365: Anatoly, by Oligarkh

Oligarkh (Russia)
Anatoly (2016)
9 tracks, 38 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Over the course of this blog, I’ve talked about albums that have political significance, albums that are culturally important, albums that symbolise a musical movement or that rebel against the norm, albums that represent musical styles that are very rarely heard, albums that can tell us something about the histories of certain musics or cultures or peoples or that can hint at the future of the same, albums that have a particularly intense emotional connection for me personally, or strongly associated with a beloved memory. Then there are albums that aren’t any of those things and that I chose for just being pure bangers.

Readers, today’s album is in that latter category.

The concept behind Oligarkh is a simple one and that simplicity is its strength. Samples of Russian and other ex-Soviet folk music, Orthodox chants, old TV shows and readings from classic literature and fairytales are all chopped up, flipped, turned inside-out and otherwise mangled before being added to deep bass, heavy beats and epic synthscapes and rounded off by a live kit drummer. Together, it becomes the dirtiest, most unholy combination of trap, dubstep, happy hardcore, techno, gabber and hip-hop, all with that rich seam of the land’s old musical traditions running through it. All it needs from you is to blast it as loud as you can and have your own Russian rave.

Every track here is 100% built for making you dance as heavy and as hard as possible in whatever movements take the fancy of your limbs, so it’s hard to pick out any particular highlights in that way. The most surprising for Anglophone listeners, though, would be ‘Devochki’, built around a sample of the Ukrainian song ‘Shchedryk’ – you’re more likely to know it as the ‘Carol of the Bells’. It may feel strange to listen to it as an all-year dancefloor filler, but I can guarantee that as soon as that bass drops any of those reservations will go right out of the window. And, looking it up, it turns out that ‘Shchedryk’ was originally written to be performed as a New Year’s Eve song, so there you go, it’s fate: if you need something to power up your New Year’s Eve party tonight, Oligarkh’s ‘Devochki’ is your secret weapon.

Oligarkh’s music isn’t necessarily too clever, but it definitely is big, as well as being boisterous and loud. It’s just a massive heap of messy fun and it comes with a side order of Russian folk, so what’s not to love? Music doesn’t need some deep or intellectual message or meaning. When you have that primal need for music to facilitate an arm-in-the-air bounce around whatever space you happen to inhabit at any given moment, that’s the meaning of Oligarkh.

363: I Eat the Sun and Drink the Rain, by Sven Helbig

Sven Helbig (Germany)
I Eat the Sun and Drink the Rain (2016)
10 tracks, 43 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Classical music has been used to complement and add melodic interest to electronic dance music since the latter genre’s beginnings – when you think of those epic, anthemic dance tracks, that classical sound is particularly strong, either from samples of big sweeping strings or the influence of the awe-inspiring impact of a huge symphony orchestra in full flight. The use of club music in classical styles, however, is explored much less often.

Composer Sven Helbig, in his work I Eat the Sun and Drink the Rain, brings electronics into his music in a way that complements the classical, rather than the other way around. The principle sound here is choral music, the voices contributed by the Vocalconsort Berlin. It’s a very old sound. The choir sing in reverential tones and the harmonies and counterpoint that are used are reminiscent of medieval music – mostly using wide open chords which occasionally drift into friction-filled dissonances with pleasing resolutions – but they do lean in subtly unorthodox directions now and again, showing the influence of modern art music and even jazz, but only in a way that benefits the overall atmosphere. Although Helbig himself wrote many of the texts that are sung throughout the work (in German), the sacred sound is made solid with the inclusion of the Kyrie and the Agnus Dei, both common elements of the sung Latin mass. The composition for choir alone is suitably beautiful, powerful and haunting.

So far, so classical. But Helbig’s work comes into its own with the use of live electronics, performed by the composer himself. The way he uses the electronic sounds is very similar to the way they’re used in house music, but the context in which they’re used gives those sounds a very different feel. He basically takes the exact opposite direction to club music: the beat is far from the main focus, to the degree that it is hardly present at all. Where a ‘beat’ is manifested, it’s a world away from four-to-the-floor kick and clap-snare; rather, it is a subdued, even shy, rhythm described by a crunchy synth hit of a similar quality to a bendir frame drum. Instead, the dance music makes itself heard in its texture the way its sounds and effects are layered up. A great example is in the track (or, in Helbig's terminology, ‘episode’) of ‘Kyrie’. The first sound heard is an electronic drone. The note provided by the drone stays consistent but its harmonic quality is ever-shifting. As the choir comes in with their overlapping lines, the drone seems to ‘pick up’ on the sound of their voices, and the reverb and delay effects fold those voices back into the drone so that it evolves throughout the piece. At points, it means that it is hard to distinguish whether you’re hearing human voice or synthesised tone.

This use of electronic sounds and influences from dance music in I Eat the Sun and Drink the Rain are so subtle that it seems strange to focus on, but it nevertheless defines the sound. Most of the time, the listener will probably be unaware of the impact of these elements – that’s the point, after all – but without them it would be such a completely different atmosphere, and probably one ‘lacking’ in some indiscernible way. To use any sonic element in such an all-important yet understated way is the sign of acute musical intelligence, and to marry classical and religious choral music with electronic dance music in such a way is absolutely fascinating and shows real, felt knowledge of both styles. If classical music has a raison d’être it must surely be to look into the past and future in equal measure – in this work, Sven Helbig captures that dual consciousness in the most satisfying way.

354: The Imagined Village, by the Imagined Village

The Imagined Village (United Kingdom)
The Imagined Village (2007)
11 tracks, 61 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Allll the way back at the beginning of this blog, in the very first entry, looking at Bellowhead’s Burlesque, I said that I’d be writing about the Imagined Village here at some point. Well, with only 12 days and 12 albums left to go, I’m finally getting around to it. No time like the present, right?

Alongside Bellowhead, the Imagined Village were the group to turn me on to English folk music. I can’t remember which one I’d listened to first, but they both hit me at roughly the same time, and I think that’s important. If I’d have heard one group doing interesting, exciting and different things with English folk music, maybe I would have been tempted to write it off as a one-time thing, the work of a few particularly talented musicians. When there’s two doing it – and making very different music from one another on top of that – that means there’s a movement happening. ‘Hmm,’ thought I, ‘maybe there’s something to this…’ thus leading me down a years-deep rabbit hole of scratchy field recordings, folk clubs in the upstairs rooms of pubs, fragile tomes of folklore and many great albums and gigs from the English folk scene.

Really, if you ever wanted to draw me into English folk music, you could barely come up with a formula as compelling as the Imagined Village. The idea was to use the music of the past to conceive of how the folk tradition may more accurately reflect the England of the 21st century. All the repertoire here is made up of traditional English songs and tunes or else directly inspired by them, and the musicians involved include such folk royalty as Martin and Eliza Carthy, Chris Wood and the Coppers but also big names from other fields such as Paul Weller, Benjamin Zephaniah, Billy Bragg, Sheila Chandra, the Afro Celt Sound System and Transglobal Underground.

It’s one of those projects where you look at the line-up with all its suitably impressive names and go ‘…can it actually work, though?’ Well, that’s an emphatic YES from me. You don’t have to listen to many of the tracks from here to realise it. Take ‘Tam Lyn Retold’, in which Benjamin Zephaniah updates the age-old story of a whirlwind romance, unexpected pregnancy and an epic battle between elf and fairy into one of clubbing, asylum seeking and the cruelties of the UK’s immigration system. He recites this genius spin on the old folktale in a dubwise fashion, backed by the beats and bass of Transglobal Underground, the sitar of Sheema Mukherjee and the fiddle and vocals of Eliza Carthy. That’s probably my favourite of the bunch, but they’re all like that, fresh takes that put the old songs in a different light while an astounding cast create magic around it.

By the time you read this in a week or so (or maybe years in the future, I don’t know), this won’t be news any more, but as I’m writing this, it’s the day that we’re coming to terms with the Conservatives’ massive re-election that keeps Boris Johnson as prime minister for another five years. It hurts, a lot; not just for me but for the millions whose lives will be negatively affected over the coming years. But I’m glad I get to write about the Imagined Village today, because this project, this group and this album are the opposite of Boris Johnson. The Imagined Village takes something that has been a valuable part of English culture for centuries and brings it more in line with the make-up of English culture today without dumbing down either side or losing anything in the process. The Imagined Village doesn’t hark back to a time long gone, but instead embraces all that is wonderful about multiculturalism, modernism and progressivism. Introducing dance beats and rock singers and dub poets and Indian sitars and dhols into English folk music doesn’t make it any less English – that is the England that I see around me and that I love. And it makes me love all these beautiful old traditions of England even more. Fuck Boris Johnson – I don’t live in his country. And I will strive to make my corner of this green and pleasant land a welcome home for all. This Imagined Village doesn’t deserve to return to the imagination.

347: Whirl-y-Waves, Volume 3: Sounds Imported, by Various Artists

Various Artists
Whirl-y-Waves, Volume 3: Sounds Imported (2005)
24 tracks, 155 minutes (2 CDs)
Stream and download via the Whirl-y-Gig website

The Whirl-y-Gig is a wonderful world of alternative dance music. A parallel dimension of love, light and epic bangers. Well, it is once a month. The Whirl-y-Gig is actually London’s longest running club night, and has been transforming spaces all over the city into pools of peace since 1981. Once upon a time, Whirl-y-Gig was a common fixture at festivals, including WOMAD, and now they have their own – the Whirl-y-Fayre, hosted in August every year in the Vale of Avalon. The décor is a beautiful mix of psychedelic fabrics, colours, flowers, trippy lights, lasers, UV, East African and South Asian patterns and abstract shapes. The smell is a mix of incense and euphoria (and a little weed). Everyone is welcome, and its wide-ranging audience reflects that. Elderly hippies dance with first-time clubbers and everyone feels the love. Until licensing laws got the better of it, it was even an all-ages affair, and the kids were made as welcome as anyone else. An hour before the end (at 6 or 7am), a huge parachute drops from the ceiling, the music turns chill-out and everyone comes down gently into the morning on a gently undulating flow of bliss. What a place.

And behind the decks, every time, for (at least) eight hours a go, is the legendary DJ Monkey Pilot. His sets are as eclectic as the people that attend: there’s techno, trance, drum’n’bass, dubstep, house… but for me, one of the most important roles of the Whirl-y-Gig was as a vibrant centre of the world dubtronica scene at its height in the 90s and early 2000s. So many of that scene came through the Whirl-y-Gig doors, whether as artists or as partygoers (usually both), and the club duly responded by becoming the place to hear the newest and the best in internationally-focused, dubwise electronica. The list is jaw-dropping. Transglobal Underground, Loop Guru, Dreadzone, the State of Bengal, Kamel Nitrate, the Kumba Mela Experiment, Banco de Gaia, MoMo, Zion Train, System 7…I could go on and on. Two of the albums we’ve already covered on this blog even have tracks named after the club – Dr Didg’s Serotonality and Afro Celt Sound System’s Volume 1: Sound Magic – such is its influence.

Which brings us to this album. It’s the last of three compilations in the Whirl-y-Waves series, and it’s basically just a little bit of Whirl-y-Gig that you can make in your very own home. It’s two CD-length mixes by Monkey Pilot himself built up of all solid Whirl-y-classics. The first CD is full-on dancing hard at midnight music; the second takes a more chill-out approach, still with beats, but appropriate for those early morning still-awake peace-outs. Parachute music, in other words. Each of the three Whirl-y-Waves mixes are essential in my opinion, but I went for this third volume purely because of those first four tracks: ‘King of the Sound and Blues’ by Zion Train, ‘Yellow and Black Taxi Cab’ by Transglobal Underground, ‘Tandoori Shakeaway’ by Kamel Nitrate and ‘Ararim (Friends, Family and Lovers Remix)’ by Oojami. To start an album that way is simply obscene – that’s over 20 minutes of just some of the best world dubtronica imaginable. And after that, the vibe just continues.

The Whirl-y-Gig is some proper utopian shit, and if the world were more like it is inside those walls, it would be a happier, and certainly dancier, place. But life can’t be a Whirl-y-Gig all the time, so for the rest of it, this album can help. Light that incense, flick those lights and sail across those Whirl-y-Waves into a better place…

338: Targ, by Bargou 08

Bargou 08 (Tunisia)
Targ (2017)
9 tracks, 43 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The past few years have been a really exciting time for new directions in Tunisian music. I’ve already covered the ecstatic religious Afro-Tunisian industrial noise group Ifriqiyya Électrique and the pan-Maghreb bass music from Tunisian producer AMMAR 808, and today’s album is another one that is preserving one of the country’s little-known traditions by engaging it in a new way.

Bargou 08 was put together by Nidhal Yahyaoui, who grew up in Tunisia’s Bargou valley in the mountains of the country’s north-west. The people of the valley had created their own unique musical culture that had never gotten out into the rest of Tunisia, let alone abroad, but was starting to become lost. So, in the great tradition of the song collector, Yahyaoui began learning and recording the music from the valley, the music of all walks of life, to make sure a record of these traditions persisted. Then he decided to take it to the world, and for that, he brought in the help of Sofyann Ben Youssef – also known as the aforementioned AMMAR 808.

Together, they worked on arrangements of the folk pieces, bringing in musicians from the valley with those from outside it, they created a sound that is intensely of its place but cosmopolitan too. Ben Youssef’s synths and the drum kit of Benjamin Chaval put Targ undeniably within the 21st century and turn the tracks into banging floor-fillers, but they’re also somehow subtle; the architecture of these instruments working in complete complement with the traditional instruments of Bargou. The rasping gasbah flute and the astringent sound of the zokra shawm are paired with grinding sawtooth synths and the booming, distorted resonances of the bendir frame drum is enhanced with the pounding beats and cymbals of the drum kit and the fluid synth bass. The arrangements, too, make the best of both worlds, with the melodies and accompaniment entirely based on traditional songs, but still ramping up and occasionally dropping out in anticipation of a hearty bass drop, conducted by Yahyaoui’s passionate and subtle vocals, wrenching these beautiful songs from deep in his soul, gifted from his ancestors, while picking out lines on the wtar lute.

As far as I know, Bargou 08, as a project and a band, is on indefinite hiatus, but even if one album is all we get, Targ is an incredible achievement. It’s a shining example of how to keep traditional and endangered music alive without preserving it like a museum piece or patronising its musicians by keeping it chained to the past. Bargou 08 treat the music of the Bargou valley with the utmost respect while understanding its potential within the worlds of electronic and dance music, bringing these elements to the songs without taking any of the meaning or sound or energy away from their traditional forms. Nothing is destroyed, only built upon, and it’s magnificent. It’s a great album of cross-cultural collaboration done exactly right, and yet another brilliant, exciting and refreshing sound to come out of Tunisia in just the past handful of years. That country has so much to offer this world of music, and I can’t wait to hear what’s coming next.

334: Cool Spring, by David Rothenberg, Bernhard Wöstheinrich and Jay Nicholas

David Rothenberg, Bernhard Wöstheinrich and Jay Nicholas (USA/Germany)
Cool Spring (2016)
5 tracks, 51 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

David Rothenberg’s music challenges the accepted – or, rather, assumed – definitions of what music is or can be. In fact, he goes further and adds questions about who or what musicians are or can be. Big themes, then. You can see why Rothenberg is not just an accomplished musician but a professor of philosophy at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Using his clarinets, a sharp mind for jazz and improvisatory music and, most importantly, an attentive and unfaltering ear, Rothenberg has plumbed new depths in research into non-human music. Over the past 15 years, he has released books, films, articles and albums about the music inherent in the lives of insects, marine mammals and birds, including creating majesterial, uncanny and ultimately ephemeral collaborations between himself and the animals, performing together on equal footings. I have been lucky enough to witness several performances by Rothenberg; by far the most memorable have been several occasions, from late night to early morning, where he created stunning improvised music with nightingales in the parks of Berlin, some of which have been captured in the recent album Nightingale Cities and film Nightingales in Berlin.

That was somewhat of a diversion. In Cool Spring, Rothenberg’s collaborators are a pair of sapient hominids like himself, electronicist Bernhard Wöstheinrich and bassist Jay Nicholas. The music is deep and intense while still managing to be relaxing in its own way; it’s chill-out that relieves parts of your mind and fully engages others. It does this as a combination of ambience, free jazz, broken downtempo beats, avant-garde, environmental sounds, spacey electronica and even hints at styles as varied as dubstep, folksong, classical. It’s surely art music in every sense of the term.

But even though this album is inescapably humanly organised sound, Rothenberg’s adventures into the sonics and songs of the animal kingdom are all over it. The most direct evidence is in some of Wöstheinrich’s samples of birds and insects, but the way Rothenberg approaches the clarinet, in his phrasing and his melodiousness, the way his lines flit and flirt with each other, obeying their own rhythmic rules but never clashing with the rest of the created aural environment. The whole flow of the pieces on this album, the shapes they trace and the stories their developments tell, is impacted by the natural world around us.

In all of his work, with humans or other animals, David Rothenberg creates in harmony with the sounds of our living planet, rather than operating above it, and is always compelling while he does it, be it in the medium of music, film or words.

331: Now, by Electro Bamako

Electro Bamako (Mali/France)
Now (2015)
12 tracks, 50 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

I opened my review of Now by Electro Bamako in the dearly departed fRoots Magazine with ‘Phwoar! Now this is an album,’ and that much really cannot be disputed (although you’re welcome to try).

The premise is simple: it’s wassoulou music from the streets of Bamako, represented here by the voice and kamelengoni harp, meets underground club music, courtesy of Damien Traini and Marc Minell from France. As a fusion, this one ain’t big and ain’t clever. It doesn’t break any major boundaries, and nothing about it particularly leaps out as a surprising, first-of-its-kind, turn up for the books. When you go into this album, you know what you’re going to get, even right down to the band’s name.

But it sure is funky. Music doesn’t have to innovate wildly at every turn to still be a bloody good time, and I feel like this album exemplifies that. Maybe the artists involved wouldn’t necessarily agree with me, and maybe they’d be put out at that assessment, but a good album is a good album, and Now is. It does everything right. Every groove it layers up is interesting and full of vibe, the Malian element is pronounced and treated with dignity while still chopping it and changing it to suit the transcontinental context, and it has beats for days. If you got rid of the three superfluous ‘radio edit’ versions at the end (the only thing I can fault of the album), it’s also a tight 40 minutes – just long enough for a satisfying time without dragging.

Now won’t create a new futuristic way of telling the time, but it’s definitely an album you can set your watch by. This is one to enjoy with no complications and no hesitations. And, after all, isn’t that what we all want from our music listening experiences, most of the time?

329: Halalwood, by U-Cef

U-Cef (Morocco/United Kingdom)
Halalwood (2008)
10 tracks, 59 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Having spent portions of his life in Rabat (his hometown), New York and London, producer and DJ U-Cef absorbed the sounds of all three, and his music is a testament to the world-meeting potential of both Moroccan and club music.

Halalwood, U-Cef’s second album, is littered with guests, and every track is credited as ‘U-Cef feat.’ up to three musicians at a time, the only exception being ‘Ya Rayah’, his remix of the Rachid Taha recording. But it doesn’t sound cluttered as you might expect. U-Cef’s production binds it together so well that the first two tracks can be as different as a downtempo techno-trance take with darbuka and synths imitating oud and ney (with the help of Steve Hillage’s Mirror System) followed by hip-hop metal based around the deep roots Gnawa of Said Damir with Bizmatik on raps, and they flow together as smoothly as anything. The whole album goes along this way, with contributions from artists as diverse as Natacha Atlas, Damon Albarn, UK Apache and Dar Gnawa.

This is a great album to not think too closely about and instead let the music give your body an education on Moroccan music of all styles and club music of all flavours. When it works, it works and sometimes that’s all that it needs – Halalwood works through 15 guest musicians and one producer who knows each of the styles at play through first-hand connection to bring it all to the dancefloor as one united sound.

319: London Zulu, by Doreen Thobekile

Doreen Thobekile (South Africa)
London Zulu (2005)
9 tracks, 50 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

This album is London Zulu, and so was Doreen Thobekile. She worked with many artists of all different styles while living in London since the 1970s, all while keeping her Zulu roots very much alive. This was her debut solo album, and she made it aged 60.

In many ways you could think of this as a Transglobal Underground album: Tim Whelan and Hamid Mantu provide the production, most of the musical backing and Sheema Mukherjee gets a couple of guest slots on sitar and bass too. The approach is very much TGU-like and fans of that outfit will of course love this one as well.

But that is not to diminish Doreen’s all-important place on the album at all. The whole thing really does revolve around her. As well as her striking vocals, she also plays the concertina, mouth harp, musical bow and mbira, and the tracks are just as often based around the elements of maskandi or mbaqanga as they are electronica. It’s actually super interesting to hear how Doreen works with TGU: where the group’s music travels to every cultural corner of the world without stopping, Doreen’s influence takes that adventurousness but focuses it like a magnifying glass, concentrating it specifically to work for her own style.

I need to make a quick diversion here to talk about one particular highlight of this album. The track ‘Umhlahlo’ has at its foundations a short sample of Ravel’s ‘String Quartet in F major’, and it’s one the funkiest uses of classical music that I can think of – it’s tied in first place with Busdriver’s ‘Imaginary Places’ with its use of Bach’s ‘Badinerie’. So if you’re in a hurry and you need to get a feel for the album in one song, now you know where to turn.

London Zulu – in its resulting sound as well as its perfectly succinct title and powerful cover art – really reflects who Doreen was: deeply cosmopolitan, unmistakably South African and always both at all times. It’s heavy at times and a joyous party throughout. Doreen left us in 2010 but the spirit and musical philosophy of London Zulu continues in the work of her daughter, Ingrid Webster, who performs this music and more almost every month in London, proving that it’s far more important than just a funky record – it’s a legacy.

304: Rûwâhîne, by Ifriqiyya Électrique

Ifriqiyya Électrique (Tunisia/France/Italy)
Rûwâhîne (2017)
9 tracks, 44 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Ifriqiyya Électrique are responsible for one of the most intense musical experiences I've ever had – twice. This record – their debut – gives a good idea of the sound of their music, but it cannot convey the sheer power of its live performance.

The Banga are black Africans, descendants of West African slaves, who live in the Djerid desert in the south of Tunisia. They are a Sufi community, and as such they use their music as worship, reaching out to Sufi saints and the spirits of their ancestors in large-scale healing ceremonies, where initiates fall into ecstatic trance, vehicles for the unknowable forces.

Ifriqiyya Électrique is a collaboration between four Banga musicians and Italian-French industrial noise duo Putan Club, with additional electronics from Pierpaolo Leo and extensive samples from on-the-ground recordings of the rûwâhîne (spirit) ceremony. On the face of it, these collaborators may seem to have very little in common, but their musical aesthetics align in wonderful ways. Both use sound to break the brain. Banga music and industrial noise are both used to confuse the ears, to detach the listeners from mundane reality and occupy the entirety of body and cranium.

Together, they create an overwhelming wall of noise. Clattering krakebs, wildly distorted bass, pounding Tunisian tabla barrel drums and naghara kettle drums, smashing cymbals, anguished massed cries of religious utterances, wailing electric guitar, garbled synthesised sound, low-pitched rhythmic chanting and authentic sounds of late-night ceremonial hubbub. All of it combines to create something terrifying, exhilarating, raw and passionate. The intensity comes in waves – sometimes the noise is all encompassing, but at others it is smouldering, tension building and just as captivating, and both modes work to increase the impact of the other.

In live performance it is ear splitting. In the dark, shoulder-to-shoulder with other humans, moving together, sweating together, it becomes an assault of simultaneous sensory deprivation and sensory overload. The only way the feeling could be more acute is if it were conducted in the ceremony’s rightful location, in the deserts and tiny huts, surrounded by candles and in air suffused with many incenses, teas and highly-spiced food.

You won’t get that from this album, but you will get a flavour of it. Play it as loud as possible, turn off the lights, turn up the central heating and bring your neighbours around and you’ll get closer. But, if you can, experience Ifriqiyya Électrique in the flesh. There’s nothing quite like it, and you may never feel quite the same again.

297: Leftism, by Leftfield

Leftfield (United Kingdom)
Leftism (1995)
11 tracks, 70 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Leftism by Leftfield is one of the quintessential albums in house music, and one of the first to make a lasting impact as an album in its own right (as opposed to particular songs contained within).

A big reason for that is that it was one of the first to offer something that a single – up until then the standard currency in house music – couldn’t do, no matter how banging it was. Leftism took listeners on a voyage of discovery. Rather than just having a beginning-middle-end, fun dance around before moving onto the next track by the next artist, this album takes you to many places and headspaces, each flowing smoothly into the next like scenery outside a train window.

As well as refiguring the place of the long-playing album in electronic music, Leftism also helped to change ideas of what house music could actually be. Throughout the journey, the tracks roll through deep trance, ambient music, trip-hop and dubwise grooves along with a whole array of house styles, and samples and influences range from as far as Brazil, Bulgaria, India, Jamaica and West Africa.

It’s kind of amazing that when Leftfield first made this album, they weren’t happy with the results, feeling that it didn’t gel at all. I guess working on something for so long (some of the tracks had been in production for years) does give you a certain tunnel-vision, and it’s lucky that they decided to go ahead and release it anyway. Even though it was their very first album, it became their defining work. When I saw Leftfield live for the first time last year, it was Leftism that they played, beginning to end and much expanded, but it was a template that still drew the crowds in their thousands.

It’s rare that one album changes the course of music, but Leftism definitely did that, and electronic dance music of all styles has benefited from its legacy. Sounds just as fresh and just as get-up-and-danciful today, too.

293: £00T, by Filastine

Filastine (USA/Indonesia/Japan)
£00T (2012)
13 tracks, 46 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Raised in the US and living with his body in Barcelona and his headspace in the sounds and smells of the world’s every corner, sound artist and producer Filastine creates intelligent music that is as nourishing for the brain as it is for the limbs. £00T is an album based on doom-laden, glitched-out and dirty dubstep, techno and dub, and suffused with all sorts from Javanese gamelan, cumbia, Arabic string orchestras, Thai music, Gnawa and found sounds, with valuable contributions from alternative hip-hop artists Nova (from Indonesia) and ECD (from Japan).

Filastine and his collaborators use their music to get messages across – anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, environmentalist and pan-globalist themes are all explored through lyrics, music and sound collage. Recording this album across six countries and using samples from even more, the understanding and respect that Filastine has for these many different styles and musicians allows him to patch together a work of rich and inhabited soundscapes that remain entirely uncluttered. The musical cultures that are used together in these pieces complement rather than contradict, strengthening the core message of strength in diversity and power in numbers.

Despite a menacing atmosphere and political bent, however, there is a sense of fun about it all. This is not po-faced music. This album is worldwide rave, after all; you can’t commit to such a party if you’re going to be deathly serious about it all the time. Being able to keep so many influences and important topics afloat in music that has a suitably weighty tone while still making it a proper blast to listen to marks Filastine out as an incredibly talented producer. This is one name we should be hearing about more often – spread the word!

282: Maghreb United, by AMMAR 808

AMMAR 808 (Tunisia/Algeria/Morocco)
Maghreb United (2018)
10 tracks, 36 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Together with the last two entries, this week has become a trio of modernised North African sounds, each putting their own unique stamp on the traditions. AMMAR 808 goes probably the most left-field of them all.

AMMAR 808 is Sofyann Ben Youssef, Tunisian producer and synth player and the owner of an incredibly wide range of musical expertise: jazz, metal, rock, Tuareg music, classical music of Arabic, Western and Indian flavours and all sorts of electronica – they’re all in Ben Youssef’s wheelhouse, and they all go towards the headspace that flowers into his work as AMMAR 808.

Maghreb United is Ben Youssef’s first album under this particular moniker, inspired by the upheaval of political systems and societies in the Maghrebi countries – Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco – over the past decade. In this period of revolution and subsequent rebuilding, people are looking to radically different ways of doing things, and with Maghreb United, Ben Youssef takes it to the extreme, creating a musical sci-fi that is indelibly rooted in the region’s musical styles. To create this style of ‘Maghrebi bass,’ he enlisted three singers from different spheres across the region, each adding their own sound and style: Cheb Hassen Tej, a specialist in Targ music from Tunisia; Sofiane Saidi, Algeria’s star of nu-rai; and Medhi Nassouli, a Gnawa musician who also plays the guimbri lute, from Morocco; also involved on several tracks is Tunisian gasba (flute) and zokra (bagpipes) player Lassad Boughalmi.

These musicians all gave their own musical perspectives on each of their respective styles (all but one of the tracks on the album are derived from traditional songs), and from them, together with a studioful of synthesisers, drum machines (especially the fabled Roland TR-808) and a fair few extra samples, Ben Youssef juggles all these influences together to create the new traditional music of the pan-Maghrebi space colony. This is deep bass and dark techno as if they were traditional music, evolving in the urban metropolises and arid deserts over a thousand years or more. Ben Youssef’s personal connection to these styles means that his application of electronica is in perfect harmony with their original musical intentions, while creating music that reaches beyond club banger. The scale is so epic as to render the dancefloor irrelevant – it will hit you where you stand, take you out of your mind and throw you into a world of booming trance, making your limbs move and emptying your brain of all but that most essential reverberating sound.

This is Afrofuturism, North Africa style: a utopian vision of a Maghreb post-revolution, post-nation-state, and definitely not Earthbound. In an exciting time for Maghrebi music in general, AMMAR 808 is a game changer. Maghreb United is just the beginning. Ben Youssef is currently recording album #2, with Tamil musicians – this space journey is set to take a different course. I can’t wait.

279: Volume I, by Commodo Gantz Kahn

Commodo Gantz Kahn (United Kingdom/Turkey)
Volume I (2015)
6 tracks, 24 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The producers Commodo, Gantz and Kahn are three of dubstep’s biggest names of the past decade, and Volume I, their first three-way collaboration, was always going to be a release with expectation on its back – this was the biggest supergroup the scene could have hoped for.

Now, you see, I’ve just typed that last sentence, in the full knowledge that I have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s the vibe that I get from reading about the release, anyway, but I have to say I’m not as up on the comings and goings of dubstep as I’d like to be. And I would like to be. When I listen to good dubstep it hits me hard and makes me wish I’d been totally immersed in the scene since its late 90s inception. What I lack in the intimate knowledge and vocabulary of dubstep, I make up for in just thinking ‘oh my god this is so sick!’ at the top of my mind-voice when I hear it. I know what I like, and Volume I is exactly that.

This album is an amazing journey of sound and it doesn’t even clock in at half-an-hour. There’s no doubting the dubsteppedness here – the pulse is slow, the producers use of layered delays and reverb are enough to rival the classic Jamaican studios and the bass is suitably cavity-worrying – but there’s also a refreshing lack of cliché at work. For starters, they employ hardly any of that stereotypical dubstep wobble-bass. This isn’t party music, either. No happy-go-lucky, carefree dance party anyway. The music here is dark, intense and menacing. You’ll be dancing to it, but you’ll do it with a moody expression on your face.

What it does have is a very strong Middle Eastern feel. Although Istanbul native Gantz has the most obvious connection, each of the producers had worked sounds from across the region into their work before (he typed, in the full knowledge that he had no idea what he was talking about), but for this album, it forms the basis of each composition. Synths that echo the qanun zither or ney reed flute; samples of Turkish singing and sweeping Egyptian string orchestras warped and distorted into unsettlingly slow melodies and ominous drones; electronic and affected beats undergird rhythmic flourishes from darbuka (goblet drum) and riqq (tambourine); mountains of minor seconds, minor sevenths and major thirds that turn it all into an otherworldly hijaz – the Middle East is there in every element, and they fit so comfortably within the dubstep milieu that I’m astounded that there isn’t already a huge scene devoted to just this fusion.*

Volume I is the perfect soundtrack to watching a storm roll in from the horizon on a warm day, seeing the sheets of rain and feeling the peels of thunder in your belly. I know, because it was the album on the speakers while me and my mates hurriedly packed down our barbecue while casting worried glances at the churning sky in the distance getting closer and closer. Commodo, Gantz and Kahn’s beats and bass gave it all a suitably apocalyptic edge and definitely made us all feel a little like we were in a cool thriller film.

Even though I know so little about the dubstep scene, I’m glad that I have the wits to recognise a real musical event when I hear one, and this wonderful album certainly lives up to the reputations of its three big-name producers. It’s just a shame it’s so short. No Volume II seems to be out there yet, but I check diligently. Until then, turn off the lights, turn up the bass and fall into another world – for 24 minutes.


* If there is, why didn’t you tell me? I want to be invited to your parties!

273: Club Meets Dub, Vol. 2, by Various Artists

Various Artists
Club Meets Dub, Vol. 2 (1996)
12 tracks, 72 minutes
YouTube playlist

This is what happens when dub…meets the club. It’s the purest form of what I insist on calling dubtronica. There’s all sorts of club music represented on this compilation, with trance, house and techno at the top of the list, all of it approached with a dubwise frame-of-mind. You can even hear the roots from which styles such as dubstep evolved. Tracks are included from big names such as Zion Train, Dreadzone and Iration Steppas, as well as a bunch of previously unreleased tracks from lesser-known wonders.

Dub usually lends itself well to the ambient side of electronic music, but this is no chill-out session: this is UV sculptures, psychedelic Celtic-/Indian-inspired artwork, laser shows and strobe lighting and going bonkers at 3am music. The tracks are also well-mixed by Quark of Acid Rockers, meaning that if you want a banging club night in your own living room, all you need is some right chunky speakers and Club Meets Dub. Bonus points if you get someone to flick the lights on and off in time with the music. Sorted.

245: Seize the Time, by Fun^da^Mental

Fun^da^Mental (United Kingdom/Pakistan)
Seize the Time (1994)
14 tracks, 84 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

From the very beginning of the album, you know Seize the Time is not going to be a comfortable listen. To start the first track of your debut album with a truly disgusting and horrific 30-second-long answer-machine message from a cockney racist, full of P-words, N-words and C-words and ending in a chilling death threat. It’s a really affective opener, shocking, and it’s an inspired way to start the album. Because it shouldn’t be a comfortable listen; these are not comfortable topics.

And that’s the way the album continues. I usually find ‘unapologetic’ a weird word to be applied to artists going against the mainstream – why should they ever be ‘apologetic’ in the first place? – but I think it’s quite well-placed for Fun^da^Mental, and Aki Nawaz in particular. They are not here to make polite requests; they’re not here to give you pleasant, comfortably unfamiliar Asian music to boost your progressive cred. They’re not going to sit around and allow you to put them in the world music box, or the Asian underground box, or any box at all. They’re difficult, and fuck you for thinking your opinion matters.

The uncompromising lyrics talk about what it was like to live life while being young, Asian, British and Muslim in the early 1990s without pulling any of the punches, and they still – sadly, angrily – hold too much weight even 25 years later. They’re all held together by a supreme musical tapestry that similarly reflects the soundscape of Britain for young British-Asians: it’s very much in the old school hip-hop mould, but the instrumentals are full of quotes and inspirations from Bollywood, bhangra, South Asian classical music and other folk music, as well as jungle, dub, electronica and lots of punk in both sound and attitude. There’s also a liberal dousing of spoken samples, from the inspirational (Malcolm X) to the rage-inducing (predictably-Tory MP Alan Clark). The group’s place in the fledgling world dubtronica scene is felt with the inclusion of Transglobal Underground’s Tim Whelan, Neil Sparkes and Nick Page.

It’s always maddening when art made through injustice retains its meaning with very little change over such a long period of time. The great thing about music, though, is that it helps – awareness is heightened, people get angry and the groundswell continues. Seize the Time is just as important to listen to now as it was in 1994 – revisit it if you’ve not for a while, and listen and learn if you’ve never experienced. Get furious. We need that now.

237: Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks, by Various Artists

Various Artists
Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks (2011)
28 tracks, 98 minutes
Download in full from OverClocked ReMix ∙ Soundcloud

When I started to set out writing about this album, my first thought was ‘this is probably the most embarrassing album on the whole list.’ But really, that's bullshit. You should never be embarrassed to like any music at all – unless it is music that oppresses others by its existence, in which case it belongs in the sea. But as a general rule, the whole concept of ‘guilty pleasures’ in music just shouldn’t be a thing. If you derive enjoyment, pleasure or meaning from it, in whatever form that may take, and it doesn’t hurt anyone, then it does its job as art, and is therefore good. And if I derive enjoyment, pleasure or meaning from it, then it is Good, and warrants its place on this blog. So bearing that in mind, I’m going to resolutely try to be entirely unashamed of this pick, while secretly hoping that no-one is laughing at how much of a nerd I am.

What is it then? It’s music from the Pokémon games for the various Nintendo handheld systems from the Gameboy to the DS. The tracks featured here are mostly from the first two generations of Pokémon games, whose music was based on sounds that we now think of as chiptune. You know the sort – bleepy and bloopy but with a surprising range of timbre, percussion that was just different types of white noise, and very short compositions that looped around and around depending on which in-game area you found yourself in at the time. The music of the Pokémon series was really good considering its limited resources, and could sound idyllic like a small rural village, ancient like a traditional Japanese temple, funky and action-packed for fight sequences or just one of the creepiest pieces of music ever composed.

BUT that isn’t what we’re listening to today. Not quite. Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks is an album made by the OverClocked ReMix community. OverClocked ReMix is a fun little corner of the internet where people work with video game music of all kinds and put their own spin on things. This includes remixing, remaking and reorchestrating video game music in every conceivable style, as well as making music inspired by certain games or pieces. Everything on OC ReMix is vetted before it gets posted – so the quality is usually very good – and everything is available for streaming and downloading entirely for free. Occasionally they release ‘albums’ of music based on a specific theme or game, and that’s where Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks comes from.

The way the OC ReMix project works means that the music on Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks is incredibly varied. Some tracks are obviously better than others, but the project’s vetting and compilation process means there’s very few duds in this whole set, and when the tracks are good, they’re really good. Super inventive too. There’s standard chiptune-y type remixes, but there’s also full metal rescores, piano covers, even R’n’B sort of things and original songs. But my absolute favourite has to be the remix of ‘Team Rocket Hideout’ from the original games, Pokémon Red, Blue & Yellow. This is what the original track sounds like. And this is what the remix, ‘TEEM.ROKIT’ by producer Tweex, sounds like:

How great is that?! That’s some proper industrial techno and psytrance vibes right there. I would not be embarrassed to drop it during a DJ set as long as the mood felt right. There’s dirty dub bits in there too. And I love that it still stays remarkably true to its source material – it has a lot of the same bleep-bloop atmosphere and obviously bases itself almost completely around the same melodies and countermelodies of the original, but it just ramps it up and up to the next level. It sounds (appropriately) like an evolved version of the 1996 original, and the vibe it creates is so perfect for the in-game context that I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this is exactly what composer Junichi Masuda would have had in mind if the system at the time would have allowed.

It just brings me back to a thing I seem to say way too often and that you’re probably bored of: video game music is a really untapped source of brilliant compositions, programming and ideas that are very rarely heard out of context, but that really do deserve a wider listener base than just the people that happen to play those specific games. So here’s me doing my own bit to get a wider audience, this time through the great work of the OC ReMix project. Maybe I’m still slightly embarrassed to be writing about Pokémon music on my (mostly) serious blog about the wonders of music from every bit of the world…but it’s good music, so who am I to argue?

201: Love Songs, Vol. 2, by Yishak Banjaw

Yishak Banjaw (Ethiopia)
Love Songs, Vol. 2 (1986/2016)
8 tracks, 46 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ iTunes

When I first heard this it blew my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I certainly couldn’t stop telling people about it, and playing it to anyone foolish enough to stand still next to me for enough time for me to get me iPod out. I’d listened to a lot of Ethiopian music before – and even been there myself – so when I was asked to review another Ethiopian album (one called Love Songs, no less), I thought I knew what was coming. Obviously I did not.

Yishak Banjaw’s music is traditionally Ethiopian in its scales, its rhythms and its composition. The only thing he really does differently is play it all on a Casio PT keyboard with enthusiastic use of all the various synth options and some programmed beats. And it seems to change it completely. There are similarities with Charanjit Singh’s 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat in terms of the story of how the records came to be and the way they were made, but whereas the Indian record came out sounding like acid house five years before that even became a thing, Banjaw’s music gives me realｖａｐｏｒｗａｖｅtingles.

Everything about this record sounds a little off-kilter. It’s all ever-so-slightly warped and washed out, and there’s a hiss from the tape transfer, which all lend a faintly unsettling vibe to it in a way that is hard to pinpoint. As all the synths swirl together in those unmistakably Ethiopian shapes while using the alien-sounding timbres, your mind gets dragged along into the maelstrom, having the same effect as the hypnotist’s spiral.

I really love this album and its retro vibes, but what’s really exciting is that I just found out he’s still making music and releasing albums as late as 2017, and they’ve not stopped being any less enigmatically cool as his work from the 80s. Check this shit out. The synths are more modern, the sound is a little cleaner and the sensibility is slightly more to the pop side of things, but it’s so good to hear that he’s still making his unique music three decades later. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some more Ｅｔｈｉｏｐｉａｎｗａｖｅ to catch up on…

171: Super Parquet, by Super Parquet

Super Parquet (France)
Super Parquet (2015)
4 tracks, 43 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Featuring albums by Dub FX and Dr Didg in the past couple days, we’ve been in a world of loops, and now that we’re with Super Parquet, that isn’t going to change just yet. When I interviewed the band back in 2017 for an article (which you can read at my other blog), they were totally clear on what was the most important thing about their music when they just kept saying “drones and loops” over and over, in a quite nice verbal representation of what they do.

In a sentence, Super Parquet’s music is a marrying of folk dance music form the Auvergne region of France with electronica, techno and musique concrète, but such a description gives only a small hint as to what the group actually sound like. They’re not very easy to listen to; their instruments all have harsh tones, from the cabrette bagpipes, banjo and the boîte à bourdon (the ‘bumblebee box,’ sort of a cross between a hurdy-gurdy and a shruti box) to the overdistorted synthesisers and the super-crunchy drum machines. They also revel in disturbing sounds, dissonances are found and dwelled upon, without the musicians ever really feeling the need to resolve them. Throughout the entirety of the first track, a harsh, sawtooth synth drone plays, first in the bass registers but slowly sliding all the way upward towards mosquito levels, and hitting every single dissonance along the way. It’s uncomfortable and they love it.

The great thing about their sound is that it’s completely unrelenting. That’s the thing about drones and loops – they will go on forever until you tell them to stop…and this is a band that don’t like to stop. They will build and build for as long as they like, raising the tension and never really letting that drop come in the way you expect. That’s taken to the extreme in the final track of this set, ‘Bourrée à Solomagne’, which is 22 minutes of beautifully agonising build up before the tension is released right at the end.

This is music to overwhelm the senses. In that way, it’s quite like the ritual music of North African Sufis such as the Gnawa or Stambeli. The band have got the ears covered, but to get that full out-of-your-mind experience, there needs to be some element of disorientation. The only time I’ve seen them live was in a huge arena in Poland. Their performance was up to scratch, but the venue was just too spacious. I’d love to see them in a small, packed club, incredibly dark except for the dancing and strobing stage lights, with heavy, incense-tinged air. I reckon in that context, this music would be a trance-inducer to rival any religious ritual.

Super Parquet is the only material the band have released so far, and it is from four years ago. They seem to have gone fairly quiet in the last year or so, and I really hope that means that they’re busy focusing their attention to the studio, creating some brilliant new album. Fingers crossed, eh? But until they come out with that one, at least we have this one to be getting on with – it’s not bad!

UPDATE: I have been reliably informed that we will be getting some exciting new recordings by Super Parquet very soon, and a whole new album by the end of the year – score! So if you like what you hear from this album, keep an ear out for their new stuff. I can't wait!

104: I Like It Like That, by Various Artists

Various Artists (USA/Cuba)
I Like It Like That (2008)
28 tracks, 133 minutes (2 CDs)
Spotify • iTunes (both of these links are to the first disc – the remixes – only.)

It’s come up a few times that I’m a fan of the bonus remix – especially when it comes as a whole separate album (see Matisyahu, Mongrel) but this album is an exact opposite sort of thing. Here, the remixes are the main event.

The first disc is a set of remixes; a big bunch of producers were let loose on the back catalogue of Fania Records, the legendary record label that became the home of all the best salsa artists over the years. With some big names on the levers and pulleys, such as Gilles Peterson, Louis Vega, Quantic and Bugz in the Attic, salsa hits from the 1960s and 1970s are transformed for 21st century dance floors.

Because each track has its own remixer, there are lots of different styles and approaches on offer, from the subtle reworking of Roberto Roena’s ‘Take Five’ by Nicola Conte to the full-on blips-and-bloops fest of Gilles Peterson and Simbad’s remix of ‘Saona’ by Noro Morales. There’s good ones and less good – the two mentioned are among the best of the 14. But, being my usual contrarian self, it’s once again Disc 2 that I always gravitate towards with this one. This disc contains all the original tracks that got the remix treatment on the first one. Those tracks are a great document of the development of salsa music in the US, evolving out of the son and rumba brought by Cuban immigrants, mixing with other Caribbean styles from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and then with various jazz and soul styles in centres such as New York City and Miami.

None of the remixes are bad – some of them are great – but it does seem a little bit strange to me to be creating dance music from tracks that are already perfectly crafted for dancing in the first place. Even just as a sampler for classic Fania Records repertoire, I Like It Like That does a really good job. Treat the remixes as a nice bonus – it makes more sense that way.