Various
Oz Echoes: DIY Cassettes And Archives 1980​-​1989

from the artist's bandcamp: ...TALKING OF POST-TECH DIALECTICS,THIS IS A TRIBUTE TO THE CYBERPUNK.The mother of technology collapses. Ten fragments of her soul are spread in cyberspace. The last encoder composes the pieces to a manifest. A poem that is a call for the distortion of the artificial.Manifest is an album, in which CORIN synthesizes the reconciliation of the dystopian and utopian. It is a story of manipulated time that exists out of instrumental and vocal proportions.

boomkat: ...Peter Mekwunye aka Pedro’s self-released side of homebrew boogie pop is a total one-of-a-kind find dating to 1993 Portland, OR, and has been newly discovered by Musique Plastique, who issued Visible Cloaks eponymous debut LP in 2015. Trust that you’ve hardly ever heard such a raw, lo-fi slab so full of soul and vibes as One Kind of Love!As a new arrival from Nigeria to Portland, OR in North West America, Peter Mekwunye assembled a small home studio consisting of casio keyboard, microphone and a multitrack recorder to realise his dream of making and releasing his own music a reality with One Kind of Love. As these things go, Peter self-distributed the album on tape to local shops and it pretty much disappeared without a trace of acclaim In the history books.Fast fwd to the modern day and its rediscovery tees up a total melter of an album for a whole new generation, offering the kind of obscurity that you’d well expect to hear on Awesome Tapes From Africa, especially with its distinctly Nigerian-sounding melodies and loping grooves influenced by Fela Kuti and the piquant dance-pop of William Onyeabor. But this this one ended up coming out in America and therefore kinda by-passed ATFA to end up in its own geo-temporal time-warp.Now remastered from tape by Brandon Hocura at Invisible City, One Kind Of Love’s blend of impassioned pop songs and hushed, spoken word poetry set to wobbling grooves and rhythmelodies possesses a deeply special charm, remaining as testament to the idea of going it alone and finding your place in the world, which, although it only took him 24 years, Pedro has clearly come back into circulation at a time when bedroom boogienauts and dreamers are especially hungry for this stuff - a deeply familiar yet at once alien and enigmatic sort of electronic soul.Highly recommended!

Editions Mego: ...Bastet is a ritual study gliding the path from the rites of the ancient to the realm of the modern. Bastet is the name of the ancient Egyptian goddess closely linked to music and female power who coerced humans to entertain her in order to keep her untamed animalistic side in check. Whilst absorbing this legend the second LCC release presents itself as a vast canvas of ritual, restraint and spacious sonorities. Stark and unnerving Bastet is not reliant on pure electronics as abstract theatre but rather utilises these tools to conjure a world circling the spheres and planes of symbolic human activity.Recorded throughout 2016 among residencies at the legendary studios EMS of Stockholm, the Inter Arts Center of Malmö and their own studio in Gijón, Bastet is a rich experience: cryptic, visionary and utterly compelling. 8 tracks laying forth a deep listening journey into the netherworlds of human experience, movement, ritual and space.

Efficient Space: ...Lady of Mine is the 1989 debut LP by self-made Italian-American Joe Tossini. An astoundingly honest, passionate record of cosmopolitan lounge music, he willed this charming suburban oddity into existence without any formal musical training.Sicilian by birth, Tossini drifted around the world between Italy, Germany and Canada, before finally settling in New Jersey. After the passing of his mother and the breakdown of a second marriage, an anxious and depressed Tossini took to songwriting as a form of therapy, crafting disarmingly candid lyrics from his extraordinary life and loves. Whatever industry savvy or musical virtuosity he lacked was made up for by unflinching resourcefulness and infectious charisma. Befriending bandleader Peppino Lattanzi at local club The Rickshaw Inn, he was encouraged to animate his singular songs with an ambitious cast of 9 players and 5 backing vocalists, sincerely credited as his Friends.The Atlantic City basement sessions are a low budget, high romance testament to Tossini’s character and the power of positive thinking. From the defiant, Casiotone samba of If I Should Fall In Love, to Wild Dream’s dizzying escapism and the native tongue croons of Sulla Luna and Sincerita, Lady Of Mine hums with the inimitable magic of a true original. Piercing the heart with an effectively sparse combination of humming keys, CompuRhythm drums, horn flourishes and backing divas, ample room was left for Tossini to frankly deliver his much-needed life lessons.