Tag:

Moodymann

Soul Machine

Posted on April 11, 2017 @ 10:43pm by Coqui

I recall wandering the vast corridors on an indoor mall only to find a record shop nestled in one of its murky corners. Two separate instances swell from the ocean of memory to overlap: the first was some time ago in the tropics of Camuy on the north side of Puerto Rico, while the second came more recently in the sun-baked heat of Palm Desert. 12" disco dubs in the mall's casual spaces, Jark Prongo records and Dimitri From Paris way back when and Ronnie Laws and Bowie's David Live nestled in the stacks. It brings to mind summer of '98 up in the Bay Area, nights at Mushroom Jazz and long afternoons on the pier. Beginnings at an errant house party, Chicago and The Bucketheads - Street sounds swirling though my mind - with the steaming percussion of Fela Kuti in the mix.

Cut adrift in the dog days after disco had died, in retrospect a golden age when the dancefloor was suffused with the deep dubbed-out flavor of island sounds. It turned out that you couldn't kill it after all, no matter how hard you tried, it lived on in the electroid boogie of D-Train's You're The One For Me and the tropical slow-burning post-disco mirage that had begun to take shape. Wild shapes permeated Larry Levan's lush sonics at The Paradise Garage, the gulf stream drift of Eddy Grant and Grace Jones setting the stage, with Compass Point and the All Stars fleshing it out into four dimensions. The masterful fourth world Juju Music of King Sunny Adé & His African Beats and Tony Allen's Afrobeat 2000 excursion rubbing shoulders with Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts launched it all into the outerrim.

Wally Badarou's shimmering synths flow through it all at low tide, from Echoes in 1985 through Jamie Principle and Larry Heard's early sides on into Bobby Konders' House Rhythms and beyond - the Nu Groove flavor (Here Comes That Sound Again). Scores of moody 12" records blur the lines between deep house, downbeat hip hop, rave and dub reggae, while a secluded path drops out into Bristol, stretching from Carlton to Massive Attack and a whole new decade on the rise.

The low-slung flavor of The Brothers Palmieri and Harlem River Drive flows just below the surface all along, and the sampladelia laid out by Marley Marl, Prince Paul and The Dust Brothers brings it back into the foreground, mirroring those earlier incursions of low-slung, sun-baked riddims in the era of the breakbeat. Countless groups and their records heed the call, filling out the shoes of Nuggets for the nineties. Perhaps the likes of B.A.D. and Neneh Cherry were the bridge between the twin poles, along with myriad other elements thrown into the blend (as is so often the case).

At any rate it's been there all the time, surfing below the surface like the Vertigo Steel out in Lakeside, representing all the discos that could have been. Multi-colored lights flash against mahogany brown, mirrorball spins in slow-motion to the throbbing pulse of Moroder's tronik disco. The skeletal strains of Morgan Geist's Moves EP and the psychedelic filter disco of Kenny Dixon Jr.'s Silentintroduction bridge the gulf of twenty-odd years, and the raw chicago sonix of Steve Poindexter and DJ Skull get down and dirty with a hard-edged magic all their own. Old Reese records like The Sound and Just Want Another Chance lay the bedrock, Tronik House's Smooth Groove and E-Dancer's The Human Bond too, while Todd Terry's blinding 12" slabs of noise are never far from the turntables.

On the road again in the space between dances, rolling low to the pavement in a little brown Dodge Colt and bumping the sounds of Beck's Deadweight, Scott Weiland's Jimmy Was A Stimulator and The Egyptian Lover's My Beat Goes Boom - 808 beats banging through the vehicle walls down into the steaming asphalt of Mission Gorge Rd. in the blazing heat. Modern Funk Beats soundclash featuring the blurred edges of If Mojo Was A.M. and Carl Craig's skewed take on hip hop. People Make The World Go Round. Nothing wrong with a little history in those grooves, passed down through the years and picking up 'nuff flavor along the way.

Between the proto-hip hop beats of The Meters and Chic's lush disco grooves lies a galaxy of sound; betwixt Gwen Guthrie's neon-spangled shapes and the dusted beats of Cypress Hill lies a lifetime. The blunted corners of those Soul Machine EPs seem to split the difference between the two, spooling out their various strands into a fatback beat before unfurling back again, out into the möbius of time... there's more to come when they inevitably return.

AG Memories: In The Heights

Posted on November 21, 2016 @ 7:20pm by Coqui

Picking up where we last left off, it was January of 2006. I found myself back in the Heights - living with my brother in a spot off El Cajon Blvd. - after a year spent living between Hillcrest and Balboa Park. The neighborhood was my kind of place, with a varied working class population crammed into a timeworn infrastructure that pre-dates the second world war. There was a public library a few blocks away and an excellent bar down the street called Shamrock's that played a selection of vintage rock (of the San Francisco variety) or block rocking hip hop and r&b, depending on the night.1 As Lamont Dozier might say, I was going back to my roots.

A couple of synchronous events had occurred just before the move that colored the next year or so. For one, I discovered Woebot's blog by way of his epochal list of The 100 Greatest Records Ever (via a timely link from Blissblog), which - more than any list I've ever found - seemed to align with my own musical priorities.2 It was uncanny! In truth, I'd only heard about half the records in the list, many of which were among my own favorites, and I'd heard of maybe another 30%; the rest represented a new frontier. It was clear that most of them would be right up my alley, and it was time to get hunting.

There were loads of cool revelations, like how often our favorite records by key artists overlapped: Kraftwerk's Computer World, Herbie Hancock's Sextant, The Velvet Underground's self-titled record, Neu! '75, Rhythim Is Rhythim's The Beginning and Captain Beefheart's Safe As Milk.3 His list also tuned me into the music of Scott Walker, Virgo, Edu Lobo, Brigitte Fontaine and Allen Toussaint, sounds that would come to mean the world to me. This isn't even taking into account the writing itself, which always came off witty and warm, coloring even his most esoteric excursions into the avant garde with a down-to-earth flavor. Without a doubt, discovering Woebot's scurrilous activities in sound remains one of the key moments in my musical life.

The other event that went down toward the end of my time at the 1808 was the near-simultaneous appearance of SA-RA and Hot Chip on the pop music landscape: two crews that were so very tailored to my tastes that it was almost comical. There's a piece I've been working up centered around their appearance (in light of the recent Hot Chip show), but for now suffice it to say came along at just the right time for where I was at in 2005.

Moodymann's recent Black Mahogani LP was fast overtaking Silentintroduction as my favorite record of his, and I'd been diving deeper into disco and garage than I'd ever been able to before. The output of labels like West End and Easy Street were in constant rotation, along with some other things that I'd been turned onto by one Kenny Dixon Jr.4 There were loads of greet electro-boogie records to be found for pennies (an ongoing obsession), things like Ray Parker Jr.'s Woman Out Of Control and One Way's Who's Foolin' Who.5 SA-RA dropping at this point only served to bring my various obsessions into focus.

Shamrock's had tuned me into a whole bunch of hip hop and r&b around this time, along with a number or choice rock selections. This the era when Comets On Fire dropped their masterstroke, Avatar, sending me into the past digging up a bunch of storied Head Heritage material like Pentagram, the first three Blue Öyster Cult LPs and early Grand Funk Railroad.6 Augmenting old favorites like the Groundhogs, MC5 and Blue Cheer (not to mention Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen, of which my brother was a huge fan), it provided the soundtrack to that summer.

Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California had just come out around this time, illuminating the context around the Laurel Canyon scene in L.A. (something I was a bit thin on). Nearly everything I already knew I'd found out by simply following the various lines of flight from The Byrds' orbit. Things like Gene Clark's solo records, The Flying Burrito Bros and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Which then connects to Buffalo Springfield and Neil Young/Crazy Horse, not to mention of the early solo albums by David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. That's how it works, this music thing, you go from node to node. Hotel California fleshed it all out, and provided the impetus to dig a little deeper.

All of which sets the stage for the second era of Radio AG, a period stretching from the dawn of 2006 to the close of 2007. I finally had a proper setup for my decks again (I'd had them laid out on the floor at the 1808). The mixes from 2006 were all coming to terms with the above tributaries, threading them into a matrix of groove-based music and taking the intended audience just a little deeper into the realm. There's that one mix where I played out the entirety of Halleluwah because it seemed like the right thing to do. The lions share of the year's mixes were from the summertime, and it shows. Lot's of high desert action, dry and dusty.

2007 was really the sea change. The winter mix was the first where I was really able to run wild with a consistent atmosphere, opening with Asmus Tietchens and closing with When The Levee Breaks. Everything had an glacial cast to it, from an unreleased Kelis tune to late-period Gentle Giant and early Simple Minds (a perennial favorite), it came on like an icy gust of wind. The next few mixes got deeper and deeper into beats, which is something I'd always meant to do. Drexciya, Scan 7 and Theo Parrish. The table was finally set.

At the end of the year, G.B. loaned me a stack of records with the stated mission to make a mix out of them. The result was Episode 012. It was a great experience, working with a bunch of records I'd never heard before (I was only familiar with something like five of them), and on the whole pleasantly disorienting (like one imagines deep sea diving to be). Especially eye-opening were the Sneakmove Minicomps and the records on Bully, which were great breakbeat-driven slabs of noise seemingly built atop live drums.7

The uniting thread throughout was a sort of post-rock, post-everything even, selection of sounds. There were beats that seemed to blur the lines between IDM and abstract hip hop, like the remix of Boom Bip by Boards Of Canada. There was James Figurine's cover of Other 99 (an old Big Audio Dynamite song that became the name of my original blog back in 2003) along with a G.B. original. It was a fascinating realm to spend some time in, resulting in the second true winter mix. Coming at the close of 2007, it's also the perfect way to close out the second chapter of the Radio AG saga.

And then, a long break...

1. Sadly, the place closed down about seven years ago, ultimately being replaced by a hookah lounge.
2. At the time, your typical list seemed to take in 90% classic rock with token soul, jazz, hip hop and - if you're really lucky - electronic entries.
3. Whereas the canonical picks at the time would have looked something like this: Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express, Herbie Hancock - Maiden Voyage or Head Hunters, The Velvet Underground & Nico, Neu!'s debut, Rhythim Is Rhythim - Nude Photo and Captain Beefheart - Trout Mask Replica.
4. Take for instance his DEMF set (available on Groovetech), where he opened with Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson's We Almost Lost Detroit before running through Curtis Mayfield and William DeVaughn chestnuts, ultimately settling into a boogie groove with The Brides Of Funkenstein and André Cymone.
5. I'd been seeking out this one for ages. It turned up on the floor of some indie rock shop for 50 cents and was the only record I bought that day. Cutie Pie was one of my key jams circa '93 that for whatever reason was in heavy rotation along with The Isley Brothers' Between The Sheets and Kleeer's Tonight on Jammin' Z90. I'd taped them all off the radio, along with Ice Cube's It Was A Good Day, Duice's Dazzey Duks and The Geto Boys' Six Feet Deep, on what was the first tape I ever made.
6. I'd actually bought a couple of their later records way back in the day based on their name alone, and Snakes and I had sampled some material for some of our earlier beats (see G-Street, for one).
7. It makes perfect sense that they reissued the Silver Apples compilation, as that duo seem like the logical ancestor to their sound.

People Make The World Go Round

Posted on October 12, 2016 @ 8:40pm by Coqui

Cruising down University to the sounds of the C2 Remix of Innerzone Orchestra's People Make The World Go Round, in the cool Autumn air of the early evening as the sun settles on the horizon. People everywhere, going about their business: walking the sidewalks and the crosswalks, driving through these city streets, humanity in motion. People make the world go round. Breakbeats roll out in cascading layers beneath the clipped sequences of pure machine soul.

Dusk descends and the Kenny Dixon, Jr. Remix begins to unfold, palm trees silhouetted against violet skies as Norma Jean Bell works her saxophone and Mr. Bubz Fiddler springs into action on bass. The sounds of Axelrod and Adderley flow like tributaries through the bedrock, a jazz mosaic set in stark relief against the geology of a place where the desert meets the sea.

In the words of Winston Zeddmore, I love this town!

AG Memories: Rusty Waters

Posted on September 19, 2016 @ 8:50pm by Coqui

Looking down from the Georgia Street bridge, into North Park and the place where it all went down, and the memories of the early days of Radio AG come flooding back.


While uploading the first five episodes of Radio AG over the past few weeks, I was struck by how rough a lot of the mixing was! Sure, partially this was down to being rusty (I'd taken a hiatus from spinning and music production to concentrate on finishing school), but I also suspect it was due to the fact that for the first time I was grappling with a lot of material that wasn't typically intended to be found in the mix.

Up until then, I'd primarily spun techno and house, on the one hand, or downbeat rap and trip hop, on the other. Mixing disparate selections from the sixties, alternative, new wave and so forth - much of it music that wasn't made with the DJ in mind - well, it was like learning to mix all over again. The first year was pretty ramshackle, truth be told, but it was an enjoyable experiment in figuring how to segue between tracks of such varying structure and sequence them to successfully carry a sustained mood (I wouldn't figure out the latter until the following year!)

In retrospect, I'd always tended to approach spinning from more of an electro/hip hop mindset anyway, playing with cuts and juxtaposition, whereas the general tendency with minimal techno at the time was to work gradual fades between similar tunes. The pivotal moment for me was hearing Kevin Saunderson scratch into Carl Craig's Piano Mix of R-Tyme's Use Me (on his X-Mix: Transmission From Deep Space Radio mix): this was everything I wanted dance music to be. On the flipside - the trip hop side - Terranova's DJ-Kicks was a revelatory experience, boasting a broad selection taking in hip hop, dub, post punk, electro and Detroit techno, all while maintaining a consistently vivid atmosphere throughout. Listening to both of these mixes for the first time - within months of each other! - was quite simply a mind-expanding experience, changing the way I listened to music from that point forward.

As such, when I put together the original Allied Heights mix (back in 2002), it already seemed natural to drop things like The B-52's Mesopotamia and Brian Eno & David Byrne's The Jezebel Spirit - not to mention Derrick May's remix of Tired Of Getting Pushed Around for 2 Men A Drum Machine And A Trumpet - in the mix alongside prime techno cuts like Scan 7's Black Moon Rising, The Martian's Meet The Red Planet and UR's Electronic Warfare, opening up plenty of real-estate for raw house material like the KSR Vocal Mix of Octave One's Blackwater, Susumu Yokota's discoid fantasy Future Memory and Carl Craig's awesome garage-tinged A-Dub Mix of The Reese Project's I Believe. There were even a couple brand new Shadez Of Colour cuts - that were just about to be pressed up at NSC in Detroit - slipped into the mix. It was a nice little mix that captured a time when things where humming in the Heights and it seemed as if it would go on that way forever...

But I'd be out of the game in a matter of months, commencing a roughly two-year period during which school, work and other real world commitments managed to monopolize my time completely. The music was still there, however, and I'd spent those years exploring other sounds: lines of flight into the wider world via the post punk (PIL, Mark Stewart, etc.) and reggae (King Tubby, Horace Andy, etc.) that I'd become aware of thanks to trip hop, and the funk (Parliament/Funkadelic, Sly & The Family Stone, etc.), synth (Kraftwerk, YMO, etc.) and jazz (Herbie Hancock, Sun Ra, etc.) music that techno had tuned me into along the way. Winding back through seventies soul into the sixties - Stax and Motown - on a similar tip and sideways into krautrock, prog and arty seventies music like Roxy Music (by way of Brian Eno), it was only a matter of time before I'd worked my way back into the sixties: The Beatles, The Byrds, Hendrix and beyond.

At the end of 2004, I moved out with a couple of mates into a spot over by Balboa Park that we came to call the 1808. The scene that coalesced around the place centered on what you might call the indie rock set, with various bands and scenesters in orbit, doing their thing. I was mainly rocking out to grime like Wiley's Treddin' On Thin Ice, Dizzee Rascal's second album and the Run The Road compilation, plus Roni Size's Return To V - which seemed to key into the same prevailing mood - along with Moodymann's Black Mahogani, Amp Fiddler's Waltz Of A Ghetto Fly and Theo Parrish (with material like The Rotating Assembly's Rusty Waters in constant rotation). There was a solid weekly techno night at the Honey Bee Hive (just up the street), and I did manage to catch the odd desert rave with Snakes and crew, but all of a sudden it seemed like indie rock was everywhere and dance was hard to find. This felt something like the wilderness years, and I was a stranger in a strange land.

So I decided to go back to my roots and start a mixtape series that would take in a bunch of the stuff I grew up on, before I'd even really struck out on my own, musically speaking. I'd basically started out in new wave with Adam Ant and Depeche Mode, along with eighties dance pop like the Jacksons Michael and Janet, before hip hop and swingbeat rolled into town. So why not start there - since this was more or less the lingua franca of my intended audience anyway - sprinkling in an ever increasing dose of beats and atmosphere along the way? Radio AG was born.

The idea at first was to construct a mix in the same way the closing song cycle from the second side of Abbey Road was structured, drifting from one pop song to the next in a kinetic flow. Along with my bedrock of past favorites, I'd lean on everything I'd picked up in the interim, ranging from Can to The Beach Boys and even some of the indie stuff I'd picked up like the Pixies (rock hard beats for miles) and Pavement (whose Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era is basically a breakbeat dance track). Going back into the nineties, my hip uncle Matt from Chicago had tuned me into all sorts of great power pop and indie dance (like Blur, Happy Mondays and so on) that had a profound shaping influence on me at the time. This material flowed logically into groups like Gorillaz (Albarn and Ryder, together), A.R. Kane and The Beta Band that I'd later crossed paths with via dance music, and all of it would in turn form part of the foundation of the series.

So I did one mix, and then another. And then another. By October, I'd knocked out a fifth episode - The Halloween Special - and the series had become a reality. I was pulling in shipments from Submerge on a monthly basis, their shelves still stocked with the finest Detroit techno in abundance. A few months later, I crossed paths with SA-RA and Hot Chip. Woebot dropped his 100 Greatest Records Ever on New Years Day. Suddenly things didn't seem so lonely anymore. And then, couple weeks later I'd move in with my brother Brian - the same place where I live today - and dig into the next chapter of the Radio AG saga. But that's another story for another day!

Two Steps From The Blues

Posted on August 22, 2016 @ 8:36pm by Coqui

A selection of murky blues and dirty beats mixed by DJ Slye.

I recently came across this riotous, blazing mix by Woebot that he terms this grungey, mutated R'n'B-derived sound. In a weird bit of synchronicity I've been crossing a similar terrain lately. In truth, it's a place where I dwell much of the time.

I've recently been ruminating on this intersection between post punk, trip hop and the blues that's sort of tangentially related to some of the shapes he throws in this mix. This is partially down to working my way through A Cracked Jewel Case - long stretches of which run parallel to my own fascinations and obsessions in sound - but also it's a very definite strand of sound that's pretty central to my own musical make up.

In fact, I've long had a loose selection of tracks rolling around that all occupy a similar space in my mind and thought, Why not throw them all together in a mix and see what happens? The end result is a bit of a low slung, moody affair... but then I wouldn't have it any other way.

  1. Skip James Cypress Grove Blues (Yazoo)

    2. We start out deep down in the Mississippi Delta, way back in 1931, with Skip James and some of the mightiest blues ever laid down. This is an ancient, desolate sound: loneliness captured on wax. There's this haunting character to James' vocals - his playing too - that really puts you in the room with him.

  2. Goodie Mob Cell Therapy (featuring Brandon "Shug" Bennett) (LaFace)

    3. Fast-forward 64 years and Dirty South enters the popular consciousness. This paranoid crawl through shadowy imagery of black helicopters, looming fences and the security state features state of the art production from Organized Noise, yet there's an unmistakable grit here that ties everything back to the Delta.

  3. Drugs Brain On Drugs (Kraked)

    4. Psychedelic soul from the turn of the century. Various players from the contemporary touring lineup of Parliament/Funkadelic get down in the studio with this strange slab of hallucinatory sprawl. In many ways, this is like the midpoint between SA-RA and Moodymann. There was even an excellent deep house remix of this tune on a 12" by French duo Château Flight.

  4. Mark Stewart + Maffia Survival (Mute)

    5. The massive geometric rhythm here has always reminded me of the desolate, wide-open spaces of certain old electric blues records. I think the Maffia certainly do have a bit of the blues in them - filtered through an angular, cyberpunk shaped prism, but there nonetheless - and their early recordings as the Sugar Hill house band bear this out. See also No Wave and Cabaret Voltaire.

  5. Martina Topley-Bird Too Tough To Die (Independiente)

    6. Taken from her solo debut after parting ways with Tricky. Quixotic is of a piece with Tricky Kid's earlier records - thoroughly imbued as they were with Martina's indelible presence - and this track in particular makes the strong blues nature of her microphone presence explicit. Ensconced within the grinding rhythms of this gnarled bit of modern blues, she seems as comfortable in the form as a Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday.

  6. Dr. John Black Widow Spider (ATCO)

    7. Martina's voodoo-steeped soul segues into the New Orleans swamp-blues of Dr. John, from sophomore album Babylon. In his autobiography, Under A Hoodoo Moon, Dr. John states, "We were trying to get into something... with visions of the end of the world — as if Hieronymus Bosch had cut an album."

  7. Tricky 6 Minutes (Island)

    8. The first half of Angels With Dirty Faces is among the densest, most atmospheric music in Tricky's oeuvre, rivalling even the Nearly God record and his collaboration with the Gravediggaz on The Hell E.P.. Much of the best trip hop is suffused with the spectre of the blues, and this rolling monster of a track - with that nagging looped guitar figure - is positively drenched in it.

  8. Howlin' Wolf Who's Been Talkin' (Chess)

    9. This is likely my favorite blues song bar none, taken from my most treasured blues LP of all time by my absolute favorite bluesman. That endless, tumbling rhythm seems to predict machine music in its precise repetition, while its stark shapes and spooked-out mood prefigure both post punk and trip hop's modus operandi, respectively. As usual, Wolf himself tears through it all like a man possessed.

  9. Terranova Sweet Bitter Love (featuring Cath Coffey) (Copasetik)

    10. The geometric rhythms in evidence here throw similar shadows, only now as if seen through a blurred lense. Sweet Bitter Love, taken from Terranova's first album, is of a piece with their earlier Tokyo Tower record. The title track and its b-side Clone seemed to encompass jazz, blues and Krautrock in one stroke while remaining trip hop through and through. Here, the sumptuous blues tone of Cath Coffey's voice inhabits the bleak soundscape with a gravity all her own.

  10. Gil Scott-Heron Me And The Devil (XL)

    11. This is the lead single from Gil Scott-Heron's final record, and it hits you in the chest straight out the gate with it's apocalyptic tone and cinematic force. The deep, smooth croon of his seventies records has grown into the rough and ragged voice of a man who's seen one thing too many - this is 21st century blues.

  11. Dark Comedy In My Home (Poussez!)

    12. The second Dark Comedy record, from 2005, just might be my favorite thing Kenny Larkin has ever done. This is deep and moody electronic blues from Detroit, a primal swamp of a record with more than a dose a black humor to it... made all the more unsettling in its juxtaposition with dead-serious subject matter on the flipside. In My Home recounts an episode around the time of his Metaphor LP - ten years earlier - when he was shot in his home during an attempted robbery.

  12. Ray Charles It's All Right (Atlantic)

    13. The original soul man's second album, and a true masterpiece of piano-laced rhythm & blues. This one's of a piece with the Howlin' Wolf selection above as some of my favorite blues music ever, with Charles here in the process of shaping it into what would soon become soul music. The Raelets' exquisite backing vocals haunt this track, the dense atmosphere of which evokes the same sense of dread one might expect in a killer trip hop cut some 35 years later.

  13. Tom Waits Clap Hands (Island)

    14. L.A.'s odd man out, this is the second in Waits' trilogy of avant garde eighties records. This tune always stayed with me, its spooked chords unfold over rolling percussion that sounds as if it were played out on hollow bones, the man's raspy croon smack in the middle as he unfurls another one of his dead end backstreet tales. They all went to heaven in a little row boat, that line always gets me. Pure dread.

  14. Bobby Bland I'll Take Care Of You (Duke)

    15. More spectral blues-bathed soul. A key record in that continuum, and a stone cold classic. This is another one of those tunes, where the atmosphere just swirls around you - encircling your entire field of vision - as Bland's piercing vocal climbs through its murky slow-motion organ runs. Later covered by Gil-Scott Heron in fine style on I'm New Here, the same record that houses Me And The Devil.

  15. Otis Rush My Love Will Never Die (Take Unknown) (Varèse Sarabande)

    16. Electric blues shot through with that same steely cold sense of mystery you'll find in Who's Been Talkin' and I'll Take Care Of You (indeed much of the downbeat blues music from this era is cloaked in it). Otis Rush is a giant vocal presence, his guitar figures hang there in suspended animation like glyphs on a brick wall. I'm always half expecting this song to show up in some Tarantino film.

  16. Aretha Franklin The Thrill Is Gone (From Yesterday's Kiss) (Atlantic)

    17. Smoldering southern soul from the great Aretha Franklin. The swelling Hammond that shades into her piano's wraithlike progression, paired with backing vocals from The Sweet Inspirations - steeped in that same haunting flavor that the Raelets lent so effortlessly - provide the perfect environment for Franklin's deep soul stylings. This has long been one of my key downbeat soul numbers. Indeed, in my mind this forms a loose tetralogy with Who's Been Talkin', It's All Right and I'll Take Care Of You, songs whose spectral ambience inform whole swathes of my taste in music.

  17. The Jimi Hendrix Experience Voodoo Chile (Reprise)

    18. Supercharged rock-hard blues from Master Hendrix. From that first sustained note, bending into the heavy silence, this just builds and builds like a great flaming galleon adrift in slow motion across the night sky. Steve Winwood does serious damage here with his smoldering Hammond runs (glowing like embers in the darkness) as Hendrix's blazing guitar figures arc across the soundscape. The night I was born I swear the moon turned a fire red. Very likely indeed.

  18. Jelly Roll Morton Winin' Boy Blues No. 2 (Rounder)

    19. Back in the early days of Napster, a good friend of mine offered to download a couple tunes for me (I didn't yet have access to that sort of thing at the time). My two requests were Tainted Love and anything by Jelly Roll Morton. This is the tune that he turned up, and it stuck with me for years until I eventually tracked it down on volume four of this Library Of Congress set. To this day, it still knocks me out like it did the first time I heard it. That whimsical melody and Morton's rich croon - it's just perfection.

Mixed By: DJ Slye
Inspirations: Tricky, In The Studio With The Special AKA, Woebot's I've Got Blisters On My Fingers! mix, A Cracked Jewel Case by Kevin Pearce, Trip Hop - The Blues Of Our Time

Deep Space Music (Slight Return)

Posted on February 25, 2016 @ 5:55pm by Coqui

A few years back, I started a limited series in which I'd post a weekly tune that was locked into the celestial. I called it Deep Space Music. It was loosely inspired, as is much of what I do, by something a bunch of forward-thinking cats did in Detroit back in the day. In this case, it was Deep Space Radio, a series of transmissions made in the mid-nineties in which people like Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson would spin far out techno and house over the city's airwaves, culminating in Saunderson's masterful X-Mix: Transmission From Deep Space Radio mix.

My own excursion was a much more minimal affair, hosted on the old version of this very site, titled (rather unimaginatively) Deep Space Music. It involved simply tossing up one tune a week - for just under a year - from one summer to another, spanning between 2012 and 2013. The idea was that each song would flow into the next as one long suite, thematically speaking, the patchwork whole unfolding like the weekly sci-fi serials of old. At any rate, it proved to be an enjoyable exercise and hopefully tuned some people into some great music in the process.

In researching a monster piece I've been working on lately (and coming at you in the near future), I'd been digging through the interplanetary archives and - in the process - discovered a tracklist of all the tunes that featured in the series. I'd nearly forgotten about the whole enterprise, but seeing as it fits in thematically with the trip we've been on lately I thought it might be illuminating to beam the results back to earth, commenting on each selection in the process.

You'll notice that a lot of these tunes have continued to crop up in the intervening years, via mixes and even featured in The Parallax 100, which should highlight the centrality of this selection to my own musical tastes. All of these should be relatively easy to get your ears on nowadays, via Youtube or some other means (like picking up the record, perhaps), so if something sounds enticing you know what to do...

Engage!

  1. Ashford & Simpson Babies (Dub Version) (Capitol, 1984)

    2. The journey starts with rolling drums and guitars chiming off into the event horizon. Spacious pads with a graviational pull all their own drift through the mix, that gently chugging bassline seems to propel this ship through the vastness of space in ethereal slow-motion. Don't you know that I live for this sort of thing? This a François Kevorkian perpertrated dub of Ashford & Simpson's original (from their Solid LP), stretching it out across timespace with just a snatch of the original vocal. When Nickolas Ashford drops right into the mix, singing The love story's true, they didn't change me and you..., the track seems to stop and rebuild itself right before your eyes.

  2. Mtume The After 6 Mix (Juicy Fruit Part II) (Epic, 1983)

    3. Another flipside excursion, another featuring just a snatch of vocal input and another one of my favorite songs of all time. The original has one of the great synth progressions ever, pulling you in with a gliding futuristic optimism (think Tommorowland), but this second part - stripping the track to its essentials - is true space capsule music. You find yourself waiting for the synthesized bass sound that just oozes into the track every other bar. Hearing this for the first time was one of those pivotal moments in my life, like a parallel universe unfolding before me, and everything contained within was right up my alley. I remember rustling up the album and 12" within weeks!

    This tune and much of what follows are what I like to call Machine Soul, in essence a sonic strand stretching from Mtume through Model 500, into Timbaland and beyond.

  3. Kleeer Tonight (Atlantic, 1984)

    4. This one takes me back to sun-glazed days in late summer, playing video games on the Atari 2600 (truly ancient technology by that point in the mid-nineties), tripping out to Solaris and the sound of machine rhythms in the scorching heat. This track was the basis for DJ Quik's Tonite, its rubberband, synthetic bassline spreading deep into the DNA of g-funk. True machine soul, you can picture yourself listening in some perfectly-engineered alien vessel, gliding over a neon vector landscape in the night.

  4. Drexciya Running Out Of Space (Tresor, 1999)

    5. Perfection in just under two minutes, this would lend itself to a killer 7" single. That's a whole category unto itself. Sounding almost as if Tonight were fast-forwarded - all sonics twisted and filtered through fifteen years of electro boogie science - the track swoops and shudders on a nimble machine-funk rhythm before dissolving into a majestic, beatless coda. You could run a starship on that. Drexciya of course representing the life aquatic, they seem to be just as much at home in the deep black of space.

  5. Slam Visions (featuring Dot Allison) (Soma, 2001)

    6. Turn-of-the-century Glasgow. A killer pop song seemingly sprung from the subconscious. The atmosphere heavy like a black hole, that shrouded bassline rising from within, drawing you deeper and deeper into gravity's pull. At the center of it all is Dot Allison), serenading the night skies in a druggy murmur. The song explodes into some psychedelic vision of deep space r&b, glowing shards of funky synthetic sound spiralling off into the stratosphere, northern lights ablaze.

  6. Keni Stevens Night Moves (Ultra-Sensual Mix) (Elite, 1985)

    7. I've gone digital about this one before. You're gliding across the grid, vectors scrolling under a moonlit sky, landscapes parallaxing in the distance. Keni Stevens drapes his absolute smoothest, most delicate voice over an elegant neon-lit groove, all the parts moving in perfect unity. The vocal and instrumental versions of the Ultra-Sensual Mix run together on the vinyl, giving you eleven and a half minutes of supersonic pleasure.

  7. Sun Palace Rude Movements (Passion, 1983)

    8. I've noted before (another repeat!) how this record comes on like Carl Craig and Hall & Oates making music together in an elevator. I stand by that. Eighties smooth jazz isn't supposed to sound this exciting, but every element in this tune mixes together into the perfect palette and, against all odds, feels absolutely timeless. The perfect (quiet) storm.

  8. Yage Theme From Hot Burst (Jumpin' & Pumpin', 1992)

    9. An exclusive from the excellent Earthbeat compilation, an indispensable round-up of glistening techno produced by a pre-FSOL Dougans and Cobain. Crystalline synths drift whimsical over stuttering breakbeats, muted rave sounds trill just below the surface, with everything submerged in a deep, oceanic calm. Almost freeform in its construction, this track simply shimmers.

  9. The Isley Brothers Voyage To Atlantis (T-Neck, 1997)

    10. Why don't The Isley Brothers get more love? They're easily the equal of giants like Led Zeppelin or Stevie Wonder. What gives? They have loads of great records. This from their seventies 3 + 3 period - when the group's ranks swelled to six - in which they operated as purveyors of fine funk and peerless, sun-glazed soul. Voyage To Atlantis itself sways in stately slow-motion, exit music for a film. Cosmic, elegaic and beautiful.

  10. The Jimi Hendrix Experience 1983...(A Merman I Should Turn To Be) (Reprise, 1968)

    11. Aquatic, like Drexciya, but in tune with the cosmos. Hendrix got his start playing guitar with The Isleys before going down in history as arguably the greatest guitarist of all (the Forever riff in this song is one of the most inspiring things I've ever heard done with an electric guitar). This record finds him equally adept at using the studio as an instrument unto itself, rolling various movements and spaced out interludes into a nearly fourteen-minute sonic tapestry that works seamlessly as one long, flowing piece. The result is simply breathtaking.

  11. Fluke Kitten Moon (Astralwerks, 1997)

    12. The better part of this album, Risotto, is pretty spaced out as a rule, and I could have used anything from the blunted black hole trip Bermuda to the alien frequencies of Reeferendum to make the same point. However, Kitten Moon eclipses all other candidates with its relentless, chugging rhythm and a drop into pure atmosphere that leaves you standing on the edge of infinity.

  12. Kleeer Tonight (SA-RA Remix featuring The SA-RA All Stars & Me'Shell NdegéOcello) (Rhino, 2005)

    13. The original Kleeer classic (heard above) has a long history of affection among electronic funk connoisseurs. SA-RA turn in what is, in truth, more an outright cover than a remix. I love how they take the relatively minimal original - a tune that seems deeply influential to their own group's aesthetic - and go all out with it, stretching out in widescreen with a big band in tow (including the inimitable Me'Shell NdegéOcello), with no expense spared. Sparkling in the discotheque.

  13. Octave One Nicolette (430 West, 1991)

    14. Octave One embody a certain sonic perfection, working out the internal logic of techno and house to arrive at a streamlined form that sounds unlike anything else. This from their classic Octivation EP, following on the heels of their debut I Believe. Detuned bleeps spill out from a low slung rhythm, the fusion of shuffling 909 beats and a wandering analog bassline, synth washes flowing beneath it all in such a way that r&b stations should've been playing it. In a word, DEEP.

  14. Joe Gibbs & The Professionals Idlers Rest (Joe Gibbs, 1977)

    15. Intergalactic dub reggae, sounding not unlike SA-RA holed up at the Black Ark. Hard to believe it's from 1977. Rock hard beats and bottomless bass kick into gear with siren synths blazing high up above. This from the second volume in Joe Gibbs' excellent African Dub All-Mighty series, which I was lucky enough to snag at Reggae World some years back (and just in time to spin at a New Years Eve party later that night).

  15. Leon Ware Tamed To Be Wild (United Artists, 1972)

    16. Motorik machine soul from the first solo shot by this songwriter in the shadows. Think Suicide. Leon Ware growls over a chugging blues beat, rolling pianos and electronic bass that zig-zags beneath brooding verses before exploding into that near-gospel chorus. Ancient synths droning into infinity. It's all very Warp Records. Ware well-documented as a songwriting auteur, with Motown and Marvin Gaye, in particular (look no further than I Want You for the proof), benefiting from his way with the pen. Check those credits - from Quincy Jones to Minnie Riperton to The Jackson Five - he's everywhere!.

  16. Jackson And His Computer Band Utopia (Warp, 2005)

    17. I remember being stumped as to how to follow up the previous track - so doggedly singular was that grinding tronik soul stormer - but this convoluted electro/house burner from the French auteur Jackson Fourgeaud did the trick. Intricate and overloaded, this track is - simply put - a monster. The whole of it seems constructed from shards of sound - electronic glitches and vocal snatches - shattered into a million pieces only to be reconstructed into a skewed vision of disco, churning under waves of droning sonics before dropping out into that heavenly chorus. Have you ever thought about utopia? Utterly bizarre, yet I challenge anyone not to be hooked by the second listen.

  17. Beanfield Keep On Believing (Compost, 1997)

    18. My brother Matt and I used to be obsessed with this tune. Still are, truth be told. One of my go-to tracks in defense of the practice of sampling. This tune essentially mashes up Vangelis' Let It Happen and the batucada drums from Costa-Gavras' Z (Mikis Theodorakis in full effect), filtering them through deep space sonics and winding up with something utterly singular. But where did those blues vocals come from?

  18. Medeski Martin + Wood Midnight Birds (SA-RA Remix) (Main) (Blue Note, 2005)

    19. More SA-RA. They're all over the place in this break out! The MMM original is a swaying mirage of interstellar exotica, but the SA-RA version takes it on a wild, tangled trip into the unknown. Busting out wrongfooted on the 4/4 - like if J Dilla made a house track - this multi-part dancefloor burner seems fueled on unstable elements, kicking into a juke joint mid-section before it all collapses inna staggering machine rhythm that just disolves into stray synths in the moonlight. The life and death of a star.

  19. Jay Dee Think Twice (BBE, 2001)

    20. Speaking of J Dilla, this deep slab of downbeat bliss from Welcome 2 Detroit is the square root of all manner of twisted machine soul that's tumbled out of this blessed millennium so far. This could go on for hours and I wouldn't get bored. The Donald Byrd bit that goes Your love's like fire and ice, that's why we've got to think twice, followed by a little trumpet flourish, is catchier than most songs you hear on the radio. Then it flies off on a variation, the piano jukes then goes left, before once again drifting somewhere else entirely.

  20. Smith & Mighty DJ-Kicks/I Don't Know (featuring Alice Perera) (12" Mix 1) (Studio !K7, 1998)

    21. It's beginning to feel almost as if I subconsciously drew from this nearly forgotten list when mixing last year's Radio AG transmissions! I suppose that speaks to their closeness to my heart (aww!). This one's so tied up with my own memories and experiences that I don't know where to begin. You just want to curl up inside the warmth of this song. In the surrounding context, it plays like a companion piece to The Martian's Sex In Zero Gravity: a love from outer space.

  21. Me'Shell NdegéOcello Come Smoke My Herb (Maverick, 2003)

    22. Comfort Woman - the record from which this track springs - is on some serious Hendrix-level astral plane, its space rock dynamics swooping and shuddering in graceful slow-motion through the reggaematic machinery of dub. This is deep space as a return to the womb, and it's the swooning blur of Come Smoke My Herb that offers up the record's simplest, most exquisite pleasure: walking on air.

  22. Divine Styler In A World Of U (Maverick, 2003)

    23. In between Styler's old school debut and underground return lies Spiral Walls Containing Autumns Of Light, a record that draws on space rock, industrial and fusion as much as hip hop. This tune in particular is coming from somewhere else! There's that inevitable, descending chord progression - guitars running through sheets of chorus, trilling off into delicate metallic solos - rolling drums and Divine Styler's druggy murmur at the center of it all, cut adrift in wholly expansive innnerspace.

  23. The Police Walking On The Moon (A&M, 1979)

    24. Everybody knows this one, and for good reason. Andy Sumner's guitars chime into the endless deep while Stewart Copeland taps out a beat that seems to obey the laws of lunar gravity rather than the Earth's, and Sting sounds without a care in the world. I remember a particularly dark night back in the day when I listened to this song on repeat, non-stop until I eventually drifted off to sleep.

  24. Simple Minds Veldt (Arista, 1979)

    25. Early Simple Minds records are doubtless a treasure trove of weird new wave, but you'll also find some of the most atmospheric instrumentals of their era... or any other for that matter. Perfectly conjuring up visions of the titular African plains at dusk, strange shapes shifting in the darkness, this brings to mind Suburban Knight's The Art Of Stalking. I swear that you can hear mid-period FSOL in this densely articulated atmosphere. The first time I heard it, I thought What's going on now?! Today it might be my favorite thing on the album.

  25. Dexter Wansel Solutions (Philadelphia International, 1978)

    26. Philly soul craftsman gets loose in the studio, shearing into incandescent jazz funk. The song drifts in and out into radio transmissions - presumably picked up in deep space - chronicling the struggles of present-day Earth. Not much has changed! Wansel croons in silk over luminescent organs and a rubber-synth bassline, fragile and exquisite. A minor r&b hit at the time, it's a wonder this tune isn't more widely known.

  26. The Steve Miller Band Sacrifice (Capitol, 1977)

    27. Glorious tripped out pop-psychedelia from the original space cowboy. Crystalline rhodes shimmer in the moonlight over a downbeat rhythm, while Steve Miller pulls liquid shapes from his guitar and sings moody lines in the foreground. I've always been a sucker for that vibrato thing he tends to do with his voice: What a sacrifiyiyice.... This is, in essence, a jazz funk record. Which leads us into...

  27. Roy Ayers Ubiquity The Memory (Polydor, 1976)

    28. DEEP jazz funk. The deepest. Drawing you slow-motion tumbling into a black hole, shadows and sound swirling all around, it seems to have a gravity all its own. Feel Surreal. Those drums are rock hard, pounding a tripped-out beat while deep Moog bass textures curl beneath. Liquid keys shimmer and gamma ray ARPs stream like sunlight through the darkness. Innerspace music and subconscious soul, this track embodies the haunting words of its refrain.

  28. Marvin Gaye A Funky Space Reincarnation (Tamla, 1978)

    29. Taken from Gaye's exquisite kiss off Here, My Dear. I remember buying the record thinking, Well, it's supposed to be one of his weaker ones but I love What's Going On and then being completely blown away. A Funky Space Reincarnation has Gaye drifting through images of mental deep space travel over a downbeat disco rhythm - sort of half-singing/half-rapping - commenting on the sights he encounters along the way and putting the moves on Miss Birdsong. Strangely enough, this always makes me think of those rolling ambient house numbers by The Orb like Perpetual Dawn and Toxygene, gently unfurling on an astral plane.

  29. Bobby Lyle Inner Space (Capitol, 1978)

    30. I first heard this in a Kirk Degiorgio mix and couldn't believe my ears. This came out when? How?? It's the secret ancestor to Carl Craig's gaussian-blurred ambient excursions like Neurotic Behavior and A Wonderful Life, and a glorious track in its own right.

  30. Psyche Neurotic Behavior (Planet E, 1989)

    31. Which brings us to this, which strangely had the opposite effect: I couldn't believe it had come out so recently. Breathtakingly cinematic and vast in scope, it sounds simultaneously ancient and futuristic, like a sleek alien structure that the scientists can't seem to date. I remember compiling the Parallax 100 and originally planning to include 4 Jazz Funk Classics, but just couldn't resist this record's exquisite shades and absorbing timbres. Elements is in that grey area of compilations that pull from just one or two years - see also The Three EPs by The Beta Band - but it just works too well as an album in its own right. It gets the pass! And just because his first stuff is my absolute favorite doesn't mean I don't love the rest of it... the man has gone from strength to strength, one of the most consistently compelling producers around.

  31. The Martian Skypainter (Red Planet, 1995)

    32. Motorik deep space drive. I've been a big fan of Red Planet for ages, and if I'm not mistaken have everything the label put out (there might be a Somewhere In Detroit record lingering, I can't remember). At the time I just couldn't get ahold of the records, try as I might. I first heard this and Midnite Sunshine (and, come to think of it the very next track as well) on Submerge's Depth Charge 3, a round-up of tracks that from their extended crew. I was in heaven.

  32. Freq Waveaura (Matrix, 1995)

    33. This is the other one from that compilation, although its original home was a label compilation for Matrix Records (Sean Deason's label). As far as I know, this never had a release outside those two compilations. Deason was a rising star at this time, in what was called The Third Wave Of Detroit Techno, and I snapped up whatever I could by him. When he was on, he was really on. This spaced out organ jam, a sleek Martian cousin to Paperclip People's Steam, was one of those moments.

  33. E-Dancer World Of Deep (KMS, 1997)

    34. I can now recall that there was a bit of a Detroit rally going on at this point. I was feeling good! This tune was actually featured on Saunderson's X-Mix that I mentioned above. It was hot off the presses at the time. Simply put, this is superb machine disco. Deeply psychedelic and absorbing, that bassline just takes hold. Are those synths or are they voices? You just have to close your eyes to this one.

  34. Virgo Ride (Radical, 1989)

    35. More dazzling tronik house moves, this time by way of Chicago. Machine rhythms and a cascading bassline suck you into the pitch black, while blurred vocals invite you to take a ride. This is night drive music for a ride to Club Silencio.

  35. Dark Energy Midnite Sunshine (Underground Resistance, 1994)

    36. This one from the awesome Dark Energy double-pack on UR. Credited to Dark Energy AKA Suburban Knight AKA James Pennington, and offering up a flipside to the paranoid dread in earlier records like The Art Of Stalking and Nocturbulous Behavior: anything is possible and the future is wide open. Inspiring stuff. There was a later Dark Energy record that was quite good as well, this time on an electrofunk tip.

  36. Reload Ehn (Infonet, 1993)

    37. Taken from A Collection Of Short Stories, which is (if I'm not mistaken) Global Communication's auspicious debut. The record is a grab-bag of disparate styles - from ambient to breakbeat techno and grinding industrial - complete with an equally disjunctured set of accompanying science fiction texts. This beauty in this track lies in its sheer inevitability as it works out its own internal logic - the synth's progression and that throbbing bassline, low-key breaks rolling beneath - its off-kilter funk running like illogical clockwork.

  37. Plaid Spudink (Warp, 1997)

    38. I've always been quite fond of this one. Its casual futurism is like viewing the Earth through a tiny portal from within the compact close quarters of the international space station... a tin can floating through the vastness of space. There's also loads of stuff by The Black Dog that I could/should have used in this list, but it must have slipped my mind.

  38. China Crisis Jean Walks In Freshfields (Virgin, 1982)

    39. This unlikely jewel of space music in miniature lies nestled at the end of China Crisis' debut album, Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms. It drops you into the shadow of a nebula and is over in the blink of an eye.

  39. Double Helix Low Key (Rush Hour, 2002)

    40. I think this one first appeared on the All Access To Detroit's Music Festivals compilation, but it later got a 12" release. A clockwork rhythm taps beneath a glowing bassline as the deepest of synths roll out into casual infinity. Strangely, this often makes me think of the spaciest precincts of China Crisis' discography (particularily Red Sails and The Soul Awakening).

  40. Kraftwerk Spacelab (Kling Klang, 1978)

    41. These gentlemen from Cologne don't have an album dedicated to space, possibly because they already said everything they needed to within the shining six minutes of Spacelab. Partially inspired by the machine disco rhythms of Giorgio Moroder, this sounds like ambient house before house even happened.

  41. Queen In The Space Capsule (Love Theme) (Elektra, 1981)

    42. When Dr. Zarkov's space capsule disconnects from the rocket, that guitar strum etches itself into infinity. Queen in soundtrack mode here, this is beautiful like Tangerine Dream. It's the love theme for Dale and Flash, one one level, but on another it seems to gesture toward a universal love for all of humanity (and thus makes it Dr. Zarkov's theme as much as anyone else's). Perfect music for getting sucked into a vortex, I once made an abstract hip hop track that sampled those opening synths.

  42. Mr. Fingers Stars (Jack Trax, 1987)

    43. Glorious early deep house from Larry Heard (a legend doncha know?). You've got this gently chugging beat, a bassline that wanders all over the spectrum and shimmering synth sequences that rotate in slow-motion lunar orbit, always threatening to slip just behind the beat but staying in perfect time. Exquisitely psychedelic.

  43. Dâm-Funk Keep Lookin' 2 The Sky (Stones Throw, 2009)

    44. Uptempo bizzness from the ever-reliable Dâm-Funk. Seeing him live made me realize that he's something like the West Coast equivalent to Moodymann: operating with the same vital foot in the present, informed by deep crates and a musical lineage stretching deep into the past (just swap out West Coast electro and Solar Records for deep disco slates and Motown). This is one of those moments when you realize that he's making, for all intents and purposes, techno.

  44. Mýa Mýa (Interscope, 1998)

    45. Produced by Darryl Pearson, cohort of DeVante Swing (mentor to Timbaland), and the sound's rubbed off in this fragile orbital torch song. I remember Simon Reynolds, back in the day, describing how midway through the song everything seemed to rotate on its axis. There's loads of great r&b moments that happen to be built on Art Of Noise/ZTT tunes (a list in itself there), and this must surely be among the greatest.

  45. DJ Mitsu The Beats Negative Ion (featuring Ainjoy McWhorter) (SA-RA Remix) (Planetgroove, 2004)

    46. SA-RA at their most deliriously decomposed (think Smokeless Highs and Hangin' By A String), but working with such lush source material that it manages to become a great pop moment in and of itself. Shamefully, I don't know anything about DJ Mitsu The Beats, as I only grabbed this remix EP after hearing it played out on their Dark Matter & Pornography Mixtape.

  46. SA-RA Creative Partners Hollywood (Redux) (Babygrande, 2007)

    47. And the men themselves for the grand finale. I can't overstate how epochal this crew have been in my own musical life, like something on the level of Led Zeppelin. They managed to tie together so many strands of music that I cherish and then took them supernova. This is zero gravity r&b, and a perfect end to this unplanned excursion into deep space music.

Dam-Funk @ The Casbah

Posted on October 4, 2015 @ 4:29pm by Coqui

A month ago today, Dâm-Funk rocked The Casbah. It was the first day of the tour, which I later found out would coincide with the release of his new album Invite The Light. His last solo full-length of new material was also his debut, 2009's massive Toeachizown. Firmly grounded in electronic funk, it used g-funk, r&b and techno - sounds that were crucial in my own musical life - as a launchpad in Searchin' 4 Funk's Future. For me at least, it's been one of the key records in recent memory.

I've kept up with his trajectory since then, including his archival Adolescent Funk compilation as well as collaborations with Steve Arrington and Snoop Dogg. All the while, I've been patiently anticipating another solo record, so I was excited to lay my hands on a copy and hear the direction he's taken his sound since.

We rolled into the venue early in the evening as The Junkyard Band bumped out from the dancefloor. The Cookie Crew DJ's were tearing it up on the decks, spinning a blend of down and dirty electronic funk - a perfect warm up for the evening to come.

Dâm-Funk hit the stage with his live band in tow, kicking into high gear from the jump; I'd almost forgotten how hard live funk could hit. I've seen some footage of him performing live on stage in the past, but this was him taking it to a whole other level. He'd truly polished his game and come into his own as a frontman of this lean and mean three-piece band. Many of the extended, Pacific endless trax from the Toeachizown days had been revamped with lyrics and loosened up with a tensile center of gravity. The band jumped into an updated take on Mirrors - that preview of things to come on his debut - and it still sounded like the futurist optimism of Detroit poured into one ray of elusive sunlight and scattered through a prism into the sky.

Indeed, long stretches of the show stepped confidently into techno territory. O.B.E. (Out Of Body Experience), from the new album, seemed to recall Underground Resistance circa their masterful Galaxy 2 Galaxy series of records: that same sense of astral jazz exploration - shot through with deep electronic shades and timbres - gliding reckless across the dancefloor. 4 Hero's shimmering synths on their epochal Parallel Universe also come to mind, along with the dubbed-out stomp of The Orb, whose track of (nearly) the same title... well, I've only just now realized what it stood for!

It dawned on me that Damon Riddick just might be the West Coast analog to one Kenny Dixon Jr., crafting a double-gatefold vision of post-electro music that stretches beyond one record or the next to populate a vast mosaic of sound; each of these auteurs seem to be hard at work creating their own musical universe. Coincidentally, they both seem to have edged closer to Prince in their delivery (see Moodymann's Det.riot '67 and Dâm's new record, for example).

There were serious Purple Rain vibes running through the Casbah show, a sense of grandeur that the venue struggled to contain. At one point Dâm launched into a heartfelt paean to some distant lover that had him dropping to his knees, James Brown-style, repeatedly throughout its seemingly interminable (in the best possible sense) run. The tension was undeniable. Another moment found him in the middle of the dancefloor, stretching his keyboard out for the audience to play.

The show ended with an encore consisting of Dâm getting behind the drumkit and running loose-limbed through a selection of stone cold funk classics like Rick James' Mary Jane, Slave's Just A Touch Of Love and Cameo's Candy, connecting his own music with a rich lineage of electronic funk even as he leans bravely toward the future. All 'N All, it was a transcendent experience, in which the small venue transformed into one great pulsing ultraviolet dream.

Hashim – Primrose Path

Posted on April 20, 2015 @ 11:54pm by Coqui

Hashim - Primrose Path

(Cutting: 1986)

Here's a space jam that's always stayed with me. I wish I could say that I was rocking it back in the eighties, but I first heard this on Dave Clarke's X-Mix: Electro Boogie (like why even front?), where it slipped into the mix to close out a tight running selection of digital beats on a deeply psychedelic note. I remember cruising through the back streets of Grantville, then back and forth across Mission Gorge at night, to these booming electro rhythms.

This mix opened up a whole world of machine music that I'd been unaware of before then, an alternate continuum stretching back in time to the early eighties and forward into the future. I pored over the liner notes, studying the label information and started trying to track the records down. I noted in the acknowledgements that Clarke regretted being unable to license any music from The Egyptian Lover. That name stood out to me, evocative and shrouded in mystery. Fate would have it that I'd shortly find a pristine copy of Egypt, Egypt at a rummage sale a couple blocks from my house, and my descent into electro at the twelve inch level had begun. Then, some time later, I tracked down a copy of Primrose Path...

Hashim was one Gerald Calliste Jr., a producer intrinsically associated with Cutting Records, that crucial imprint behind a sequence of killer, genre-defining electro records unleashed in the mid-eighties. His first 12", Al-Naafiysh (The Soul), released in 1983, was a b-boy phenomenon, one of the stone cold classics of electro and a crucial building block in the forward trajectory electronic dance music. The record cemented a working partnership with label boss Aldo Marin behind the mixing desk that would continue throughout Calliste's stint at the label.

Further exploits included a second Hashim 12" and records with the Imperial Brothers and High Fidelity Three, all powerful electro numbers that served to further establish Cutting Records as an institution through the mid-eighties. These records featured further collaborations with Marin, peppered with appearances by luminaries such as Benji Candelario, Whiz Kid and The Latin Rascals. Primrose Path, the third Hashim record - and Calliste's final release for the label - surfaced in 1986.

Dropping the needle on the record, a voice intones Only the truly wise ones will conquer the power of darkness (shades of Star Wars) before tom toms roll out into a fathoms-deep abyss as a shuddering electro rhythm begins to take shape. Synthesizers straight out of the Al-Naafiysh playbook sweep across the soundscape, cloaking everything in dread, as distant guitars chop out atmospheric shapes in the ether. Textures are swathed in reverb, drums booming through the soundscape: you can feel the space in this world. The city never sleeps.

It's a slap bass (of all things) that holds down the groove behind this rolling electro monster, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The whole approach seems closer to terrain covered by late-period post punk artists like 400 Blows1 and 23 Skidoo, in which brutal live musicianship fused with industrial/EBM sonics to map out an interzone where the ghost, the possibility, of techno is felt (you can hear the block rockin' beats of The Chemical Brothers prefigured within these deep-hewn grooves). This is a music that could soundtrack William Gibson's Count Zero, true cyberpunk sound, managing the improbable feat of sounding firmly of its era yet at the same time feeling like the future now.

Descending even deeper beneath the sonic fabric, the flipside houses a dub version that is everything you'd hope it would be, deconstructing the already spacious original into an unfettered excursion of vast, cavernous spaces. The beat drops out occasionally (something that doesn't happen on the a-side), revealing bits of texture through the cracks, seeming to magnify and stretch time/space in the process. You can hear King Tubby's dub innovations, filtered through the work of disco technicians like François Kevorkian and Walter Gibbons, writ large throughout; there's even a chirping electronic sequence running through both versions that wouldn't sound out of place on a Lee "Scratch" Perry production.

One thing that's always fascinated me about this record is how seamlessly it merges live playing with the sequencer. Was that bassline played live or was it sampled, cut up and sequenced later? Was it some combination of both? What's generating those enigmatic guitar sonics? Physical instrument or simulation? It's difficult to tell where the machines end and the human begins. Like Moodymann's similarly spectral excursions into house music, it seems to make a mockery of the distinction. This is cyborg music, pure and simple: it's the sound of the 21st century arriving ahead of schedule.

1. The 400 Blows 1984 record Declaration Of Intent always struck me as operating on a very similar plane to Primrose Path. There's the slap bass, sure enough, but also the austere, half-tempo intro, simple chanted refrain and dubbed out atmospherics. It's a perfect example of the way that two disparate scenes can inadvertently create music that overlaps sonically. Check it out, either way, it's a killer groove!

Let Me Ride

Posted on March 30, 2015 @ 10:52pm by Coqui

So it looks like I've nearly let a month slip by without delivering any goodies for you, and for that I have no apologies to offer (sometimes, reality just comes creeping in). I've got one feature that I'm in the process of putting together on L.A. hip hop, which is really just a little something inspired by the DJ Quik/Warren G show at the North Park Observatory. Quik's set got me in a West Coast state of mind, and I've been augmenting my usual diet of Moodymann and Mtume with a healthy dose of rolling g-funk ever since: a fitting soundtrack to the summer's heat of the last week or so (even as springtime has only just begun).

Part of the reason it took me a week to go digital about that show is the fact that I got caught up working on this upcoming material, which quickly managed to get out of hand: so many great rap records have come out of L.A. that it seemed churlish to just distill the list down to the usual suspects (although those do get a look-in). Why not go all out and dive headlong into this little corner of the Parallax stacks? Ultimately, the plan will be to split this feature into four separate slabs, each one focusing on a particular aspect of the L.A. thang.

There's a couple new records that have been in heavy rotation at the Parallax Room, particularily the new Model 500 album (Digital Solutions) and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly. Digital Solutions is a master stroke from Juan Atkins, featuring Mad Mike and even Amp Fiddler in the fold (two players who just so happen to have played with Parliament/Funkadelic in the past, appropriately enough). This is supremely elegant Detroit techno, picking up where Deep Space left off and stretching that sound further yet into the 21st century.

On the hip hop tip, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly is without a doubt something extraordinary, finding Kendrick Lamar processing the prevailing mood of these past few years and putting down a fierce reaction in a record that is both here and now. Picking up the thread of sprawling, ambitious soul/jazz albums that engage with the times and manage to work all the way through, its a bracing listen that brings to mind classic records like Silentintroduction and Voodoo. I could go on and on, and that's a potential list in itself right there. Appropriately enough, it follows on the heels of D'Angelo's Black Messiah, a similarly fathoms-deep rumination on the present state of affairs.

I'd love to engage with all of these records on here at some point in the near future. Beyond that, I've got a couple features waiting in the wings (and I still need to talk about that Jungle LP). The response to the Radio AG 2015 Winter Mix was positive in the Heights, so I'm hoping to get something cookin' for spring within the next month or so. I may even hit you with some more frivolous material along the way in order to keep communications open between features. After all, spring is the time to get loose...

The Parallax 100

Posted on January 5, 2015 @ 10:31pm by Coqui

This all germinated from an exchange between Sari (my wife), Andrew (my brother) and myself in which we each compiled our top 100 records of all time and then had a little party to review the lists while listening to bits of the records in them. It was a great excuse to talk music and I daresay that we all had a blast trawling through each other's favorites. It was during the process of putting together my own that my love for writing about music began to rekindle and I vowed to myself to bring back this site. I suppose then that it's only appropriate that I use it to kick things off again here at the Parallax Room.

This list represents my absolute favorite one hundred records of all-time, including albums, EPs and singles. Truth be told, a couple borderline compilations sneak in too! The idea was to select the records that essentially form my musical bedrock, the very core of my taste in music, and in a sense, the lense through which I tend to hear everything else.

It can be so tempting to only include influential, important records, to lean too heavily on the accepted canon of (insert genre here) classics rather than those records one actually loves most. The flipside of that coin is to veer too deeply into the obscure, or all those neat little records one discovers along the way. I found that the trick was to ruthlessly select (from my initial pile) only the records that: 1. Had a crucial impact on me (be it immediate or gradually, over time), 2. Are front-to-back amazing, and 3. I still listen to all the time.

This narrowed the field considerably, but there were still about a dozen too many records. Eliminating those was probably the most difficult part of the process, but its amazing just how much the list started to write itself at that point. To be honest, it was a bit of rush seeing it all come together. The result is a deeply personal selection, but I think that's the only way to go. In the end, I can promise you that every record here is a stone cold killer...

100. Heldon - Électronique Guerilla

(Disjuncta: 1974)

French synth wizardry from Richard Pinhas on Heldon's first odyssey, the driving pulse of which marks it out as a remarkably physical permutation of space music proper. Tracks like Back To Heldon and Northernland Lady seem to soundtrack actual landscapes you could touch and feel, wander and get lost in. Gilles Deleuze even makes a cameo on Ouais, Marchais, Mieux Qu'en 68 (Ex: Le Voyageur), the one track to feature the band in full.

99. Man Parrish - Special Disconet Mixes

(Ram's Horn: 1983)

Man Parrish produced loads of great records throughout the eighties, but this wildly mutated remix of Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don't Stop) is a multi-jointed electro monster. Its rubberband bassline and depth charging 808s are remarkably loose within the context of electro, a genre typically defined by it's (intentional) rigidity.

98. Baris Manço - 2023

(Yavuz: 1975)

Psychedelic, spaced out funk from this giant of Anatolian music. Occupying that nexus between acid rock and straight up prog (think Paul Kantner's Blows Against The Empire), it bests all other contenders by merit of its singular sound and vision. Those massive, supremely deranged synths come as an added bonus.

97. Azealia Banks - 1991

(Interscope: 2012)

The greatest record to come out of the perennial clash between house and hip hop, a sound that has remarkably crashed back into the mainstream over the last five-odd years. The vibe here brings to mind certain records on the Strictly Rhythm imprint, also things like Hateful Head Helen, but the whole of this EP is thoroughly up to date and leans brashly toward the future.

96. Howlin' Wolf - Howlin' Wolf

(Chess: 1962)

The Rocking Chair Album. By my estimation the wildest electric blues LP, even outstripping his own supremely fuzzed out work on Chess' head-oriented subsidiary Cadet Concept. Wolf here sounds hungry as he attacks each tune with the ferocious charm he was renowned for, wrestling their melodies into a dense, churning turmoil of rock hard rhythm and blues.

95. Grace Jones - Nightclubbing

(Island: 1981)

One of the many great records laid down in Nassau by the brilliant Compass Point All Stars, this one benefits from Ms. Jones' compelling presence front and center. Splitting the difference between disco, post punk and dub, this is pristine, chrome-surfaced boogie on ten-inch rubber wheels. Just given the lavish Deluxe Edition treatment as well, with an unreleased cover version of Gary Numan's Me! I Disconnect From You tossed into the bargain. Grace's music is essential.

94. Tiger - Me Name Tiger

(RAS: 1986)

Digital dancehall. Generally recognized as a genre best served by the 7" single, this sterling LP is an exception to that rule. Tiger himself is responsible for just about every element on the record, from the toasting on down to the beats, resulting in a super-tight - and endlessly playable - ten track selection on which his larger-than-life personality shines immensely.

93. Nav Katze - Never Mind The Distortion

(SSR: 1994)

Japanese pop outfit remixed by the early heavyweights of British abstract techno: The Black Dog, Aphex Twin, Ultramarine and Global Communication. The ladies' heavenly vocals weave through these warped re-workings of their original compositions, informed by the curious slant that each producer brings to bear on the material. Truly otherworldly in every possible sense, the results simply sound like nothing else around.

92. Mulatu Astatke featuring Fekade Amde Maskal - Ethio Jazz

(Amha: 1974)

Ethiopian Jazz. Discovered this via the excellent Éthiopiques series on Buda Musique and just had to track down the original LP. Mulatu's band so fluid here, the murky soundscape so dense with rich detail, that the record itself seems to conjure up a ghostly mirage of some smoky dancehall in Addis Ababa, thick with atmosphere and hovering three feet off the ground.

91. N-Tyce - Hush Hush Tip

(Wild Pitch: 1993)

Wicked downbeat hip hop on the cusp between day-glo jazz rap and the dark blunted zeitgeist just around the corner (see Black Moon, Cypress Hill and the Wu-Tang Clan - the RZA and 4th Disciple of which actually produced this record), and managing to deliver the best of both worlds. N-Tyce's flow is smooth as can be and Method Man on the hook a particularly inspired touch.

90. Mark Stewart + Maffia - Mark Stewart

(Mute: 1987)

Sampladelic, hard-edged post punk. The Maffia backing is incendiary and Mark Stewart explosive, veering between rage and sadness in equal measure. Also notable for spawning Stranger Than Love, the dub of which was perpetrated by none other than a very young Smith & Mighty. Indeed, pre-echoes of nineties Bristol seem to reverberate throughout the entirety of this fierce, uncompromising record.

89. Althea & Donna - Uptown Top Ranking

(Lightning: 1977)

A peak-period Joe Gibbs production that leaps out of the speakers with a rude zig-zagging synth and rock hard backing by The Mighty Two. Althea & Donna still manage to steal the show with their raw, infectious delivery on this absolutely massive (#1 in the U.K.!) pop reggae number. I've often thought that this tune must have had a profound shaping influence on The Slits, in both sound and spirit.

88. War - The World Is A Ghetto

(United Artists: 1972)

Strung out fourth world voodoo funk. Captures that feeling in late August when summer's lost its luster and seems like it's never going to end; sun-glazed buildings and steam rising off the streets. A definitive L.A. record, if I may be so bold. The band's interplay here so dexterous (City, Country, City) and group chants so obsessive (Beetles In The Bog) that nearly every tune feels like a mantra. This is my Marquee Moon.

87. Black Riot - A Day In The Life

(Fourth Floor: 1988)

Seminal N.Y. House and Todd Terry's finest moment of patchwork brilliance. Owing to his background in freestyle music, he was the first house producer to truly grasp the possibilities of hip hop and consequently seemed to approach all of his early traxx with a wildstyle mindset. This was already over a decade old (an eternity in the nineties) by the time I first got to hear it, but it blew my mind nonetheless. If there's one record that I'd like to think my life sounds like, this is it.

86. Thomas Leer - 4 Movements

(Cherry Red: 1981)

Globetrotting synth pop from one of the pioneers of the form. Looking past the gloriously icy climate of his peers (this the era of Gary Numan, Fad Gadget and The Human League), Leer establishes a warm and astonishingly nimble sound here. Splitting the difference between Kraftwerk and Tonto's Expanding Head Band, while adding a bit of eighties pan-global jet set atmosphere for good measure (think Club Paradise and Jewel Of The Nile), this plays like a Balearic record out of some parallel universe. In ours, it wouldn't even occur to people to make something like this until about fifteen years later (see Jimi Tenor, Patrick Pulsinger, Uwe Schmidt et al.). Utterly indispensable for any electronic pop lover.

85. Motörhead - Motörhead

(Chiswick: 1977)

Bracingly intense, white-knuckled biker metal. Despite their reputation as speed-metal pioneers (their very name a slang term for speed freaks), on this, their very first record, the hangover of hard rock's James Brown-as-played-by-cavemen beats endures, informing the entirety of its blistering mid-section: one of my favorite rock 'n roll trips of all time, sounding like a two lane stretch of highway cutting deep into the Mojave desert.

84. Underground Resistance - Riot EP

(Underground Resistance: 1991)

UR in their undeniable prime, back when Jeff Mills and Rob Noise were still kicking it in the group with Mad Mike Banks and the crew came off like Detroit's very own Public Enemy. I love nearly everything they've put out, from space jazz to computer-age electro to no-nonsense techno - all of it was extraordinary - but they never hit harder than when they were intensifying Belgian hardcore. On the Riot EP, UR's conceptual brilliance collides with their Hard Music From A Hard City aesthetic, resulting in their definitive statement.

83. Billie Ray Martin - 4 Ambient Tales

(Apollo: 1993)

In which the German dancefloor chanteuse collaborates with The Grid for a double-EP of ambient blues. In the process, she briefly inhabits - maybe even invents - the role of ecstasy age post-canyon troubadour (amplified here by the presence of BJ Cole on pedal steel), fragile and coming down from the shattered heights of the rave dream. This fertile landscape would eventually provide sanctuary to artists like Beth Orton, Dido and Dot Allison, while stretching outward to color the sensibilities of projects like Broadcast and The Beta Band. The results here are as true to her vision of dark electronic soul as she would ever get and practically define the word majestic.

82. The English Beat - I Just Can't Stop It (U.S. Version)

(Sire: 1980)

New wave ska-pop, played with clockwork precision by The Beat. Tropical, breezy numbers like Hands Off... She's Mine and Rough Rider rule the day, although there's a definite undercurrent of dread beneath all of this day-glo pop, rising to the surface in Twist & Crawl and even Mirror In The Bathroom's unresolved paranoia. The U.S. version of this record is the one you want, as it includes two crucial extra cuts: Ranking Full Stop and a cover version of The Miracles' Tears Of A Clown, both of which add an extra dimension (and loads of charm) to the record.

81. SA-RA Creative Partners - Cosmic Dust/Cosmic Lust

(Jazzy Sport: 2005)

Machine Soul twisted to the nth degree. SA-RA were often at their best when they didn't even seem to be trying, and this two-part EP (that only ever surfaced in Japan) might be the best example. Instrumentals like Jumbo and Enter Sex Slop beam two decades worth of hip hop-infused r'n'b into deep space, while Love Stomp and Wonderful (the alien descendent of Stevie Wonder's 70's records) ply a sort of warped astral jazz. And the two ballads (sung from a space capsule), Intoxicated and We Can Do Anything, stand among the finest songs they've penned. It's a shame that Butterscotch (aka Frequencies), possibly their single greatest moment (and one that would have felt right at home in this company), remains unreleased.

80. Thelonious Monk - Genius Of Modern Music, Volume One

(Blue Note: 1951)

Early works by the jazz giant, recorded during his very first sessions as band leader. This well before his stellar run on Riverside and Columbia, which resulted in a flurry of great albums like Brilliant Corners and Solo Monk. Captured here is the initial supernova that eventually went on to generate those later works, shining as they do like stars in the firmament. A wild and intensely cerebral vision of jazz that finds careening bebop taken to logical abstraction.

79. Manuel Göttsching - E2-E4

(Inteam GmbH: 1984)

Manuel Göttsching, Krautrock guitarist extraordinaire, creates one of the great synth lines and then proceeds to construct an hour-long jam around the ebb and flow of his machines. The result is a marathon of spaced out proto-techno that gradually seemed to weave its way through the very DNA of electronic music in the ensuing decades. I first heard him on Terranova's Tokyo Tower way back in good old 1997, and he's remained one of my favorite guitarists ever since. His guitar sound here, as always, is exquisite.

78. Romanthony - The Wanderer

(Prescription: 1994)

Definitive statement from one of garage's true auteurs. This is supremely lush and soulful. A saga spread across four radically different versions, each managing to simultaneously contrast and complement the other, with the hypnotic electro pulse of CD Remix #9 and Fusion Dubb's cascading instrumental bliss running perpendicular to the wild pitch madness of Let Da Rhythm Move U, while the opening Journey Man Thump itself is extraordinarily haunting.

77. Associates - Sulk

(Associates: 1982)

A luminescent nocturnal paradise, and the precise point of intersection between post punk and new pop. Alan Rankine and Billy MacKenzie drape sheet after sheet of sound onto a staggering pileup of impenetrable texture that they somehow manage to mutate into a breathtaking sequence of fully formed, brilliant tunes. Billy MacKenzie's soaring, operatic vocals are about the only ones you could imagine successfully cutting through these densely populated soundscapes.

76. Mental Cube - Chile Of The Bass Generation

(Debut: 1990)

A pre-Future Sound Of London Dougans and Cobain get down to business with the title track, a rolling breakbeat monster, but the centerpiece is undoubtedly Q, an absolutely gorgeous peak-era rave anthem. As great as all of their later FSOL output was (Accelerator and ISDN among my favorites), their early records have a certain ravishing intensity, a rough-hewn charge, and this one is their masterpiece.

75. Fela Ransome Kuti & Africa 70 - Expensive Shit

(Editions Makossa: 1975)

Afrobeat icon's mightiest record, from that blistering offensive he ran during the seventies, a period when the man was simply a force of nature on a serious roll. The title track was inspired by a police raid on the Kalakuta Republic (the story of which is the stuff of legend), but it's the insouciant brilliance of b-side Water Get No Enemy that quietly sneaks up to steal the show and push this record out above the stiff competition. As the man once said, Music is the weapon of the future.

74. Chic - C'est Chic

(Atlantic: 1978)

The quintessential disco LP, and possibly the greatest, catches The Chic Organization in the middle of their late 70's winning streak: a period when they could do no wrong. It's lush, peak-era disco like Happy Man and I Want Your Love (not to mention the immortal Le Freak) that seem to be the obvious bounty here, yet the leisurely Savoir Faire (sounding like a lost instrumental from the Super Fly soundtrack) and gorgeous balladry of At Last I Am Free - almost undisclosed moments of pure elegance - match all those songs for beauty, with everything blending together to make this record such an undeniably strong one.

73. Herbie Hancock - Sextant

(Columbia: 1973)

Pure, elemental space jazz, in which gravity simply ceases to be a factor. This is the gateway record between Mwandishi's longform electric grooves and the full-on jazz funk of Head Hunters. The presence of one Dr. Patrick Gleason, working the ARPs, pushes this recording into the realm of pure tech jazz. A delirious odyssey into the deep black void of space and an obvious ancestor to later like-minded projects such as Galaxy 2 Galaxy, Innerzone Orchestra and Fretless AZM.

72. Roy Harper - Stormcock

(Harvest: 1971)

Four elegiac folk suites that burn with a white hot intensity. Everything here suffused with heartache and dread, yet staunchly refusing to ever fully give into the darkness. Harper's mournful vocals and spidery guitar weave their way through the orchestra's towering Gothic architecture, these great vaulting spires from which one can but observe the rolling, desolate tundra laid out below.

71. Kemet Crew - Champion Jungle Sound

(Kemet: 1995)

Categorically fierce ragga jungle from the golden age of rinsin' amens. Masterminds James and Mark X took the proper name for ancient Egypt to christen both their label and crew, all of whom are present here (plus Remarc, in a blistering cameo appearance). Tearing breakbeats are the order of the day, with subsonic bass charges and a militant atmosphere pervading the whole of this furious, uncompromising LP.

70. Kelela - Cut 4 Me

(Fade To Mind: 2013)

Dreamy post-grime r'n'b, moments of which make me think alternately of Detroit and The Prodigy. This a three-way collaboration between the Fade To Mind and Night Slugs crews (both dealers in dark electronic instrumentals) and Kelela, who lends her ethereal vocals to these already otherworldly backing tracks. The whole affair feels deeply surreal, as if this were a music heard through the lingering mists of a dream. Technically a mixtape, as an album-length statement it excels.

69. Wreckx-n-Effect - Rump Shaker

(MCA: 1992)

New Jack Swing. Teddy Riley's greatest moment, the Teddy 2 mix far superior to the album version. With the inclusion of that piano twinkling on the breeze, easing the tension of an interminable sax line from The Darkest Light, the whole thing is pushed to perfection as the groove's mesmerizing sway begins to lift into low orbit. I remember hearing this on the radio for the first time, as an 11 year old, and thinking that it sounded like a mirage in the desert (pyramids and palms dancing on the horizon). It wasn't until I finally tracked the record down, years later, that I realized what the song was actually about!

68. Virgo - Virgo

(Radical: 1989)

Sublime deep house from Chicago. Simply perfect, everything in its right place. Do You Know Who You Are and School Hall are among the most achingly beautiful songs ever written, while Ride and In A Vision map infinity: true hall of mirrors music. I'd been into house music for ages before finally managing to discover this thanks to a hot tip from Woebot, whose exceptional writing about music was a revelation, and for that I will forever be grateful.

67. Elton John - Tumbleweed Connection

(DJM: 1971)

Elton and Bernie Taupin, at this point still firmly in singer-songwriter mode, deliver their country western concept album. Almost musical-esque in execution, each song seems to follow one character while the next will drift on to focus on another (I've always recognized a kindred spirit in Come Down In Time). A front to back masterpiece with some of their most glorious songs; that it's almost obscure these days is a shame.

66. Don Cherry - Don Cherry

(Horizon: 1975)

A dense, hallucinatory vision of fourth world jazz. Don Cherry's crystal-clear tone cuts through this mercurial brew of boundless depth, a mesh of struck bells, electric piano, tambura, bass and percussion. Pure Ocean Of Sound music. Frank Lowe's presence here a revelation, his pellucid tenor licks shimmering like the very surface of the water.

65. Wailing Souls - The Wailing Souls

(Studio One: 1975)

Superb roots reggae LP on Coxsone Dodd's Studio One imprint. The Wailing Souls are one of the mightiest vocal groups of all time, their harmonies among the great elemental sounds in music, managing to effortlessly capture the feeling of pure joy and then whip around to endless longing in but a moment.

64. Sun Palace - Winning

(Passion: 1983)

Eighties jazz funk one-off. It's 1981: Keith O'Connell and Mike Collins, two British session men, get down in the studio with a Prophet 5 synth, Fender Rhodes, CR-78 rhythm box and electric bass, churning out this motorik bit of smooth jazz onto a demo tape and sounding completely out of time (think Hall & Oates and Carl Craig stuck in an elevator, making elevator music, and you won't be far off). The duo spent years trying to get a label to release it, until Passion Records (the soon-to-be parent label of Jumpin' & Pumpin') finally pressed it to wax directly from the original demo tape and gave them the epic name Sun Palace. The record wound up as a Loft Classic, and the rest is history.

63. Kelis - Wanderland

(Virgin: 2001)

Remarkably flawless longform work of pristine machine soul, produced by The Neptunes just as they were surfing their creative peak and released a matter of months after the first N*E*R*D album. Like the original electronic incarnation of that record, it was tragically buried at the time (never even receiving a U.S. release in this case). Still, a bunch of us bought the imports and played them obsessively. Of all the vocalists that The Neptunes worked with, Kelis always seemed to best articulate the Star Trak vision - that intriguing mix of stoned ennui and star-child optimism - and nowhere better than on this record's cosmic denouement.

62. Octave One - The Living Key (To Images From Above)

(430 West: 1997)

Moody, half-lit Detroit techno. This album links together two EPs from the preceding year: The Living Key and, you guessed it, Images From Above, tacking on the absorbingly lush Burujha to round out the set. Not a famous record, but an essential one. The sound that the Burden Brothers achieved during this era is utterly captivating: arcing fractals of percussion entwine mathematically precise drum patterns while shards of synthetic texture pierce vast burnished soundscapes, splashes of melodic color drifting wraithlike out of the darkness. Every element so modest, so low key, yet the combination is ruthlessly magnetic.

61. Genaside II - Narra Mine

(Hardcore Urban Music: 1990)

An absolute beast of a record, in which monumental waves of pressure build and build over endless, rolling breakbeats. Narra Mine is a lavishly melancholic stretch of widescreen ardkore, while the flipside's nightmare strains of urban paranoia rise like steam from twilight city streets. Guns of Brixton, indeed. Sharon Williams wails like a banshee and Killerman Archer's maniacal, rapid-fire toasting amplifies the tension every moment he's on the mic. Pure dread.

60. The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground

(MGM: 1969)

Sixties garage rock from New York, made gently with liquid guitars. Where the Velvets' rockers used to pound, they now glide smoothly, with gorgeous folk numbers being the order of the day. The Murder Mystery, their final concession to the avant garde, is an engrossing dive into the subconscious.

59. Françoise Hardy - Françoise Hardy

(Vogue: 1965)

Breezy French pop, and one of the greatest pure pop records ever. Sounding like ribbons of sunlight shimmering through stained glass, this is daydream music to fall in love to on a summer afternoon. The reluctant icon is accompanied here by the Charles Blackwell Orchestra, whose inventive flourishes provide a swooning, sumptuous palette of sound for Hardy to wistfully inhabit with inimitable style and grace.

58. Antonio Carlos Jobim - Jobim

(MCA: 1972)

Lush, haunting orchestral environments crafted by bossa nova's greatest composer. A seventies record through and through, this is an incredibly heavy listening experience. Songs stretch out over vast uncharted terrain, every corner of the soundscape cloaked in rich detail. There are entire worlds transcribed within the grooves of this record.

57. Martin Circus - Disco Circus

(Prelude: 1979)

French disco, prefiguring the likes of Daft Punk and Cassius by some fifteen years. Martin Circus were a rock band that drifted into disco's orbit for a couple albums, one of which spawned the original fourteen-minute version of this tune. Here, it gets reworked by the legendary François Kevorkian into a dazzling maximalist affair, crammed with nearly every sound you could imagine and capturing disco's essence within its shining seven minutes. The b-side, I've Got A Treat, is an infectiously sleazy bit of motorik Euro-disco.

56. Prince - For You

(Warner Bros.: 1978)

Half-lit bedroom disco from the nascent superstar. Maybe not as spectacularly widescreen as his staggering run of eighties records, there's still something very special about the sound here that draws you in. In Love and Soft And Wet have a deft, almost dainty, rhythmic touch to them, while ballads like Crazy You and So Blue sound improbably low key amidst his considerable slow jam repertoire. The undoubted climax is I'm Yours, an epic prog/funk workout that closes out the record in a thrilling crash of thunder, pointing gamely toward the future.

55. UGK - Ridin' Dirty

(Jive: 1996)

Bun B and Pimp C loom large over the history of Southern rap, having been in the game since virtually day one, and Ridin' Dirty is their ornately detailed masterpiece. The whole record glides in graceful slow motion, Pimp C and N.O. Joe's velvet-cushioned production forming a plush foundation for UGK's elliptical rhymes to dance over. An affinity with one DJ Screw can be felt throughout the blurred, spectral grooves of this LP, and nowhere more than the ghostly twilight vision of 3 In The Mornin'.

54. John Coltrane - Sun Ship

(Impulse!: 1965/1971)

Late-period Coltrane. These sessions, from 1965 (although the record itself was only posthumously released in 1971), are among the last to feature his classic quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. True space jazz in every sense, with Coltrane blasting through the stratosphere, slipping into zero gravity and back again as Elvin Jones pounds out the propulsion for this interplanetary starship's travels.

53. Zap Pow - River

(Zap Pow: 1977)

Psychedelic dub reggae 7", produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry at the Black Ark and at the peak of his powers. This sun-baked, hallucinatory underwater excursion seems to rise from the immense bass pressure of the titular river's bed, where everything churns and tumbles in a great slow-motion whirlpool, sucking you ever deeper into the hypnotic abyss.

52. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin III

(Atlantic: 1970)

Legendary rock band at their most arcane and mystical, veering from the hard blues of their first two records into a sort of unheimlich folk balladry. The proto-metal is still there - Immigrant Song, Celebration Day and Out On The Tiles - but now filtered through a medieval lense only occasionally hinted at before. That's The Way and Tangerine are two of their most bewitching acoustic numbers, while the majestic sway of Friends remains my absolute favorite moment in their oeuvre.

51. Shivkumar Sharma - Raga Madhuvanti

(HMV: 1975)

This mesmerizing Indian classical recording is quite simply magnificent. Shivkumar Sharma a true visionary and master of the form. His playing on the santoor never fails to be thoroughly captivating: hearing him work his magic is like watching someone coax time to a standstill. The added touch of those flickering, gently swaying rhythms make this my absolute favorite record of his.

50. David Bowie - Low

(RCA Victor: 1977)

Bowie in Berlin, taking on aspects of minimalism and Krautrock while transforming his plastic soul sound into something even more robotic in the process. Side one is crammed with strange, paranoid pop songs and shimmering instrumentals, while side two stretches out into an ambient landscape of Europe endlessness. This era of Bowie's (detailed in Bowie In Berlin: A New Career In A New Town, an excellent read) is ceaselessly fascinating to me, and remains a conduit to so much amazing music, amidst which this record more than holds its own as a masterpiece.

49. Eddie Palmieri - Exploration: Salsa-Descarga-Jazz

(Coco: 1978)

Far-out salsa, shot through with an unyielding sense of cosmic jazz exploration. Eddie Palmieri, often referred to as the sun of Latin music, has a great many first-rate records to choose from, but this one is my favorite (with Vamonos Pa'l Monte running a close second). Pulling together some of his wildest studio experiments (Cobarde's crazed ten minute salsa pulse and the almost modern classical Random Thoughts) with marathon live workouts recorded at the University of Puerto Rico (Chocolate Ice Cream and The Mod Scene), this record essays some of the man's outermost sonic precincts. Those improbable zero-gravity breaks on Condiciones Que Existen's low-slung barrio funk are a particularly impressive touch.

48. Billie Holiday - Solitude

(Verve: 1952)

Gorgeous vocal jazz shearing into proto-soul territory. Having informed so much great music throughout the years, it still remains entirely unmatched on its own terms. The very sound of this record is enchanting, infused as it is with pure depth and splendor. Billie Holiday, here still clear-voiced and resplendent (before the ravages of time and hard living took their toll), remains the greatest vocal presence jazz has ever seen. A record to lose yourself in.

47. Psyche/BFC - Elements 1989-1990

(Planet E: 1990/1996)

Majestic early techno relics from Detroit's Carl Craig, back when he was just a fresh-faced kid trying to make his mark on the culture. Each and every track would be a highlight in any other context, while in present company they all flow into one extended hypnotic sequence. Moody dancefloor burners like Crack Down and From Beyond flow effortlessly into the glorious breakbeat release of Please Stand By and out toward the elegiac ambient house of How The West Was Won, while the peerless Neurotic Behavior still sounds like a record from another age... wholly timeless and too magnificent for words.

46. Suicide - Suicide: Alan Vega · Martin Rev

(Antilles: 1980)

No Wave duo get atmospheric with Ric Ocasek in the producer's chair, stretching the sounds of the debut's most sumptuous passages out across the entirety of their second full-length. Diamond, Fur Coats And Champagne sets the stage with a casually ethereal groove, while the duo map their sound's spaciest precincts in the eerie freeform calm of Las Vegas Man and Harlem.

45. The Isley Brothers - The Heat Is On

(T-Neck: 1975)

Long-running legends riding the crest of their mid-seventies 3 + 3 era, arguably the band's peak. Prefigures Bowie and Eno's Berlin-era methodology, in which the uptempo numbers fill out side one while the second is given over to pure atmosphere: in this case melting into a sidelong mix of ambient soul, the ravishing synths of which are exceptionally lush and sun-glazed.

44. Brian Eno - Before And After Science

(Island: 1977)

Speaking of which, Eno's Berlin-era album is absolutely essential listening, of a piece with his earlier classic Another Green World (a crucial record for me, just barely outshined by this one). Here, Eno examines the lush vegetation of that world from an entirely different perspective: that of the laboratory (the domain of science), and the elegant precision exercised therein is thoroughly modern. Even as strange almost-pop songs gradually give way to pure ambience, the former seem to inform the latter (and vice versa), melting together in a state of perfect harmony.

43. Arthur Russell - In The Light Of The Miracle

(Talkin' Loud: 1995)

By my estimation Arthur Russell's finest moment, fusing the introspective nature of his World Of Echo material with the strange propulsion of his leftfield disco records like Let's Go Swimming and Wax The Van. This is a vision of the dancefloor that stretches far beyond the walls of the city, out across the great plains and into the deep blue horizon, spreading joyously outward as far as the eye can see.

42. Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington - Recording Together For The First Time

(Roulette Jazz: 1961)

Two old timers who've seen it all finally get a chance to meet up in the studio, laying down crisp re-workings of a bunch of classic Ellington-penned numbers. This is quite possibly the purest glimpse into the very essence of jazz ever put to tape. Even as these two legends swing together like it ain't no thang, they sound for all the world like they're jamming in orbit on the space station.

41. Simple Minds - Real To Real Cacophony

(Arista: 1979)

Weird new wave. Literally overflowing with ideas and travelling in every direction at once. Spiky rockers like Citizen cut their way out of the murky depths even as moody instrumentals like Film Theme revel in them, while mid-tempo club burners like Premonition crop up to inhabit the space between. Veldt, a maddening slice of pure atmospheric paranoia, even breaks out into a pleasantly menacing skank. For me, an unquestionably crucial record.

40. James Brown - Hell

(Polydor: 1974)

The godfather's dense double-album, rife with an overwhelming sense of seventies dread, yet at the same time home to some of his most gorgeous ballads. The fourteen-minute closing stretch of Papa Don't Take No Mess, one of his greatest extended workouts, is an obvious standout, while the Latin-tinged reworking of Please, Please, Please a hidden gem that hints at the remarkable breadth of this LP. I can't think of another record remotely like it.

39. Jungle Brothers - J. Beez Wit The Remedy

(Warner Bros.: 1993)

Skewed hip hop from this visionary Brooklyn crew. If their first LP gave birth to the Native Tongues era then this one effectively laid it to rest. Decomposed beats, subsonic bass pulses and random machine bleeps punctuate these gaussian blurred samplescapes within which Eugene McDaniels and Public Enemy rub shoulders with The Stooges. The results are a kaleidoscopic hallucination of hip hop: bizarre, druggy and in the end, their crowning achievement.

38. SWV - Can We

(Jive: 1997)

Nineties r'n'b. A glistening, four-dimensional soundscape that seems to morph and gyrate like liquid clockwork. Here, the swingbeat girl group hook up with Timbaland and Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott (at an early peak, when everything they touched turned gold) to produce this casually futuristic one off - and a highlight for all parties involved - realigning SWV for the chrome age.

37. Moodymann - Black Mahogani

(Peacefrog: 2004)

Sub-conscious deep house, where the border between electronic and live instrumentation decomposes to the point that its hard to tell where the programming stops and the band begins. I'm Doing Fine embodies this seamless symbiosis, while the juke joint boogie of traxx like Shades Of Jae and Back At Bakers (On Livernois) form a perfect counterpoint to the spectral jazz found in Holiday and I Need You So Much. Riley's Song, no more than a bassline groaning in slow motion beneath layers of ghostly atmosphere, nearly manages to steal the show, while the Mahogani 9000/Black Mahogani suite that closes the album (and memorably quotes Eddie and Priest from Super Fly) could go on forever and I wouldn't mind.

36. Ray Charles - Yes Indeed!

(Atlantic: 1959)

The original soul man's second full-length is an indispensable glimpse into his signature vision of rhythm & blues. Exquisite backing vocals from the ever-reliable Raelets add a swaying finesse to this already remarkable material, sweeping from the spectral crawl of It's All Right to the carefree shuffle of Swanee River Rock, through the rave up threat of Leave My Woman Alone and on to the back door blues of Blackjack. The all-encompassing breadth of vision outlined in this sequence of fourteen flawless tunes is truly staggering.

35. 4 Hero - Parallel Universe

(Reinforced: 1994)

Dego and Marc Mac, operating out of their studio in Dollis Hill (located next door to The Future Sound Of London's), charted rave's trajectory from the intensity of its hardcore origins through the depths of the darkside, ultimately arriving at this distant outpost of interplanetary jungle. Yet even as they connect with the lush space jazz of Galaxy 2 Galaxy and Herbie Hancock, they still manage to retain the rhythmic danger from even the most twisted of their earlier records. If anything, that fury gets amplified in Wrinkles In Time and Sounds From The Black Hole: astonishing displays of breakbeat science as you're ever likely to find.

34. Scott Walker - Scott 4

(Philips: 1969)

Avant garde crooner's finest moment. An existential rumination on the certainty of death and dues, and a flawless work of orchestral grandeur. The Seventh Seal and The Old Man's Back Again are so majestic that they practically beggar belief on first listen, while the fragile moments (Boy Child, Duchess) are among the most exquisite songs he's ever written.

33. King Tubby - Dub From The Roots

(Total Sounds: 1974)

Awesome dub reggae LP from this pioneering architect of the form. The drums splash, the hi-hats skip and the bass cuts massive caverns beneath a soundscape in which everything exists as texture. This is a dusty, planet-shaking sound: simultaneously futuristic and ancient. Invasion, kicking off with those rude synth bleeps, could soundtrack the boarding of Zion in William Gibson's Neuromancer. In a word, massive.

32. Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Safe As Milk

(Buddah: 1967)

The fabled outsider checks in with his first LP of abstract blues, burning with raw garage punk fury and a set of unforgettable tunes. A remarkably early intervention for this sort of rootsy swagger (The Stones still mining psychedelia in '67), at times so dynamically gnarled that it seems to reach forward and predict the next ten years of rock's progression.

31. Smith & Mighty featuring Alice Perera - DJ-Kicks EP

(Studio !K7: 1998)

Bristol trip hop from the originators of the form. Nearly all of their records are splendid, but this little EP, recorded as a companion to their brilliant DJ-Kicks mix on Studio !K7, distills everything great about the crew into one exceedingly lush slice of perfection. Like some hazy afternoon vista bathed in mist, this sun-glazed melancholia feels like a daydream that lasts deep into the night. The remix on the flip is a bit of storming UK hip hop, featuring an uncredited MC Kelz. I've always loved the way that each version samples a bit of vocal from the other. This is one of those records that never fails to bring the memories flooding back, and along with the accompanying mix was the soundtrack to the better part of my final year in high school.

30. Neu! - Neu! '75

(Brain: 1975)

Motorik Krautrock speeding down an endless stretch of highway, this also possesses some of their gentlest moments. Seeland, in particular, sounds exactly like the sunrise looks when you're up early enough to watch the world wake. The flipside of the coin boasts Hero and After Eight, two exhilarating proto-punk onslaughts that achieve a sort of rock 'n roll perfection.

29. Marvin Gaye - Here, My Dear

(Tamla: 1978)

Spaced out smooth soul. The confessional nature of the material - focusing on the disintegration of Gaye's marriage to Anna Gordy - marks it out as unique, especially within the context of late 70's boogie-tinged soul. I've often felt that parts of this record (especially A Funky Space Reincarnation and Is That Enough) share an affinity with certain records by The Orb, prefiguring that same extra-dimensional sense of gently shimmering psychedelia.

28. Rammellzee vs. K-Rob - Beat Bop

(Tartown: 1983)

Early hip hop's mad visionary stretches out in this loping sidelong groove, coming on like a hip hop update of Sly Stone's Africa Talks To You/The Asphalt Jungle. Jean-Michel Basquiat's production is crisp and spacious as his diagram on the sleeve, and no other MC had more claim to be dropping science than Rammellzee.

27. Kate Bush - The Dreaming

(EMI: 1982)

Strange, cutting edge art-pop constructed with heavy use of the Fairlight sampler by this visionary British songstress. Kate is incredibly moving throughout, her voice a controlled fury at the center of these fiercely brilliant songs, wherein she deftly coalesces shards of pure sound into form much like a nebula gradually becomes a star. Choosing highlights is virtually impossible, for as surely as each song differs wildly from the other, they're simultaneously all of a piece, the jigsaw edges of each locking with the others into a seamless fabric of inner space.

26. Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges - Clube Da Esquina

(Odeon: 1972)

Landmark Brazilian double album, brimming with pure majesty and splendor. Grounded in Tropicália and samba, there are also deep currents of acid-psyche and even space rock running through its core. The Clube Da Esquina group achieve such an absorbing widescreen sound here, launching off into hitherto unexplored and expansive realms, that its difficult not to get lost in the very sound of the record. Trust me, you'll want to set aside an afternoon for this one...

25. E-Dancer - Velocity Funk

(KMS: 1997)

Stomping Detroit techno from Kevin Saunderson, a figure who more than any other has had a profound influence on my own musical life. Around this time, there were loads of great records coming out of Detroit, which was enjoying one of its periodic renaissances. For me this was the apex. Velocity Funk is a pounding hardcore banger that seemed to be everywhere at the time (see also Stacey Pullen's remix), but it's World Of Deep on the flip - with that deeply haunting bassline and sheer, rolling waves of psychedelic sound - that really captured my imagination.

24. King Sunny Adé & His African Beats - Check 'E'

(Sunny Alade: 1981)

Nigerian juju from King Sunny Adé on his own Sunny Alade imprint, with both sides of the record encompassed by these great, effortlessly flowing suites. The steel guitar sound heard here stands among my favorite pure sounds ever, gliding through a poly-rhythmic web of backing guitars and percussion as they churn beneath those gently chiming bells. His show at The Belly Up a few years back was a real treat, and remains one of the great concert experiences of my life.

23. Gwen Guthrie - Padlock

(Garage: 1983)

Eighties post-disco stretched out and dubbed to abstraction by Larry Levan. This whole mini-album flows together into one long kaleidoscopic mix, the bedrock rhythms of the peerless Compass Point All Stars (Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, Darryl Thompson and Wally Badarou) gently tumbling out into space. Gwen always had such a warm presence that she invested in her music and this is no exception.

22. Bobby Byrd - Back From The Dead

(International Brothers: 1974)

Gritty, apocalyptic funk from the man who mentored a young James Brown and anchored the legendary J.B.'s. The horn fanfare on Back From The Dead is one of the great openings of all time to one of the mightiest funk songs ever laid down, and The Way To Get Down on the flip might even be better.

21. Junior Byles - Beat Down Babylon

(Dynamic Sounds: 1972)

Marvelous roots reggae LP wherein each and every song is immortal, every note perfectly played and Byles' voice outstanding. Lavishly produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry after his falling out with The Wailers (for anyone wanting to investigate reggae music as thoroughly as it deserves, Lloyd Bradley's indispensable Bass Culture tome is essential reading), you can especially hear his fingerprints all over Coming Home. Everything here shot through with a gentle melodic sway so intoxicating that it's sometimes difficult not to simply let the record play out all day. A front to back masterpiece.

20. A Guy Called Gerald - 28 Gun Bad Boy

(Juice Box: 1993)

Awesome proto-jungle. From his early tenure in 808 State and the Voodoo Ray/Automanikk era to his status as a drum 'n bass innovator, Manchester's Gerald Simpson looms large over British dance music. This album is the culmination of early records on his own Juice Box imprint, with which he essentially forged the idea of jungle out of an interface between his techno past and hardcore present. It's the sound of a restlessly inventive dreamer kicking through the ceiling and into the clouds. To this day, it remains full of possibilities.

19. Sun Ra And His Astro Infinity Arkestra - Atlantis

(Saturn: 1969)

Space age jazz from this tireless innovator who managed to maintain his Arkestra through the four decades after big band's golden age until his death. The first side features Ra experimenting with the newly issued Hohner Clavinet, while the second is given over to the sidelong wild free jazz excursion Atlantis, sounding like a field recording of that mythical empire's cataclysmic descent into the sea.

18. Adam And The Ants - Dirk Wears White Sox (U.S. Version)

(Epic: 1980)

Adam Ant was the first artist I ever got into in a big way, and my enthusiasm never waned: a definite case where I love nearly everything he's done. This is the man at his most raw and unvarnished, plying a sort of angular new wave post punk... with a hefty dose of rock 'n roll thrown in for good measure. His early band, an entirely different proposition than the one that would make it big a year later, is one of the great turn-on-a-dime powerhouse units in rock. The U.S. version includes both sides of the phenomenal Zerox/Whip In My Valise, tracks that blew me away when I first heard them as a 14 year old. I can't tell you how happy I was that his recent show at 4th & B leaned so heavily on this material.

17. Talk Talk - Spirit Of Eden

(Parlophone: 1988)

Embryonic post-rock, from a time when it was still a genre yet to exist. These erstwhile new romantics stretch out far beyond the dancefloor into a state of permanent abyss. It's the omnipresent, swelling Hammond organ that elevates this just above Laughing Stock (perhaps the more obvious choice) for me, the impassioned vocals of Mark Hollis doubly poignant in this context. Possessing a gently smoldering intensity, their music is disarmingly spiritual and direct.

16. Jamie Principle - Waiting On My Angel

(Persona: 1985)

Jamie Principle's improbably early house missive, arriving out of the ether fully-formed on his own Persona imprint. Dreamlike and haunting in all three versions, this is a wholly alien music even within the context of its own scene. It's a tragedy that such an obviously massive talent got such a raw deal, often not even getting credit on the sleeves of his own records. If there's one house artist that I wish had the chance to record an album in the eighties, its Jamie Principle.

15. Miles Davis - Get Up With It

(Columbia: 1974)

Fusion - in this case the elements fused being earth and fire - an untold substance then molded into these towering, monumental grooves. He Loved Him Madly is a 32-minute dedication to the late Duke Ellington, ambient jazz picking up where In A Silent Way left off, while Calypso Frelimo and Maiysha establish some spooky fourth world voodoo.

14. Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure

(Island: 1973)

Gothic glam rock, with Brian Eno still in the fold, generating his inimitable atmospherics and pushing the whole affair down some thoroughly surreal avenues. Bryan Ferry still sounds alien on each of these haunting numbers, while the band inhabits an island all their own. The Bogus Man and In Every Dream Home A Heartache are particularly obsessive and dreamlike, while Editions Of You never fails to burn the house down.

13. The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland

(Reprise: 1968)

Hendrix the futurist in experimental mode as The Experience launch into deep space, touching on everything from hard rock (Voodoo Child (Slight Return)) to space music 1983...(A Merman I Should Turn To Be) and everything in between (including Gypsy Eyes and Crosstown Traffic, both improbably forward-thinking, wild breakbeat stormers) on this blazing, nomadic double-LP.

12. The Beatles - Beatles For Sale

(Parlophone: 1964)

The Beatles at their most vulnerable and downcast, captured here on the cusp of their transition from infectious power pop to beatnik-inflected folk rock into psychedelia and beyond. The seeds of the groups endlessly fertile mid-period are here. Teeming with youthful passion, this record captures the intensity with which one seems to experience everything as a teenager.

11. The Meters - The Meters

(Josie: 1969)

Definitive New Orleans funk. The first LP from this group of loose-limbed legends and one of the great bands of all time. Everything here so disciplined and clean that its hard to believe it was recorded in 1969 (the year of Woodstock, endless jamming, etc. etc. etc.). This is a sparse instrumental funk that rocked like hip hop long before it was ever even sampled, existing in a class all its own.

10. The Stooges - Fun House

(Elektra: 1970)

Molten rock 'n roll. Iggy Pop is as ferocious here as he would ever be, while the band try their hardest to drown him out in this densely tangled sonic jungle. Of course you don't just drown out Iggy Pop, but you can still hear him clearing all those sonic vines out of his way in a panic (Let me in!). The sound this nasty bunch of thugs summon here is elemental.

9. Nicolette - Now Is Early

(Shut Up And Dance: 1992)

A singular collection of proto-jungle torch songs produced by Shut Up And Dance. Sounding out of time in part thanks to their visionary, stripped down production, these skittering avant pop numbers are also shot through with a deep sense of the uncanny - which is entirely down to Nicolette. A truly unique songwriter and vocalist, skewed in the best possible sense, her records and guest spots are all defined by their idiosyncratic brilliance. Now Is Early, her debut, is positively steeped in it. An unheralded masterpiece.

8. Kraftwerk - Computer World

(Kling Klang: 1981)

Exquisitely poised Germans further mechanize their sound and casually invent electro in the process. Home to some of the warmest synths you will ever hear. For me, this beats The Man-Machine by only the slightest margin, those next-level beats the deciding factor. Possibly the most perfect record ever made with machines.

7. Curtis Mayfield - Roots

(Curtom: 1971)

Visionary soul man's second studio LP, a work of majestic orchestral soul festooned with his sublime guitar work. Astonishingly innovative, full of breathtaking sonic vistas that stretch as far as the eye can see, crawling with the dense stylings of his orchestra and anchored by a backbeat that spells doom. Mayfield is there to guide you through it all, honest and touching as ever.

6. The Byrds - Fifth Dimension

(Columbia: 1966)

Folk-rockers expand their sound into hitherto unexplored territory, informed by their deep admiration of both John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, and wind up inventing acid rock in the process. Here, their straight folk numbers are perfected in the shimmering Wild Mountain Thyme and John Riley, while Eight Miles High (Gene Clark's parting gift to the band) sees them soar to unprecedented heights (further explored in I See You and What's Happening?!?!). Even the tracks that didn't make the cut (Psychodrama City, in particular) are phenomenal.

5. Tricky - Maxinquaye

(4th & Broadway: 1995)

Epochal trip hop debut from Tricky, wherein he rewrites the rule book, cuts it to pieces and then tapes it back together in an order of his choosing. By way of example, Aftermath's casually brilliant, loping groove (co-produced with Mark Stewart) stitches together bits of rhythm from Marvin Gaye and LL Cool J, samples dialogue from Blade Runner and quotes from both David Sylvian and The Rascals. Tricky's murmur anchors the pervading atmosphere of dread as Martina's ghostly wail haunts every corner of the soundscape. Oh yeah... and Hell Is Around The Corner is my favorite song ever.

4. Can - Future Days

(United Artists: 1974)

Legendary German band at their most aqueous, their telepathic interplay lifting off into the upper atmosphere. Damo Suzuki, with one foot out the door, sounds too hip to be happy as he casually lays down his most soothing set of vocals on a Can record. Moonshake is an irresistibly slinky groove and the band's greatest pop moment, while Bel Air, the sidelong jam that encompasses the entirety of the second side, is so lush and expansive that it seems capable of supporting its own ecosystem.

3. Sly & The Family Stone - There's A Riot Goin' On

(Epic: 1971)

Sly Stone's dusted masterpiece, sounding like his Woodstock-era recordings left out and faded by the sun. Crawling rhythms from ancient beatboxes spiral off into infinity, every edge of the soundscape blunted and out of focus, as timeworn tapes spool out in blurred slow-motion. The tempos drag, the prevailing mood is downbeat and the sound itself is divine.

2. Rhythim Is Rhythim - The Beginning

(Transmat: 1990)

Derrick May surfing a wave of pure innovation. The greatest techno record ever made bar none. Simultaneously cerebral and driving, it appeals to the mind and body in equal measure. That it's muted reception at the hands of the critics was partly responsible for the man's untimely retirement is a shame. The Beginning itself might be the undeniable centerpiece, but from the dazzling technoid disco of Drama to the geometric precision of Emanon and Salsa Life's tuff versioning of Strings, every track is sublime.

1. Big Audio Dynamite - Megatop Phoenix

(Columbia: 1989)

Number One. My favorite record of all time, no question. Always drawn to Contact, the record's big single, I was blown away when I finally tracked down a copy of the full album - a sonic utopia where pop music meets the rave. This is where Mick Jones' fascination with sampladelia is fully absorbed into his immortal knack for penning a tune, resulting in a true embarrassment of riches. Someday I'll write a book about this record.