Peter Holslin takes a look at the new afro-funk re-issue on Now-Again.

Alex Koenig welcomes you to Zam-Rock. The mid-1970s were a disquieting time for the Southern African nation known as the Republic of Zambia: The economic value of the country’s largest resource, copper, plummeted; the nation was politically stifled under single-party rule; there was growing strife between countries on Zambia’s borders. Perhaps the only silver lining […]

For all us smart dub cats who took Spanish instead of French, Karl Hector stays dificil with his Gallic/German/Ethiopian flair. Thankfully, the title of his Paris DJ’s mix is self-explanatory: modal jazz of the world. What happens next is even more crystalline, the enigmatic Teuton behind 09’s excellent Sahara Swing drops esoteric old Folkways and […]

Art by Père Ubu Like the late great Nate Dogg once said: nobody did it better. And Nathaniel Hale and Serge Gainsbourg probably would have got along swimmingly, exhaling expensive smoke, sipping liquors you’d only find advertised in the Robb Report, and fine-tuning the ideology expressed in “Ain’t No Fun.” After all, the Parisian crooner […]

Courtesy of crate-diggers extraordinaire, Now-Again , comes this psych-rock stunner from pre-Revolution Persian guitar god, Kourosh Yaghmae. The track first reached  Western ears on NA’s Forge Your Own Chains comp, but the label is now offering it in advance of their two-disc compilation of the Yagmae’s work. Beautiful stuff that makes you wonder if acid […]

Maybe I’m living up to the album’s title by deferring to the original back cover of Witch’s Lazy Bones. Yet I’m reasonably certain that I could scarcely do better at describing the transportive moods that the Zambian psych-rockers evoke: “If you’re feeling depressed, low, disturbed, irritable, out-of-sorts, sad, frustrated or wildly demented, then folks, we […]

Such is the influence of Fela Kuti that a compilation dedicated to the music he inspired could conceivably include almost anything made in Central and West Africa during the decade of this outfit. He was John Lennon and Bob Marley rolled into one Lincoln log-sized cone of igbo (Indian Hemp). He created a viscous solution […]

As though to justify my recent rave about their archival efforts, Now-Again strikes uh, again, with the announcement of the Nigerian Fuzz-Funk anthology, a compilation that promises to succeed in being both categorically awesome and sounding like the name of a rare Equatorial disease. Partnering up with Uchenna Ikonne of the phenomenal With Comb & […]