Rise & Shine

Released in August 2019 in a limited edition of 250, Music With Soul Records' founder Alex Figueira's scorching 7" sold out in a jiffy and recently received a repress. This may not come as a surprise to those who've meanwhile given the two tracks a spin and thus revealed their undeniable dancefloor potential. Never mind the genre, the people love it and so do we. 

Side A opens up with a driving, funktified bassline, vicious, snaking grooves and superb drum [...]

Musically speaking, 2020 is off to a very good start, as we continue to browse and select extraordinary releases from around the world for your listening pleasure. Just last week, the well-respected Madrid-based label Vampisoul (from the Munster Records family, whom you may remember from our piece on Los Saicos' "Demolición") reissued "one of the most sought-after titles from the catalogue of Peruvian label MAG," aka Sonora Casino's album "[...]

Christopher Kirkley's Sahel Sounds imprint (Mdou Moctar, Les Filles de Illighadad, Ahmedou Ahmed Lowla) jumpstarts 2020 with its catchy new "Music from Saharan WhatsApp" series: "Every month, we'll be releasing an EP from a musical group in the Sahel. Every album will be recorded on a cellphone, and transmitted over WhatsApp, and uploaded to Bandcamp - where it will live for one month only. Available for pay as you want, 100% of the sales will go directly to [...]

Not too long ago, we made a surprise discovery at a Berlin independent vinyl market and decided to take the record home with us, if only for the beautiful, die-cut artwork and foldout sleeve. Let's just say that our initial hunch was instantly rewarded and the record remains among our prized possessions. Said album was the Afrodyssey Orchestra's "In the Land of Aou Tila", a seven-track experimental and instrumental advance towards the "remote banks of a West [...]

All good things come in fours, innit? Berlin-based Eck Echo imprint closed out 2019 with its second vinyl release "Cuatro Suyos", a DJ-friendly EP featuring four Peruvian artists on the move: "The 'Suyos' were the four regional divisions of the Peruvian society that ruled over a large portion of South America before their encounter with Europeans, which completely transformed history in 1532. You had the 'Collasuyo' or 'the region of the Llama' in the South [...]

While we're at it, here's another release from 2019 that we really felt, but didn't get around to covering. Put out on the wonderful Pingipung imprint (see also Anadol's "Uzun Havalar", Cosima's "Ploaia") back in October, "Auma" is a stunning collaborative project between the multi-talented Hamburg-based percussionist and producer Sven Kacirek – whom you may remember from his ear-opening "Kenya Sessions" (2011) – and Kenyan musician Olith Ratego, hailing [...]

Let us now travel back in time, metaphorically speaking of course. At the tail end of 2016, Analog Africa's Samy Ben Redjeb arrived in Somalia's capital city of Mogadishu and "began rifling through piles of cassettes and listening to reel-to-reel tapes in the dusty archives of Radio Mogadishu, looking for music that 'swam against the current'." It was there that he discovered a pile of unmarked recordings that apparently nobody had bothered to mess with. The [...]

While looking forward to all the new music of 2020, this 2019 release most definitely deserves a special mention: Budapest-born and Berlin-based keyboarder and producer Szabolcs Bognár, aka Àbáse, dropped his astonishing debut on Cosmic Compositions back in May and went on to make several 'best of' lists. And even though we overlooked the initial release, we are now looking to make things right, by making "Invocation" one of our first picks for the new [...]

We are back, alive and almost kicking. It's been some two weeks since our last post here, which we spent resting up, eating and enjoying some time-off with our loved ones. That being said, 2020 is well upon us, so here's wishing you a happy, healthy and peaceful new year. Let's see what this decade has in hold for us. 

To get things rolling, we decided to share this blaring prog pop six-tracker with you, released late last October on London-based experimental [...]

Following the release of their third album "Catastrophic Life", these past weeks have been positively hectic for our dear Jewish Monkeys. First, they embarked on a quick tour of Germany, the Czech Republic, France and Israel. Just ahead of their show at Paris' La Bellevilloise, French daily Libé/Libération wrote a short piece on them, which you can revisit here (if you are proficient in French). The article includes a charming quote by Omer Hershman, who [...]

It's winter time in the Western Hemisphere, which finds us reminiscing about that island life with a little help by ways of French imprint Heavenly Sweetness. A few weeks back, the label – home to Guts, Anthony Joseph, the Florian Pellissier Quintet and many more – released the first-ever anthology dedicated to the work of Gwo-Ka artist Erick Cosaque, as part of its Antilles Series. The release highlights Cosaque's most distinctive oeuvres from 1973-1995, [...]

Who would have guessed that Alpaca Mountain is an actual thing and if that doesn't sound too far fetched, who would have pointed to the Netherlands of all places? But then again, with YĪN YĪN nothing seems too far-fetched, now does it? Here we have a Dutch group bringing you a fresh, psychedelic blend of '60s and '70s Southeast Asian-inspired tunes, mixed with disco, funk, electronic music and the sorts.

Their story leads back to the summer of 2017, when Kees [...]