Paraphrasing the Soul Sonic Force and sorting through today`s releases for tunes that could have graced Alfie & Leo’s Amnesia dance-floor…

Néstor Álvarez / Kinky Afro Cuban / Original Gravity

This 45 was first released in 2020, but has very recently got a repress. A big band Latin boogaloo cover of Happy Mondays’ Kinky Afro, it summons scenes of a hot steamy summer’s day in 70s New York. Pimps strutting. Music blasting from every window. Kids cooling off, shooting the pump. Shaun Ryder’s scathing boast / toast aimed at his dad – slips in and out of English and Spanish, backed by brass, flute, vibes, high quality keys and terrific trumpet and saxophone solos. I was hipped to this after finding, care of the same label, Original Gravity, Junior Dell’s reggae version of The Monday’s Step On. There’s also a highly sought after Oasis cover.

Brochure / Joking / Soft Rocks For Hard Times 

Universal Cave’s Soft Rock For Hard Times offshoot has a new 7” lined up. Just like the label’s previous 2 releases it pairs a modern cover of a vintage un-classic with an equally contemporary remix. In this case the trio Brochure reinterpret Canadian Celine Lomez’s 1980 b-side, Joking. The new production is rich, electronic, downtempo and dubby, while the vocals and melody are appropriately – given the imprint’s handle – Doobie Brothers-esque. A short, but brilliant blues-born guitar solo also accompanies the song, which is a broken-hearted ballad. Utilising a drum break just as broken, Universal Cave themselves deliver a stripped back mix. Stirring in acoustic strum and fragments of funky clavinet. Osprey 2 then do a radical overhaul. Fusing the echoed lovelorn chorus to a rocking motorik rhythm section. Cosmic sound effects come in showers, and synth sequences spin and spiral like chopper rotor blades, amidst crashing cathartic cymbals.

Discotecas 006

The latest Discotecas contains 4 cannily looped cuts. All of them revisiting rave, with breakbeats, rattling robotic snares, and seismic “bleep & bass” bottom end. Perceptive is punctuated by a plummy English voice, probably sampled from a vintage black and white public announcement film – and consequently put me in mind of The Prodigy’s Charly. Kazbah features pitched up ethnic chants – as if sung by chipmunks – over an accelerated Eric B beat. Base Instinct is a skippy mutant UKG groove, with scything hi-hats / cymbals. Ask A Dream has its tempo tempered a tad by a funky b-line, plus strings and vocal purloined from an introspective 80s Balearic / pop favourite, and stirs a little scream-up piano into the pot. 

DJ Koco aka Shimokita & 45 Trio / World Famous / Bloom

DJ Koco aka Shimokita, after blowing the entire globe’s mind with his turntable skills during the lockdowns, via Instagram, has since very successfully taken his show on the road. Doing his incredible stuff at countless festivals. He’s now gone into the studio with Flower Records’ 45 Trio to record an album. The first fruit of these sessions is a cover of Malcolm McLaren’s World Famous – lifted from the game-changing LP, Duck Rock. Together they take what was a minute and a half interlude and transform it into a brilliant Balearic start-or-end-of-the-nighter. Masahiko Kubo lays down a Cuban conga’d beat alongside Junichi Sunayama’s sometimes slapped bass, while Shingo Hirakawa’s piano jazzily vamps on the OG’s familiar melody. Moving between lively Latin, dancing and prancing, and some serious rolling when necessary. The vibe’s that of an `80s Italian pop-jazz B-side. The sort of thing that aficionados get in a sweat over.

Dub Syndicate / Right Back To Your Soul / On-U Sound

On-U Sound have released a second single from the forthcoming Dub Syndicate album, Obscured By Version. The LP collects slightly reworked archive takes of rhythms from across the band’s sort of second incarnation, when drummer Style Scott took over the creative reigns. All of the tracks are exclusives. Right Back To Your Soul is a lovely, laidback, melodica-led riff on a tune called Rock Back, which featured on the 1993 album Echomania. Scott cut the rhythm at Rohan Richards’ Leggo Studios, on Orange Street, in Kingston, Jamaica, while Adrian Sherwood took charge of the overdubs and final mix at On-U, which was at the time based in Walthamstow.

The new shake is ridiculously warm, riding the rigorous rumbling of an incredible bass-line. Rimshots echo, Sherwood just can’t help himself, and the groove now stops and starts giving the jazzy keys space to shine. I have to admit that I’m not quite sure whose responsible for the piano’s classy rippling, since the 90s sessions already included keyboardists Franklyn “Bubbler” Waul and Carlton “Bubblers” Ogilvie, while for the new mixes Cyrus Richard was also enlisted.

Yasushi Ide / Galactic Beats (Love Injection Mixes) / Grand Gallery

Around a year ago, Love Injection licensed Karou Inoue’s remixes of Yasushi Ide’s A Place In The Sun. Now they’ve remixed Ide’s Galactic Beats. Taken from his 2022 album Cosmic Suite Vol. 2, which featured a star-studded cast of contributors, from Don Letts to Jeff Mills, the original is a Tony Allen-driven Afrobeat groove. Love Injection radically reduce, strip back, the full band feel, and describe the results themselves as “for fans of Sun Palace and Ashra.” The pair adding a Rude Movements drum machine and a Chicago house b-line, while shifting the spotlight to some intricate 6-string picking. The bass kinda undulates as synths rise in celebratory swells. The keys could have come from an Arthur Russell record. The damn fine fretwork freefalling, spinning, spiralling, in Manuel Gottsching-esque kosmische gymnastics. Apparently at the moment this is only available on a Japanese mix CD. Hopefully, at the very least, Bandcamp downloads are coming. 

Omar / This Thing Called Life (Instrumental) / BBE

British soul legend Omar Lye-Fook has signed to BBE. Ahead of an album the label have issued a limited edition 45. I don’t think either of the tracks will be on the LP. This Thing Called Life is an epic instrumental. Its opulent orchestration encompasses strings, keys, harp and flute. Combining plucked pizzicato patterns with clipped rhythm guitar, its groove is dramatic and romantic. Somewhere between Barry White’s Love Unlimited and Isaac Hayes enjoying a ménage à trois.

PÔT-POT / Sibson Remixes / Comandate 

Portugal-based space rock 5-piece, PÔT-POT, get remixed by Ban Ban Ton Ton’s old mucker Mikey Sibson. Mikey, having relocated to Libson, has helped form a collective, called Comandante, throwing parties and now launching a label. His rework of No Friends mixes the band’s psychedelic guitar gymnastics with pumping progressive house. Buzzing, fizzing electronics cutting a rug with drones and chopped up fuzzboxed riffs. Mikey then turns Warsaw into something harder and darker. Jacking, but more techno-edged. Grounded by a growling bass-line, the “rock” now reduced to percussive ringing and serrated siren-like effects. A4 is slower, sinister, sort of industrial, powered by a steam-punk piston pulse. The singer is shredded. The 6-string noise shaken, phased and filtered. Collaged beats get a Balearic indie-rock / dance crossover go-go-not-go-go groove thing going.

Secret Soul Society / Julian’s Cabbages / Magic Wand

Having contributed to a couple of Magic Wand releases – numbers 16 and 17 – back in 2022, Cal Gibson’s Secret Soul Society now get a whole “Special Edition” to themselves. The 12 contains 4 forays into Cal’s trademark loopy, layered, filtered, echoed dub-influenced boogie sound. Next To You is a proper party-starting groove. Make It All True and Finally Got My Life Together both borrow blue-eyed soft / yacht rock vocals. A TB-303 gently tickles the former, creating something part early Seahawks, part Ultramarine’s Stella. The latter is a chilled concoction of cool percussion and synthesised sighs until the singer states, “I’ve been living it up”, setting off bursts of twisted, distorted bleeps. The title track, Julian’s Cabbages is punctuated by home computer “game over” cues and samples the “Double Or Drop” quiz from the `70s UK kids’ TV show Crackerjack.  

Thread Heather / La Distance / Diskotopia

Matt “A Taut Line” Lyne debuts a new creative alias, Thread Heather, with a 4-track E.P. titled La Distance. In the press, Matt lists a whole load of influences from Larry Heard and Moodymann to Jam & Spoon, so it’s no surprise that the common foundation here is house. How it goes is a chopped, choppy cut that busily bumps sliced and diced of bass and beats together. A bit jazzy, a bit broken, the hooks come in the form of a fragmented field recorded apology and a flute loop. The title number is constructed from a cool chunk of keys and percussion, with a new age-y synth singing, appropriately far away on the horizon. Treated blasts of rasping reed intro and outro Old Haunts Of The Blessed, which again has a sort of jazzy feel. However, with twisted modal chords and cathartic / spiritual cymbal crashing, it’s a lot moodier. A little like if you put a dancefloor 4 / 4 under Portishead. The highlight, though, for me, is Moment To Moment, a top quality piece of proper pounding old school techno. Urgent and energetic, it’s all about the infectious, relentless Rhythim (Is Rhythim). Its tearaway traditional percussion tapping into something tribal, while seemingly tipping its hat to funky early 90s Detroit tracks, such as Stacey Pullen aka Kosmic Messenger aka Bango’s Soundscape and Ritual Beating System.