Nigel Rolfe
Island Stories

ELECTRIC JALABAEl Hal The FeelingStrutElectric Jalaba comprises six accomplished musicians with an empathy that feels telepathic and a groove that immerses. In Arabic, the mother tongue of Moroccan-born singer and guimbri player Simo Lagnawi, a leading practitioner of Gnawa music in Britain, they call this indefinable quality, “El Hal” – “The feeling”. “It’s the feeling that comes when we’re playing and totally forgetting where we are,” says producer and bassist Olly Keen. “The feeling of being grabbed by the music and lost in the groove.”El Hal is the new third album from Electric Jalaba and their first release in five years. It’s a multi-faceted work that finds the band tighter than ever, deploying a vast cache of influences across nine tracks improvised and developed in their south London studio then deftly produced by Keen. Some tracks pay homage to the origins of Gnawa music, whose repertoire of Arabic-language praise songs contains remnants of West African dialects – Bambara from Mali, Fulani and Hausa from the Sahel region – that point to a centuries-old migration.

Dishing out dividends like the Devil himself, mysterious Dutch junglist Colder Leader continues his rich vein of vinyl form with 'Just Business'. 'Good To Go' turns the boardroom into a bedroom with its dreamy chords, bouncy bassline and warm tones while 'Cold Sees You' calls accounts into the meeting only to hear that the forecast for this year's profits are glacial at their most optimistic. 2 Bad Snowballs enter the negotiations for a final roll of the remix dice and trigger the biggest merger since Exxon and Mobil. Greasy.COLD LEADERJust Business EPCold Leader

Original press from 2013. Loud and clear.

A1 132 - A2 128 / B1 130 - B2 83

Salutations features twelve pieces of new music from artists near and dear to RVNG’s sphere, including Isik Kural, Satomimagae, vhvl, Visible Cloaks, Sign Libra, Dialect, Batu, Anna Homler, Diatom Deli, Emily A. Sprague, Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith, and Wayne Phoenix. The vinyl edition expands on the spirit of correspondence with poetry readings by Zoe Brezsny, Ivanna Baranova, Tessa Bolsover, Jessica Rae Elsaesser, and Luciá Hinojosa Gaxiola, assembled by Breszny and RVNG.Salutations signals a series of meetings, greetings, group assemblies and exercises along the invisible plane created through correspondence. This is the inaugural compilation of new music from RVNG, inspired in part by a collaboration with Adult Swim. The question of how similar we are arises in the simple form of contact, and how we choose to embrace the potential of that moment and one another. Through correspondence, we connect, communicate, and form community. At first, correspondents with one another, and through the processes of collaboration and transmission, we correspond to parallel and intersecting collective cores.This eternal network, perhaps informed (consciously or subconsciously) by some celestial or spiritual force, becomes a portal to practice social responsibility and an access point to a wider, inclusive universe of information. In turn, the network becomes a human phenomenon, as well as a potent demonstration of art and collectivism. As the world heals, and evolves through future changes, having t his network in place provides a vessel to and grow / glow beyond our corporeal state.On behalf of Salutations, a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit A.B.O. Comix, a collective of creators and activists who work to amplify the voices of LGBTQ prisoners through art, and link them with freeworld penpal

Depuis son premier album en 2011, Hollie Cook s’est imposée en matière de reggae revival de cette décennie. La protégée de Prince Fatty s’est rapidement démarquée du lot pour son mélange de reggae et de tropical-pop notamment parce qu’elle fut membre du groupe The Slits, ce qui explique cela. Quatre ans après son second album remarquable nommée Twice, l’éternelle fille de Paul Cook (batteur des Sex Pistols) a décidé d’effectuer un grand saut en signant chez Merge Records pour son troisième opus nommé Vessel of Love.