From hereon in the big list I think, everything is a potential number 1. All of these are truly excellent. Each time I listen to one of ‘em, I want to move it straight up to the top, until I play the next one in line again. And, the records in parts #1 and #2 weren’t bad either. Such a fine year for ears, if not for most other organs and appendages.

 

 

Mixing near-eastern processional/celebratory music with the scuzz-drenched tape cut-up methodology of the western noise underground, N.R. Safi aka Naujawanan Baidar makes a racket as original, incendiary and authentically psychedelic as anything the brutalised culture of the 21st century has to offer. Wherever music finds itself heading in future years, MORE OF THIS SORT OF THING would seem like a good start.

From June 2020:  

“..combining traditional Afghan instrumentation with a bewildering array of loops, radio textures, distortion, digital effects, drums, Western/South Asian instruments and more besides, [this] dense and beguiling set of heavy psyche-blasted quasi-enthno semi-forgeries basically sounds like the wildest dream of some Sublime Frequencies junkie, obsessively scanning the scanning the short wave dials in search of mind-blowing pan-global audio to rip and reconstitute for hungry ears.

Beautiful collage artwork, vintage field recordings and track titles like ‘Blood Can’t Clean Blood’ speak of a legit and powerful engagement with the issues of cultural displacement and transformation which inevitably surround this music, which pulses and shrieks across imagined and real airwaves, like an affirmative signal of resistance for Middle Eastern and North American deserts alike.”

Side D of the album, comprising ‘Shakl-e-Barqi’, ‘Nagin Saaz’ and ‘Panj Ruz Pesh’, strikes me as particularly choice. 

 

 

I wouldn’t be a Stereo Sanctity best-of-year list without Mike Vest sticking his oar in at some point, and the most noteworthy project undertaken by the UK’s leading maximalist guitar savant during 2020 was undoubtedly Ozo, a studio-bound trio in which Vest’s distinctively uncompromising bass and guitar work goes head-to-head with the Equally forthright sounds of Karl D’Silva (sax) and Graham Thompson (drums).

Of ‘Pluto’, my favourite of the two LPs, I said in July 2020:  

“Moving at least slightly closer to realising the elusive space-rock / free jazz ideal Ozo are allegedly aiming for, this one is a heavy, heavy trip – a hulking motherlode of King Crimson-accented sonic gloop which feels more ‘high gravity planetary surface trek’ than ‘interstellar joyride’, stumbling over boulders on the way back to the landing module as the low-hanging sky overhead behind to look like this album’s cover.”

‘Saturn’ is well worth a listen too however, particularly for fans of Thompson’s powerhouse drumming, which effectively assumes lead instrument status through much of the LP, his meteor shower beat-downs often pummelling both Vest’s galaxy-questing, ‘Space Ritual’ bass lines and D’Silva’s squalling, disembodied ‘Funhouse’-in-a-hall-of-mirrors sax echoes into submission. A uniquely wild and disorientating new sound in the space-rock firmament, whichever way you look at it. 

 

 

The interplay between bassist Dezron Douglas and harpist Brandee Younger was a big part of what made the New York side of Makaya McCraven’s ‘Universal Beings’ double LP so sublime, and here the duo return with one of the world’s first real lessons in how to make the concept of a “lockdown album” really work.

Culled from a series of lunchtime live-streams the couple undertook from their NYC apartment through the peak of the city’s first wave in March-June 2020, Douglas & Younger’s instinctive / off-the-cuff playing here succeeds in providing a veritable beacon of good ol’ peace, love and understanding in a cold and threatening world, proving (lest the thousands of such recordings made during the 20th century left us in any doubt) that with the right players, and the right feel, one half-decent microphone is all that’s needed to make an album for the ages.

Concentrating largely on melodically potent material which will likely be at least distantly familiar to most of their listeners, ‘Force Majeure’ is probably at its best when the duo explore the jazz repertoire, working over such touchstones as John Coltrane’s ‘Equinox’ and ‘Wise One’, Alice Coltrane’s ‘Gospel Trane’ and Pharaoh Sanders & Leon Thomas’s ‘The Creator Has A Master Plan’ with a sense of warmth and constant harmonic discovery that it’s near impossible not to be moved by. Their (instrumental) interpretations of pop songs are good too, particularly when Younger takes the lead on comparatively simple, heart-rending reimaginings of Clifton Davis’s ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ (you know, the Jackson 5 one) and Kate Bush’s ‘A Woman’s Work’.

On a slightly snarkier note, I would also like to state that this is the one and only occasion upon which this blog will provide positive commentary on a release which includes a track composed by Sting (that being Douglas’s solo bass take on a something named ‘Inshallah’ on side # 2). You may have won me over this time with your good-natured banter about coffee and human togetherness and your vast musical talent guys, but c’mon - don’t push it. 

 

 

As I mused way back in July, the extended vocal cuts led here by Chicagoan percussionist/singer Kahil El’Zabar often veer more toward a kind of spaced out, discombobulated soul than to anything in the jazz canon, with the simple hypnotic rhythms of El’Zabor and bassist Emma Dayhuff backing up the band leader’s resonant, mantra-like, sometimes entirely non-verbal, incantations, resulting in a sound which perhaps recalls the methodology of Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ taken to it’s furthest extreme, or perhaps Gil Scott Heron getting waa-aay out there on a jazz tip, if he’d stuck to pot rather than hitting the hard stuff.

At the same time though, as I’ve lived with this record over the past six months or so, it’s the instrumental cuts I come back to the most. Side # 3’s ‘Katon’ in particular spends quite a while digging into territory not too distant from the slow burn, ambient minimalism of Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society, until saxophonist David Murray eventually weighs in with some stark, unmistakably Trane-like tenor ruminations, paying heed to the feather-soft groove even as he briefly tilts in a considerably more fearsome direction - a trend which is furthered, naturally enough, on side # 4’s more conventionally lyrical ‘Trane in Mind’ - as knock-out a tribute to the big man as you’re likely to hear anywhere in the current musical firmament. 

 

 

Why, after all these years, does ‘The Devil Rides Out’, an insufferably boring novel written by arch-conservative imperialist blowhard Dennis Wheatley in 19…, retain such an irresistible aesthetic appeal, living on in the minds of horror/weird fiction aficionados like a rich bouquet of combined old book smell, empty church dust and ceremonial sulphur..?

Damned if I know, but Hammer’s ever-wonderful 1968 movie adaptation no doubt helps, as does this more recent ‘soundtrack’ to the novel offered up by Tom Mcdowell, aka Dream Division.

Of all the quote-unquote “dungeon synth” releases I sampled last year in fact, this one strikes me as by far the strongest. Not only does Mcdowell succeed in wringing exactly the right tones of comforting, TV/VHS-fogged dread and fascination from his wheezing, hissing analogue equipment, but he also brings a strong melodic sensibility to the material, filling the album with memorable, earworm-heavy numbers which would certainly not have disgraced the professional-yet-impoverished band of film composers who first minted this particular sound back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Combine this with a keen appreciation of the intangible / irresistible ‘feel’ of the material he is plundering for inspiration, and Mcdowell has really created an all-time, party rockin’ classic for the world’s second-hand bookshop haunting creeps.

 

 

Single-handedly making the concept of “stoner rock” suddenly seem like a good idea again, this Vienna-based group’s shamelessly indulgent assemblage of gargantuan / Sleep-worthy riffs and foot-on-monitor solos, served up with just a touch of bonged out weirdness, has rarely travelled far from my turntable in 2020. Seriously - super-massive rock fun with real longevity right here. Do yourself a favour today and check it out.

Here is some further blather from way back in the carefree days of Feb 2020: 

 “‘Raging Mammoth’! ‘Shaking Pyramid’! Yes, these are the kind of things pieces of music like this should be called, and I commend artist Sandra Havik for her valiant attempts to literally illustrate these concepts on the album’s front cover. Side 2’s ‘Monolith’ is dutifully depicted on the back cover meanwhile, whilst the accompanying track mixes things up somewhat, heading in a more trad metal direction, bringing in NWBHM-ish harmonic leads and moving from curious, almost jazzy/modal passages early on toward some positively Maiden-esque adventures in mid-tempo, dragon-slaying guitar heroism. Probably the all-round best cut here, it’s pretty damn immense.” 

 

 

Making her second collaborative appearance on this year’s list, Kryssi Battalene (Head Room/Mountain Movers) here lends her guitar and vocals talents to former Mininokoto / LSD March frontman Kawaguchi Masami’s New Rock Syndicate, and, if the shorter, more garage-inclined numbers which begin the resulting LP perhaps don’t come off quite as well as they could, tracks like sitar-enhanced slow-burn epic ‘Sunday Afternoon’, the shimmering, scorched earth drama of ‘Shadow of the Earth’ and the churning, bad vibes jamming of ‘The Beginning’ and ‘Pieces of You’ all remain absolutely sublime.

Even more-so than with his previous bands, Kawaguchi seems intent here on digging deep into the legacy of late ‘80s legends White Heaven, tacking close to that band’s gospel of lysergic songcraft and elegiac guitar heroics, seasoned with a touch of AMT’s show-boating exotica, whilst Battalene for her part brings a more Bardo/MBV-like sense of blissed out pedalboard oblivion to proceedings, birthing beautific, timeless, trans-pacific psychedelic rock of the very highest calibre; just a sky-scraping, spirit-nourishing triumph of beautific noise, miraculously still available on wax to U.S.-based readers for the price of a six pack plus postage. 

 

  

From July 2020:

“As ever, it’s difficult to really put into words the unique amalgam that comprises Obnox’s sound, but nonetheless, let’s take a deep breath and try again. Mixing up lo-fi cut-up noise, rust-belt garage-punk, mutant p-funk derivations, ghostly regional/outsider soul and aggro-laden, street level hip-hop, ‘Savage Raygun’ makes for an exhilarating tour through the treacherous back alleys of American music, all mixed down with a chopped n’ screwed, basement tape-splicin’ aesthetic that makes the album’s presence on shiny, newly pressed vinyl feel kind of incongruous.

That said though, this is still perhaps a slightly more – cough –‘accessible’ take on the Obnox ideal than we’ve been presented with before, dialling back on the hyper-aggressive saturation of earlier releases, even as Thomas remains an elusive presence within his own music, his vocals often remaining distant and translucent as he slyly works earworms and familiar phrases from semi-well known songs in his material, leaving us trying to source them in the fog of our own memories like some form of archaic, pre-industrial sampling. The exception of course is on the full-on hip-hop cuts, where he’s upfront and in our grill, spitting as angry and unhinged as our stupid white asses could wish for, milling down decades of uncouth working class discontent for some implacably affirmative, ugly shit flow goodness.

All of the deep, strange threads Lamont Thomas is exploring and tearing through here seem to come together, just before the end of the record, on the supremely titled ‘Young Neezy’, looping an ancient tape of Neil’s ‘Southern Man’ riff and firing it straight off into the resentful depths of twisted r’n’b oblivion. It’s pretty inspired. A few years on from Obnox coining the phrase ‘America in a Blender’ on his mutant, malfunctioning non-“free jazz” LP [‘Templo dol Solido’, 2018], he’s still busy making supremely bitter-sweet lemonade from that terrifying concept.”

 

Makaya McCraven’s ‘Universal Beings’ double LP from 2018 is one of the records I’ve played most over the past few years, and undoubtedly the one which has had the biggest impact on my listening… so of course it's a no brainer that a further disc culled from the same trans-coastal / transatlantic sessions was going to find itself sitting pretty high up on this 2020 list.

Unlike the earlier LPs, tracks recorded in different cities with different line-ups are mixed up willy-nilly here, arguably resulting in a somewhat more bracing and unpredictable listen, but McCraven’s intense, skittering electronica-influenced drum style remains consistent throughout, lending the music a unified pulse even as the textures and atmospheres change on a dime.

Most of the pieces here are quite brief, with some sounding like repetitive / water-treading segments excised from longer jams, which perhaps explains why they didn’t quite make the cut on the first two LPs, but even in its more quotidian moments, this music retains a floating, blissful sense of infectious positivity, and highlights, of course, remain plentiful.

Several cuts from the hallowed (by me at least) New York session appear to be pieces of the same tight, rhythmic workout, foregrounding Joel Ross’s vibraphone alongside backing from the aforementioned Dezron Douglas and Brandee Younger, whilst ‘Half Steppin’, recorded in London with Soweto Kinch (sax) and Kamaal Williams (keys) is an altogether more hair-raising piece of work, with what sounds like a heavily processed and/or electronically-generated beat bringing a frantic, almost jungle-like feel emphasised by distant, juddering bass frequencies and strange, droning chords picked out by Williams.

Two further London cuts featuring a more trad sax/keys/bass line up (courtesy of Nubya Garcia, Ashley Henry and Daniel Casimir respectively) find McCraven's polyphonous beatdowns sometimes threatening to drown out his collaborators, but a louche slide toward the ol ‘smoky groove’ pocket eventually wins the day, with some lovely work in particular from Henry on Fender Rhodes.

Meanwhile, the Chicago material here is excellent too, with Tomeka Reid’s cello adding a baleful quality to proceedings, as Shabaka Hutchings’ rich, Trane-esque tone alternately locks into and drowsily pulls away from McCraven's meticulously detailed, double-time beat - but my pick for the absolute best stuff this time around comes from Los Angeles.

As the distinctive creepy-crawl of Jeff Parker’s guitar signals a shift to the West Coast, the combo of ‘Universal Being pt2’ and ‘Butterss Fly’ (named for bassist Anna Butterss) proves absolutely stunning, perhaps a peak moment of this entire project in fact, with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s violin cooing some some bird of paradise as Josh Johnson's alto rides the tightly-wound rhythm set by McCraven and Parker, eventually folding out into a beautiful cat’s cradle of interlocking, ‘Bitches Brew’-esque textures… oh man, it’s a shame they couldn’t have kept this one going for hours.

But, we’re reaching the end of the final side by this point, so needs must, and, back to London, Soweto Kinch shows us ‘The Way Home’ - a big, bold South African style melodic theme, played in a duo with McCraven, cheerfully waving us off into the sunrise of the perilously uncertain future we all now find ourselves stuck in. 

 

 

Year on year, I find myself feeling ever more distraught when the moment comes for me to vainly try, yet again, to find a way to convey the kind of magic routinely bottled by Chris Abrahams, Lloyd Swanton and Tony Buck whenever and wherever they convene to take care of Necks business.

These days at least, I can merely point to the bandcamp embed above and let more patient readers discover a way in for themselves, but, for those unwilling or unable to do so, I can at least suggest that, exhibiting a characteristically zen-like sense of internal symmetry (three tracks of equal length, three musicians), CD-only album ‘Three’ represents some of the band’s strongest work in years (which is going some).

Mixing restrained, ruminative piano and bass excursions with a chaotic, rotor-blade like clamour of disembodied percussion, ‘Bloom’ and ‘Further’ are both - and it makes my soul wither just to say this, but no alternatives immediately present themselves - classic Necks. The former leaves strange, distorted, guitar-like overdubs churning deep in the background, cymbal hits ringing through infinite space and fizzing, climactic organ chords occasionally rising up like fragments of Chicago house overheard from the wrong side of thick concrete wall. The latter meanwhile is a particularly special aural tranquilizer dart, tidal organ and string textures drifting against the frantic rattle of Buck’s bells and chimes as Swanson locks into an exquisite example of the kind of slow, cyclical groove which defined the band’s early work back in the ‘90s/‘00s.

By contrast, middle track ‘Lovelock’, named in tribute to recently deceased Celibate Rifles frontman Damien Lovelock, proves harrowing stuff - a dry gulch twenty minutes of exhausted, nocturnal dream-atmos which I’d characterise as ‘bereft’, but for the fact that that would imply a level of emotional manipulation mercifully alien to The Necks pointedly abstract/subjective methodology. 

---

To be concluded…

Labels: best of 2020, Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger, Dream Division, Kahil El’Zabar’s Spirit Groove, Kawaguchi Masami, Kryssi Battalene, Makaya McCraven, Naujawanan Baidar, Obnox, Ozo, Ryte, The Necks

Is it just me, or is there something GOOD actually happening at the moment? Purely in terms of recorded music, I mean. In spite of the fact that live performance and collective playing is literally DEAD for the time being, the list of fantastic records I’ve discovered in the past six months is just ridiculous.

Has it simply been because I’m now sitting on my ass at home all day long, following links, clicking play and/or dropping the needle and keeping the speakers ticking over 9 to 5? Or, are we ACTUALLY hitting some variation on that irreducible splurge of accelerated creativity which seems to hit like clockwork about once per decade..?

I don’t know. You tell me.

All I can say for sure is, whereas in past few years I would have had difficulty in scraping together a top ten of new records I’ve really loved come the end of June, here we are in 2020, and I could probably give you a top thirty right off the bat.

I should of course temper this enthusiasm by flagging up the heinous prospect that, a few months down the line (maybe mid/late 2021 or thereabouts), we’re inevitably going to hit a dead zone, reflecting a still-ominously-lengthening window in which the majority of bands and musical ensembles have effectively CEASED TO EXIST, at least in terms of their capacity for actual in-the-same-room playing/recording (which I would still contend is generally the best kind).

I mean… wow. Let’s stop and think about that for a minute. I realise we’re lucky(?) enough to live in an era when solo electronic/producer types and songwriters can sit in their bedrooms and kick it out indefinitely, but… has there EVER been a period, since the dawn of recorded popular music in the early 20th century, when the collective creation of music in the western world has actually STOPPED - dead in its tracks?

It occurs to me that there are already plenty of folks over in Iran, Afghanistan, Mali, Cambodia and elsewhere who can tell us exactly how that feels. So hey, let’s look on the bright side - at least a pandemic-related music shutdown seems unlikely to lead to anyone getting their tapes forcibly wiped or their instruments el-kabonged. Or, more pertinently, to anyone being forced to live under imminent threat of violence, imprisonment and systematic murder as a result of their art (or, not anymore so than they were previously, at any rate – peace & love to the vast majority out there currently living under some form of tyranny or idiocracy).

So, let’s just reflect on that for a bit in six months or whenever, when our favourite record labels start sending out “sorry folks, the cupboard is bare” type emails.

But anyway – enough rambling. Tomorrow (FRIDAY) is another Bandcamp revenue-free day, so I’ll be buying these. I believe they’re all pretty mighty. Let’s get stuck in.


Obnox.



A few weeks back, when my wife’s social media feeds [I don’t have any] seemed to be overflowing with indie-rock / punk listeners suddenly scrabbling around trying to acquire an intense and meaningful interest in contemporary black music, I couldn’t help but think, “what the world needs right now is some OBNOX” - and verily, right on cue, the man has come through, with a sprawling double LP that might well be the best thing Lamont Thomas has put out under the this name to date.

As ever, it’s difficult to really put into words the unique amalgam that comprises Obnox’s sound, but nonetheless, let’s take a deep breath and try again. Mixing up lo-fi cut-up noise, rust-belt garage-punk, mutant p-funk derivations, ghostly regional/outsider soul and aggro-laden, street level hip-hop, ‘Savage Raygun’ makes for an exhilarating tour through the treacherous back alleys of American music, all mixed down with a chopped n’ screwed, basement tape-splicin’ aesthetic that makes the album’s presence on shiny, newly pressed vinyl feel kind of incongruous.

That said though, this is still perhaps a slightly more – cough –‘accessible’ take on the Obnox ideal than we’ve been presented with before, dialling back on the hyper-aggressive saturation of earlier releases, even as Thomas remains an elusive presence within his own music, his vocals often remaining distant and translucent as he slyly works earworms and familiar phrases from semi-well known songs in his material, leaving us trying to source them in the fog of our own memories like some form of archaic, pre-industrial sampling. The exception of course is on the full-on hip-hop cuts, where he’s upfront and in our grill, spitting as angry and unhinged as our stupid white asses could wish for, milling down decades of uncouth working class discontent for some implacably affirmative, ugly shit flow goodness.

Song titles like ‘Hawkwindian Summer’ meanwhile gain my eternal respect [I will steal that at some point, for something], and all of the deep, strange threads Thomas is exploring and tearing here seem to come together, just before the end of the record, on the supremely titled ‘Young Neezy’, looping an ancient tape of Neil’s ‘Southern Man’ riff and gleefully firing it straight off into the resentful depths of twisted r’n’b oblivion. It’s pretty inspired. A few years on from Obnox coining the phrase ‘America in a Blender’ on his mutant, malfunctioning non-“free jazz” LP, he’s still busy making supremely bitter-sweet lemonade from that terrifying concept.


Kahil El’Zabar’s Spirit Groove ft. David Murray.



Kind of a perfect palette-cleanser after the preceding, percussionist/vocalist and Chicago spitirual jazz OG Kahil El’Zabar (whose CV astonishingly includes work with such luminaries as Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley, Sonny Stitt and Rahsaan Roland Kirk) here teams up with his long-standing foil, tenor saxophonist David Murray, and proceeds to engage with the mindset of jazz’s 21st century new wave (represented here by bassist Emma Dayhuff and piano/keys player Justin Dillard) in what strikes me as the best possible manner.

Stretching out across the full eighty minutes allowed by two LPs, ‘Spirit Groove’s self-titled debut is a work of long-form, meditative bliss which, though rooted in jazz, often ends up sounding like some form of deconstructed psychedelic soul, with El’Zabor’s expressive, visceral and unbelievably sweet voice taking centre stage, riffing off a central phrase or ascending into pure rhythmic glossolalia as he, Dayhuff and Dillard lay down a suite of eminently relaxed, minimalist groves which, in their furtherest-reaching moments, almost touch upon the fourth world / melodic drone perfection of Joshua Abram’s Natural Information Society across which Murray soars Sanders-like and ego-free, even as El’Zabor’s vocals keep pulling the work back to a more earthy realm of physical exuberance, bodily movement and, I dunno… fun?

Early days listening to this one (as I say, I’m planning to lay down the not inconsiderable amount of scratch required for the vinyl tomorrow, all being well), but it is a supremely enjoyable listen which initially seems to bear all the hallmarks of a real timeless, endlessly comforting record. Highest possible rec at this point, needless to say.


Kawaguchi Masami New Rock Syndicate & Kryssi Battalene.



Yet another project for Headroom / Mountain Movers maximalist guitar wizardess Battalene, and as big fan of both her work and of the old school Japanese psychedelic rock from which she clearly takes so much inspiration, you’d better believe I’m ALL OVER this collaboration with Miminokoto / LSD March veteran Kawaguchi Masami’s New Rock Syndicate.

Time is short here, but let’s simply say that for those who share my frequently reiterated love for this-sort-of-thing, this is pretty damn spectacular stuff, raking the ghosts of High Rise and White Heaven over the coals with aplomb, even as it offers a few oddball diversions from the expected no-holds-barred guitar blitz along the way -the rinky-dink organ and Battalene’s verbed out, somewhat Stereolab-ish vocals which hold sway on the space-garage-y ‘Two Hearts’ being a case in point.

Clearly unafraid of a touch of such psych-cheese effects, Kawaguchi’s boys slather identikit sitar twang and chimes all over the epic ‘Sunday Afternoon’, but can do nothing to spoil its epically atmospheric SF ballroom-meets-Tokyo sunset immensitude. Magnificent stuff. With Kawaguchi’s songwriting easily hitting the heights previously scaled in his work with Miminokoto, whilst Battalene’s contributions hit the drifty, Bardo-ish bliss of her Headroom work from a decidedly different angle, this is full strength beautific psychedelic rock, cooked up just the way it should be, exactly as you’d expect from this hallowed intercontinental meeting of minds.


Edikanfo.



When my wife and I heard a track from Edikanfo’s ‘The Pace Setters’ on the radio the other week, we initially thought it sounded like music from a ‘70s cop show. It must be from the bit where they go around the streets, ding detective work and showing someone’s picture to people, Satori suggested. Yeah, I said, but I think it must be a show set in some tropical place – like, they’re driving along the beach front in Miami or Hawaii or somewhere, but can’t enjoy the sunshine cos there’s too much on their mind.

Then the vocals finally came in, and…. whoa! Completely off-base! This is actually a West African band. Wow.

Turns out, Edikanfo actually hail from Ghana, where they recorded this set of absolute stone-cold afro-funk bangers at the behest of none other than Brian Eno, who released it on his E.G. label back in 1981. Some elements of the recording have a touch of that indefinable “pro recording in the ‘80s” feel (kinda clean and dry? Gated drums? I dunno..), which is not necessarily to their best advantage, so maybe that’s where I was going with my misplaced Miami Vice type imaginings, but IT MATTERS NOT. The playing on this thing is so red hot, it rips through all that careful-careful dolbified mixing like a knife thru butter.

Heavy on the blasting horns, lurching fretless bass and octo-armed, polyrhythmic drumming, this is just one of the tightest, most consistently energised and imaginative African funk sets I’ve heard in living memory, with, as noted, a kind of cinematic scope to the arrangements which just slays.

Unfortunately however, a violent coup d’etat in Ghana on New Year’s Eve 1981 effectively put a nix on Edikanfo’s local gigging career, and with little in the way of an international touring circuit for ‘world’ artists existing at that point in time, the ensuing years of political instability effectively destroyed their ability to remain as a working unit [see themes alluded to in this post’s introduction].

Four decades down the line though, every right-thinking man, woman and child across the globe loves this kind of stuff, and it appears the group’s surviving members are back together to set the fucking pace once again….. just in time for covid. Shit man, talk about bad luck. Oh well, at least we have this superb (and admirably affordable) reissue on the Glitterbeat label to enjoy.


Ozo.



Last but not least, I’ve been remiss thus far when it comes to finding time to plug Ozo, Mike Vest’s new collaborative outfit with drummer Graham Thompson and saxophonist Karl D’Silva. If their debut ‘Saturn’ earlier this year represented an interesting stylistic development from Vest’s now-standard Blown Out/Reptilian Oblivion MO, their second LP ‘Pluto’ (I guess they skipped Uranus, as well as my personal choice for most underrated planet, Neptune) is where it REALLY comes together, with D’Silva’s sax sounding less relentlessly echoed/multi-tracked, and generally feeling more organically integrated into the boiling lava tides of Vest’s fuzz-bass and guitar layers and Thompson’s rolling rockslide ‘lead drumming’ (particularly on the uncharacteristically subdued expanse of the title track).

Moving at least slightly closer to realising the elusive space-rock / free jazz ideal Ozo are allegedly aiming for, this one is a heavy, heavy trip – a hulking motherlode of King Crimson-accented sonic gloop which feels more ‘high gravity planetary surface trek’ than ‘interstellar joyride’, stumbling over boulders on the way back to the landing module as the low-hanging sky overhead behind to look like this album’s cover. Great work all round on this one guys, it’s a monster.

Labels: Edikanfo, Kahil El’Zabar’s Spirit Groove ft. David Murray, Kawaguchi Masami New Rock Syndicate, Kryssi Battalene, Obnox, Ozo