats and dance music. Featuring Alex Malheiros and Kiko Continentino on a number of tracks, the Azymuth lifeblood runs deep, but venturing into the modern discotheque (as Mamão would call it), Poison Fruit also experiments with sounds more commonly associated with house and techno, with the help of London based producer Daniel Maunick (aka Dokta Venom) and Mamão's son Thiago Maranhão.” – Bandcamp
Item description:
Artist: |
Ivan Mamao Conti |
Title: |
Poison Fruit |
Label: |
Far Out Recordings |
Format: |
Vinyl, LP, Album |
Pressing: |
Europe |
Release Date: |
25th Jan 2019 |
Genre: |
Electronic, Hip Hop, Jazz, Latin |
Style: |
Deep House, Jazz-Funk, Samba |
Catalog No: |
FARO208LP |
Condition: |
New |
$39.00
The borders between London’s musical tribes have always been porous. For Yussef Kamaal, the sound of the capital – with its hum of jungle, grime and broken beat – has shaped a self-taught, UK-tipped approach to playing jazz. In the states, the genre’s long-running to-and-fro with hip hop – from Robert Glasper to Kamasi Washington – has reimagined it within US culture. On Black Focus, Yussef Kamaal frame jazz inside the bass-saturated, pirate radio broadcasts of London.
Taking inspiration from the anything-goes spirit of ‘70s jazz-funk, on albums by Herbie Hancock or the Mahavishnu Orchestra, it’s a loose template with plenty of room to experiment. The pair, made up of Yussef Dayes and Kamaal Williams (aka Henry Wu), have had little in the way of formal training. Instead, their musical tastes – and approach to playing – are indebted to Thelonious Monk’s piano as much as the drum programming of Kaidi Tatham.
“It's all about the drums and the keys,” Williams says. “Not to take anything from anyone else, but that's where it all originates from: the chords, the rhythm of the chords and the drums.” Born out of a one-off live session to perform Williams’ solo material for Boiler Room, it soon became a project in its own right. Coming together as Yussef Kamaal, they played a series of live shows where little more than a chord progression would be planned before taking to the stage
Bringing that unspoken understanding to the recording sessions (engineered by Malcolm Catto of The Heliocentrics), the unplanned, telepathically spawned grooves retain the raw energy of their live shows. “It's not so much about complete arrangement, it's more about flow,” Dayes says. “A lot of the tracks are just made spontaneously – Henry will be playing two chords, I'll fill in the groove and we'll just leave the arrangement naturally.”
Both hail from South East London, crossing paths in 2007 as teenagers playing their first pub gigs around Peckham and Camberwell. Dayes drums for cosmically-inclined, afrobeat outfit United Vibrations, while Williams – on top of drumming and playing keys in different incarnations over the years – has made waves with his solo, synth-draped house 12"s for much-fêted labels like 22a and Rhythm Section. – Press Release
“Tracks on the record may feel like unfinished sketches as the listener is dropped into grooves that fade in and out from each other. Yet, the consistency with which this choice is exercised still makes the album feel like a seamless progression of an idea from start to finish. Variation nestles within the forward movement of the record: opener and title track ‘Black Focus’ lulls the listener into its West Coast groove, whilst ‘Strings Of Light’ incorporates a synth-string progression over Dayes’ afrobeat and a wash of celestial keys. Single ‘Yo Chavez’ also expresses the quieter side of Yussef Kamaal, pairing a gentle Rhodes line with soft brushwork to create the eerie atmosphere of an MF Doom instrumental. It is this generic melding which characterises the pervading influence and ultimate beauty of jazz; at times indefinable or inexpressible, the finest of the genre braids sound to create boundless depth.
Jazz is best experienced live and with 'Black Focus' Yussef Kamaal have captured the unpredictable and at times fragmented intensity of the live experience on wax. This is the kind of record that inspires new listeners to explore unfamiliar sounds and musical histories; the kind of record that bodes very well for the future of British jazz.” – CLASH
Item description:
Artist: |
|
Title: |
Black Focus |
Label: |
|
Format: |
Vinyl, LP, Album |
Pressing: |
UK |
Release Date: |
2016 |
Genre: |
Jazz, Electronica |
Style: |
Contemporary Jazz, Soul-Jazz, Broken Beat, Deep House |
Catalog No: |
BWOOD0157LP |
Condition: |
New |