The shape of the album speaks for itself. It is not for storage with the other records in ones’s collection. It’s an artwork with records in it, and it would rather get damaged than fit in. These days I don’t even store the four LPs with the cover. The cover sits in my office alone, safe from the shelf and treated like the artwork it is.

Some records are like that. You can be careful but the object takes a beating anyway.

^{Drukqs, trying to fit in on my record shelf}

Drukqs is the polite end of this. Some records come looking for a fight.

I think my favourite one is “The Return of the Durutti Column”, put out by Factory Records in 1980. The first pressing came wrapped in sandpaper, rough side out, so that every time its taken in and out of the shelf, it chews the sleeves on either side of it. Factory didn’t invent this technique. Tony Wilson lifted it from Mémoires, a 1959 book by Guy Debord, bound in sandpaper by the artist Asger Jorn so it would slowly destroy whatever books it was shelved beside. Wilson turned a book that attacks the library into a record that attacks your collection.

Legend has it that the members of Joy Division glued together the sleeves by hand by and were paid in beer for their efforts. I choose to believe that this is true.

And here’s the part I love most. The music inside is the gentlest thing Factory ever released. The most fragile record in the catalogue got the only sleeve capable of drawing blood.

Public Image Ltd put out their ‘hostile’ album a few months earlier. Metal Box, released in 1979 comprised of three 12” singles cut at 45rpm for maximum bass, packed into a metal film canister with the band’s name embossed on the lid. It looked incredible and it worked terribly, which was probably the point. Shops couldn’t rack it. Getting the discs out without scratching them was a small surgery. I can attest. I owned an original, and the records broke within six months when it rolled off the shelf right onto the floor. The tin ate its own contents, and I have never had the heart to replace it.

Where the Durutti sleeve goes after your other records, PIL’s Metal Box goes after its own.

A sidebar, in 1983 Factory also released New Order’s Blue Monday. It features a sleeve die-cut to look like a floppy disk. The legend says the sleeve cost so much to produce that Factory lost money on every copy of what became the best-selling 12” single of all time.

Here’s what separates all of these releases:

The sandpaper sleeve is hostile to its neighbours. Metal Box is hostile to itself (which I can vouch for personally). The Aphex box is hostile to its owner. And Blue Monday managed to be hostile to its own label.

Every one of these objects made its own statement by the victim it picked.

If you’ve only ever streamed this music, you wouldn’t get to experience any of this hostile packaging. you’d only be getting half the story.

Collectors talk about condition on every used record they buy or sell: Mint, near mint, very good plus. These objects don’t play by those rules. A pristine sandpaper sleeve has failed at its job. An unscratched Metal Box was never really opened. My banged-up Drukqs cover is just the object doing what it was always going to do, and the repress buyers will find that out for themselves soon enough. We like to think the records will outlive us. These ones refuse to, and I love them more for it. Even the one I never had the heart to replace.

Thanks for reading and listening.

The label says Warn The Nation. Forbes Label, Jamaican pressing, no catalogue number, plain type that tells you nobody involved was thinking about posterity. And Warn The Nation is a real record, a deep one. I own two copies of this 45, and they look close to identical. Drop the needle on the first and you get Warn The Nation, exactly as promised. Drop the needle on the second and you get a tune called To Jah, which exists nowhere else, sung by a man who is probably not the man credited on the label.

That “probably” is going to do a lot of work in this piece. Fair warning before we go: my last piece followed Man Next Door through sixty years of versions, a song the whole world remembered. This one is the same tradition from the other end, a record almost nobody remembers at all. And yes, it is a wormhole, the rare-Jamaican-45 kind. I’d apologize, but the wormholes are half of why I love this music, and if you’re reading this I suspect they’re part of why you do too.

The record it says it is

Warn The Nation is a Yabby You production from the mid-seventies, credited to The Prophet. Vivian Jackson, who the world knows as Yabby You, ran one of the deepest catalogues in roots music, and The Prophets were his vocal group. Alric Forbes sang in that group, and it’s his name on the Forbes Label imprint the 45 came out on. The production credit reads Forbes; the hands on the session, by most accounts, were Jackson’s. Even the straightforward record isn’t straightforward.

It's also genuinely rare. On Discogs, seventy-one people have a copy and more than four hundred are looking for one. My first copy, the honest one, is exactly this record, and on its own it's one of the better things in my crates.

The record it actually is

Here’s where it gets good. A small run of those pressings came back from the plant with the Warn The Nation label on a completely different record. My second copy is one of them. It plays To Jah on one side and its version on the other, and as far as anyone can tell that pairing exists only on these mislabelled copies. Four people on Discogs have one. The only copy I've seen surface at auction went for just over eight hundred US dollars, from an opening bid of eight, and that was nearly ten years ago. The database entry for it didn’t exist until November of last year. The record is pushing fifty and has officially existed for months.

Finding one took me years, and not the normal kind of record hunting. You can’t search for this 45, because every copy for sale looks like Warn The Nation. The label is no help; the label is the problem. So whenever a copy surfaced, I’d ask (okay, cajole) the seller for a video clip of the record actually playing, and then I’d listen. For years the answer was the song on the label. Then one day it wasn’t.

None of this would have surprised anyone in Kingston at the time. Jamaican 45s were pressed fast, in small runs, for sound systems that cared about what was in the grooves and not much else. Labels were printed in one batch and records pressed in another, and sometimes whatever was on hand got pasted onto whatever was coming off the press. Dealers still explain the economics to buyers matter-of-factly: pre-printed labels left over from other releases were simply how small producers saved money. Half the Jamaican records in my crates have blank or handwritten labels anyway. The label was always a suggestion.

The man who probably sang it

As far as the paperwork is concerned, To Jah is an Alric Forbes record. Collectors who know this corner of the catalogue will tell you the voice is Sydney Wilson.

Who is Sydney Wilson? A singer with three records to his name, ever, and all three ride the same rhythm. Why Do I Cry on the Angwal label, Time As Gone on Greek, and a dub called Wicked Dub to close things out. An entire recording career on one backing track, and it’s the rhythm sitting under To Jah. One pressing of Time As Gone even went out on the Rocket label with its title handwritten across a label printed for a different record entirely. In this corner of the catalogue, a wrong label wasn’t even unusual. A singer named Clement Moore rode that rhythm too, on a 45 called Everytime I Do My Thing, the only record he ever made. One-rhythm men, both of them. A whole little community passing a single rhythm around, heard from once or three times and never again.

And Forbes? In 1978 he cut his own vocal of Warn The Nation, the song his own group had made a few years earlier, the title that sits wrongly on my second copy. So the discography now holds a song he definitely sang wearing someone else’s title, and a title he’s credited with that someone else probably sang. I have read that sentence back several times and I believe it is correct.

Deep in the thread

Where does “probably Sydney Wilson” come from? Not from a database. From ears, mostly. From dealer blurbs and comment sections, somebody three replies deep in a thread saying play Why Do I Cry next to it and tell me that’s not the same man. From scratched initials in the dead wax showing that two records passed through the same cutting room. The real archive for this music was never written down. It lives in runout etchings and collector memory, and everyone who gets serious about Jamaican 45s ends up a detective whether they meant to or not.

Even the deepest paperwork keeps the mystery alive. Roots Knotty Roots, a decades-long discography project that has untangled thousands of these knots, catalogues the rhythm under Sydney Wilson’s name and still leaves To Jah credited to Alric Forbes. But the same database holds the detail that makes the whole thing click. A singer named Errol Smith cut a tune called The Lord Is My Shepherd on this rhythm in 1975, and the production credit reads Errol Smith and Vivian Jackson. Yabby You, standing quietly inside Sydney Wilson’s little riddim family. The camp that made Warn The Nation and the camp that made To Jah weren’t strangers. They were neighbours, and between neighbours a swapped label looks less like an accident and more like how business got done.

Man Next Door, from last time, is a lineage you can walk like a paved road. This record is the other end of version culture: no road, no signage, four known copies, a singer nobody can quite confirm. Both are the same tradition. One got remembered by everybody and one got remembered by almost nobody, and the music doesn’t seem to know the difference.

The fix

There’s a French reissue of To Jah now, cleanly pressed, correctly titled, easy to find. I’m glad it exists, because the tune deserves ears. But look closely at what got fixed: the reissue corrects the title and keeps the credit. It still says Alric Forbes. Even the correction carries the mistake.

The original misprint corrects nothing, and I love it for that. Wrong title, disputed singer, no catalogue number, four known copies scattered who knows where. Every fact anyone ever wrote down about this record is somewhere between shaky and false, and the record itself is perfect. Sometimes I'll play my two copies back to back, the honest one and the liar, same label twice, and while they're playing none of it matters.

That seems about right to me. The label was always a suggestion. The music was always the point.

Thanks for reading and listening.

There’s something I save for the right kind of night at One Drop, my monthly session at Bar Gobo. Early in the night, while the room is settling in, I’ll play a rocksteady 45 from 1968: the Paragons, “Man Next Door,” John Holt out front with the harmonies stacked close behind him. It’s a small, domestic song. The neighbours are loud, the walls are thin, I’ve got to get away from here. That’s the whole premise.

A couple of hours later, when the lights feel lower and the room has locked in, I’ll play it again. This time it’s Massive Attack, from Mezzanine, 1998: the same words and the same melody, sung over a drum break lifted from Led Zeppelin, in a mix so paranoid and claustrophobic it feels like the walls aren’t just thin, they’re closing in. Same song. Thirty years and an ocean apart.

When I played at Amber recently I skipped the patience and put them back to back. More on the nose, sure, but that was the idea: no announcement, no explaining, just the same song twice in a row, letting the room feel thirty years go by in the space of a needle drop.

Most times nobody notices, and that’s fine. (The exception was Clint from SpaceLab, the East Hastings shop where vintage speakers share floor space with taxidermy. He clocked it immediately. Sometimes one listener is plenty.) Some records I play for the room. Some I play for that one person who's really listening. The point of the pairing isn't the reveal. The point is the distance travelled, and no song in my crates has travelled further than this one.

A quiet place

Even the original has an original. In 1963 the soul singer Garnet Mimms recorded a ballad called "A Quiet Place," and a few years later in Kingston, John Holt drew on it heavily for the song the Paragons released as "Man Next Door" (sometimes "I've Got to Get Away"). It wasn't even an A-side. It went out tucked on the flip of "Left With a Broken Heart," and nobody involved seems to have guessed what they had.

That origin matters to me, because it’s the first of two currents that run through everything I play. Soul records aren’t a detour from Jamaican music; they’re source texts. Kingston in the sixties was listening hard to American radio, taking what it loved and rebuilding it on its own terms. A song about noisy neighbours, sung beautifully, was always going to make the crossing.

The second current is what happened next.

The version chain

In Jamaica in those years, a song was never really finished. The 45 came with the vocal on one side and the version on the flip: the same rhythm with the singing stripped away, an open invitation for someone else to say something new over it. Producers rebuilt rhythms for new singers. Deejays talked over the instrumentals. A great song wasn’t a monument, it was a premise. The industry ran on this, and “Man Next Door” turned out to be one of the great premises.

The first round of versioning didn’t even involve new music. When Holt went solo, the same recording turned up on his 1971 album Holt under a new title, “Got To Get Away,” with a different producer’s name on it. Dig into who actually cut the original and the paper trail argues with itself; three pressings will give you three answers. That’s version culture too. Before anyone had re-sung a note, the song already had two titles, a contested credit, and a life of its own.

Dennis Brown got to it young, slowing it down and stretching the phrases until the complaint became a lament. Horace Andy cut it in the early seventies and called his version “Quiet Place,” circling the title back toward its soul original, whether he meant to or not. His cut became a rhythm in its own right: Dr Alimantado rode it for “Poison Flour,” and I-Roy answered the title directly with “Noisy Place,” which is the version chain at its most playful. Quiet place, noisy place. The song was having a conversation with itself, in public, on 45.

Then it left the island. In 1980 the Slits, London’s great post-punk band, cut “Man Next Door” as a single. They didn’t punk it up. They brought in Dennis Bovell to produce, the same man behind Janet Kay’s lovers rock hits and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poetry albums, and played it more or less straight, which tells you something about the strength of the bones. It spent thirteen weeks on the UK indie chart. A Jamaican tenement-yard complaint, at home in squat-era London.

And in 1998 Massive Attack made the move that turns this from a good story into a perfect one. Building their version for Mezzanine, they didn’t just cover the song. They flew in the man himself. Horace Andy, twenty-five years after his own “Quiet Place,” sang it again for Bristol, over John Bonham’s drums from “When the Levee Breaks” and a buried sample of the Cure. He’s the only person standing at both ends of the chain. He didn’t cover the song. He travelled with it.

There’s even a coda, two of them. In 2017 Pama International, a British band that named itself after one of the great old reggae labels, cut the song with Anna Uhuru’s voice out front: version culture eating its own tail. And in 2021, on his final album, U-Roy cut it one more time with Santigold, roughly fifty years after he first rode the rhythm. The song outlived almost everyone who touched it, and it was still taking new voices.

Moving house

Here’s the thing I keep turning over. This is a song about wanting to get away from the neighbours, and its whole life story is sixty years of moving into new neighbourhoods. A Kingston yard. A London squat. A Bristol studio. Every time it arrived somewhere new, it fit, because thin walls and inescapable neighbours are apparently a universal condition, and because the song itself was built to be inhabited by whoever needed it next.

That, more or less, is what I mean by version culture, and it’s the spine of everything I play. Every record in my crates is a Jamaican original, a version of one, or music that couldn’t exist without dub. The starter kit I wrote about a few weeks back ended with the observation that this music is in conversation with itself. “Man Next Door” is that conversation compressed into a single title: soul original, rocksteady classic, roots rhythm, deejay answer records, post-punk single, trip-hop centrepiece. When I play the Paragons at nine and Massive Attack at eleven, I’m not being clever. I’m just letting the song finish its sentence.

Dubwise and otherwise, as I like to say.

There are more of these pairings in the crates, and I’ll get to them: Otis Gayle turning the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” into lovers rock, Devon Russell taking Curtis Mayfield to church, the Tamlins doing things to “Baltimore“ that Randy Newman never saw coming. But “Man Next Door” is the one I’d hand you first.

Find the Paragons version, then find Mezzanine, and listen to them back to back. Sixty years of version culture, in two records.

Thanks for reading and listening.

What I’ve come to notice is that this kind of blind trust almost only happens in one corner of music. Nobody buys a guitar record sound-unheard because of who put it out. But in dub, in ambient, in the deep end of techno, the label-as-guarantee is the whole culture. Basic Channel. Chain Reaction. Music From Memory. Smalltown Supersound. You learn the imprint the way you’d learn a producer, because in these genres there often isn’t a frontperson or a hook to hang onto. There’s mood, texture, space. And the thing you end up trusting is the ear doing the choosing. The label becomes the artist.

Right now the label I’d put money on sight unseen is a young Sheffield one called Short Span.

It’s run by one person, Matthew Kent, and that matters. Before Short Span he spent the better part of a decade behind Blowing Up the Workshop, one of the most quietly revered mix series in the underground, and before that he co-ran the Mana label. So Short Span isn’t really an A&R operation, it’s a mix-maker’s sensibility handed a pressing plant. It’s curated the way a great mix is curated: for flow, for sequence, for the long unbroken stretch. That’s the secret ingredient, and once you hear it you can’t unhear it.

Even the name is the argument. Kent has said Short Span is partly a joke about how long he expected the label to survive, partly a nod to the running length of the discs, and partly a wink at the fact that all our attention spans are shot. It comes across as a love letter to vinyl as a format. These are records built to be played as sides, start to finish, not strip-mined for a playlist. Which is exactly why I’m not giving you a playlist this time. The side is the unit. Put the needle down and leave it.

So what actually ties it together? On paper it’s dub techno bleeding into ambient bleeding into IDM, all of it long, dubbed-out and fluid, more celestial than peak-time. This is dub’s grandchild, really: the same bass weight and cavernous space carried into machines and pushed somewhere colder and stranger. But the deeper through-line is that every record is sequenced like someone cared about the order, because someone did. Sa Pa, the artist who effectively founded the sound of the place (Kent carried him over from Mana, and their long conversations about how to use a side shaped the whole project), is the Rosetta stone. Once you’ve sat with one of his, the rest of the catalogue clicks into focus.

The recent run has been ridiculous. K Wata’s Give U Space is the one I keep returning to, a debut from a New York producer who took the bones of early dubstep and floated them up into something weightless. And Bot1500’s The Black Sea goes the other way, all glassy IDM detail and held breath, and it’s the one that’s quietly taken over my weekend, on repeat since Friday and still handing me things I missed the time before. Then there’s Yu Su’s Foundry, a triple LP from someone I’ll claim, a little possessively, as a Vancouver export. It grew out of a live set she built for MUTEK and a move to London, and it’s the most expansive thing on the label so far, roomy enough to invite in guests as unlikely as the post-rock outfit Seefeel and the Japanese city-pop duo Dip in the Pool. It’s the sound of a restless talent finally given space to roam, and covering every corner of it.

Go back a year and the foundations are just as strong. Sa Pa’s Ambeesh. Conna Haraway’s Shifted, three tracks of dub techno built around an eleven-minute collaboration with Xenia Reaper that began as a late-night laptop jam in Glasgow. Mammo’s Lateral, a sprawling triple-disc that pulls a decade of his scattered aliases into one place. Different hands, same gravity.

What gets me is that Short Span is barely more than a year old and it has already done the thing most labels never manage. It has a sound you could pick out of a lineup, and a level of trust that makes a stranger’s record an easy yes. People keep telling us the album is dead, that curation is dead, that nobody sits with a full side anymore. And then one person in Sheffield quietly proves all of it wrong, one long, dubbed-out, perfectly sequenced disc at a time.

If you’re new to it, don’t shuffle. Start with a side and let it run.

The records (play them whole):

Thanks for reading and listening.

I found it to be a fun but daunting task. You can’t just hand someone Bob Marley Legend and call it done. (Not that there's anything wrong with Bob, but Legend is just the hits from his Island years — and if that's all someone hears, they end up with about 4% of the picture and a lot of beach bar associations.) You also can’t dump them straight into the deepest end of King Tubby dub plates and obscure Wackies pressings and expect them to come out swimming.

One thing worth flagging upfront: reggae is fundamentally a singles music. The 7-inch was the engine, the sound system was the venue, and a lot of the genre's greatest moments never made it onto an album at all. I'm working in albums here because that's the most useful way to hand someone a body of work, but it's worth knowing what's not in the frame.

The trick is to give a music fan enough texture to see the actual range of the thing. The foundation classics, yes, but also the strange corners, the regional outposts, the producers’ albums where the mixing desk is the lead instrument, the dub records that turn the original songs inside out. Reggae is much bigger than the cliché version most people have absorbed by osmosis, and a starter kit has to argue for that.

So here’s what I sent him. Some of these are foundational and unimpeachable. Others are off the beaten track: Toronto reggae, Berlin techno producers cutting roots rhythms, a Bronx label drowning everything in synth, a British dub poet documenting Thatcher’s Britain. Together they should give a serious listener a real sense of the true range, with enough threads to pull on later.

If you’re already a reggae head, this isn’t aimed at you, though I’d love to hear what you’d swap in or out. If you’re new to it: start anywhere on the list. Reggae rewards a deep, slow listen, and it’s all connected. One record leads to the next.

Start here

One record. The fastest way to disrupt what you think reggae sounds like.

1. Keith Hudson, Flesh of My Skin, Blood of My Blood (1974)

Hudson is the dark prince. Reggae sounds so happy on the surface, all sun and skank and harmony stacks, and then you put this record on and the floor drops out. If you only have time for one record on this list, start here. Nothing else does more, faster, to disrupt what you think reggae sounds like.

Foundations

Ska, rocksteady, roots. The bedrock the rest is built on.

2. Prince Buster, Roll On Charles Street: Prince Buster Ska Selection and Let’s Go To The Dance: Prince Buster Rocksteady Selection

Prince Buster is one of Jamaica’s foundational artists, but he was primarily a singles man. He ran his own label, cut 45 after 45 through the ska and rocksteady years (the precursors to reggae), and never really thought in terms of albums. These two comps are how to hear him properly.

3. Burning Spear, Marcus Garvey (1975)

Roots reggae at its most foundational and most political.

4. Max Romeo & The Upsetters, War Ina Babylon (1976)

The cleanest possible demonstration of what Lee Perry’s Black Ark could do for a vocal artist when everything was working.

5. Johnny Osbourne, Truth and Rights (1980)

The Studio One sound at its most fully realised. This is what foundation Jamaican music was built on before everything got electronic.

The dub revolution

When the mixing desk became the lead instrument.

6. Augustus Pablo, King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown (1976)

Pablo’s melodica is a haunted instrument. Melancholy, eastern-sounding, threaded through dread. On this record it gets fed into King Tubby’s mixing desk and pulled apart at the seams.

7. Yabby You, Conquering Lion and King Tubby’s Prophecy of Dub (1976)

The other essential Tubby record, by way of one of reggae’s most singular voices. Yabby You, born Vivian Jackson, was a self-produced roots visionary, dirt-poor and physically frail, with a Christian-leaning theology that put him sideways to mainstream Rasta. Prophecy of Dub is the dub companion to his Conquering Lion sessions, mixed by King Tubby.

8. Wailing Souls, Wailing (1981)

Recorded at Channel One, mixed at King Tubby’s by Scientist himself, released through VP. The Wailing Souls were one of the great roots harmony groups out of Trench Town, and on Wailing you get vocal cuts and Scientist dub mix back to back.

9. Scientist, Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (1981)

The Wailing Souls record was Scientist working a vocal artist’s session. This is Scientist with his name on the cover and the mixing desk as the lead instrument. Recorded at King Tubby’s, produced by Junjo Lawes, released on Greensleeves with one of the greatest pieces of reggae cover art ever drawn.

The other Jamaica

Still Jamaica. Off the roots-and-dub road: jazz, Africa, dancehall.

10. Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks, United Africa and Light of Saba

The jazz-and-Africa lane in Jamaican music. Brooks played sax with the Skatalites and Mystic Revelation of Rastafari before leading Light of Saba in the mid-70s, a group that pulled nyabinghi drumming, jazz horns, and African folk forms into the reggae conversation.

11. Sister Nancy, One Two (1982)

The dancehall pick, and the one that needs no introduction even if you don’t know the name.

The diaspora

Reggae as it travelled. Bronx, London, Toronto.

12. Horace Andy, Dance Hall Style (1982)

The essential Wackies record. Wackies was the Bronx label run by Bullwackie (Lloyd Barnes) that took the Jamaican sound, slowed it down, drenched it in synth, and made some of the strangest, dreamiest reggae ever pressed. Horace Andy’s falsetto is one of the most distinctive instruments in reggae. Just ask Massive Attack.

13. Love Joys, Lovers Rock Reggae Style (1983)

The other Wackies pick. Same hazy uptown-Bronx sound, applied to lovers rock.

14. Various Artists, Glory Dominion Power Majesty: Toronto Reggae Compilation (Half Moon)

Gotta represent. Reggae didn’t only happen in Kingston and London.

15. Linton Kwesi Johnson, Bass Culture and LKJ in Dub (1980 / 1981)

A different door into reggae entirely. Linton Kwesi Johnson is a Jamaican-born British poet who built a body of work in the late 70s and early 80s documenting Black political life in Thatcher’s Britain. LKJ in Dub is the dub companion to his vocal albums Forces of Victory and Bass Culture.

16. African Head Charge, Songs of Praise (1990)

This is where dub leaves Jamaica and becomes something else. Adrian Sherwood producing on On-U Sound. Songs of Praise is ritual, sample-driven, percussion-forward, and unlike anything else on this list.

17. Mad Professor, No Protection (1995)

Neil Fraser’s Ariwa Sound has been the most important UK dub label going for forty years, and No Protection is where his methods broke into the mainstream. Massive Attack handed him the multitracks of Protection and let him dub the whole album top to bottom.

The doorway

Where reggae meets Berlin, and a whole other universe opens up.

18. Rhythm & Sound, The Versions & w/ The Artists (2003)

Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald are the Berlin producers behind Basic Channel, two of the foundational figures in 1990s minimal techno. w/ The Artists is the project where they ran their methods through reggae proper: roots rhythms built in their Berlin studio, with classic Jamaican vocalists (Cornell Campbell, Sugar Minott, Willi Williams, others) brought in to sing over the top.

What makes this record matter beyond itself is the parallel project. Through Basic Channel, Rhythm & Sound 12”s, Maurizio, and Chain Reaction, Ernestus and von Oswald essentially invented dub techno: a whole universe of artists and labels descended from this Berlin moment, and one still driving cutting-edge work today. The Versions & w/ The Artists is your most reggae-friendly door into all of it. More on that universe in a future instalment.

That’s the list, more or less as I sent it. If you go through it slowly and give it space, what starts to show up is how much of this stuff is in conversation with itself. The same musicians turn up across different sessions. The dub records are talking back to the vocal records. The Berlin producers and the Bronx producers and Adrian Sherwood in his London studio are all reaching back to the same Jamaican source. Once you hear that, you’re in.

Happy to go deeper on any one of these in a future post. Tell me what you’d add.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Same performances. Same musicians. Same songs recorded in the same backyard studio in Kingston between 1976 and 1977. Four pressings made by different hands, in different rooms, in different decades, for different reasons. The theme at Auricle was Sonic Structures: The Architecture of Sound, and I told the room: these are four buildings made from the same blueprint. Listen to what the architects did.

There is no better record for that argument than Heart of the Congos. It also happens to be one of the greatest reggae records ever made. The Black Ark was a living organism for Perry, and this album is arguably the peak of its capabilities.

The first pressing is the one almost nobody has heard. Black Art, LP4049, Kingston, 1977. Mastered by Peter Gordon-Martin at the Jamaican plant. Maybe a few hundred copies pressed. The mix is dry, open, piano-forward, almost no effects. You can hear the skeleton of the building. The joists, the beams, the spaces between walls.

The sleeves came back from the plant with blue vertical bars on the cover. Lee Perry handed them to Jah Wise. Wise is the Rastafarian artist Robert Van Campbell, the man who painted the Black Ark studio floor to ceiling and Horsemouth’s motorbike tank in Rockers. Perry had him brush yellow over the blue. Some copies got the paint, some didn’t. Not a production error. That’s how Perry worked. When the attention was there, it went in. Perry treated every surface as part of one continuous act of making. Studio walls, tapes, record sleeves, the records themselves. All of it was canvas. All of it was architecture.

The second pressing is the one you’ve probably heard, whether you know it or not. Black Art, KLP005, 1978. Perry went back into the Black Ark and remixed the entire album. My copy is the Black Art VP Export issue, pressed for distribution through VP Records, silver VP sticker on the back sleeve, Scientist’s tag in the runout. The Jamaican-market sibling carries a different cutter’s mark (matrix KK) and reportedly slightly different editing. Same year, same mix, different hands on the lathe, subtly different-sounding records depending on which side of the export pipeline you ended up on.

The standard story is that Perry remixed after Chris Blackwell at Island Records rejected the original. The truth is more painful. Blackwell travelled to Jamaica with his lawyer. Contracts were signed. Everything seemed set. Then Perry went back into the studio and built a new version on top of the first. Not in response to rejection, but in anticipation of finally being heard. Trying to meet what he believed Island wanted. More echo, more reverb, phasing. The piano recedes. Manic percussion arrives. The open rooms of the 1977 mix get walls.

And the mooing appears.

The cow sounds threaded through the 1978 mix aren’t field recordings. They’re Watty Burnett, bass singer of the Congos, humming his baritone voice through a cardboard tube lined with tinfoil, run through Perry’s echo equipment. A human voice becomes an animal, then a rhythm, then part of the room. A man becomes architecture. If you want to understand what Perry meant when he said the studio must be “like a living thing, a life itself,” that’s it. A Congos member’s breath, shaped by cardboard and tinfoil, processed through machines Perry had consecrated with weed smoke and holy water, embedded permanently into a record that would outlast the building it was made in.

Perry submitted the remixed tapes to Island. Island shelved them. Blackwell’s explanation: “I remember at the time thinking that there was one great track and the rest of it was weak.”

The building Perry made for Blackwell, Blackwell never walked into.

Put “Congoman” on from both pressings back to back and you’ll hear it immediately. The 1977 is a room with the lights on. Piano prominent, vocals in open air, every structural element exposed.

The 1978 is the same room with the walls thickened, echo filling the spaces between voices, the cow sounds arriving like weather. Same musicians, same takes. Two completely different buildings.

What happened after Island said no is what makes the architecture metaphor land.

Perry had built the Black Ark by hand in his backyard in Washington Gardens, Kingston, 1973. He buried microphones at the base of palm trees and thumped them for bass drum effects. Surrounded the drum booth with chicken wire to shape the acoustic. Had Jah Wise paint Haile Selassie above the door so everyone had to bow entering, a life-size Super Ape on the back wall, African ancestors in chains inside. His own words: “The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality.”

After Island shelved the album, the living structure came apart. The Congos departed bitterly. The Nyabinghi brethren who had spiritualised the sessions now occupied the studio permanently, disrupting new work. Gangsters arrived demanding weekly protection money. Perry began drinking heavily. The building was being invaded by forces he could no longer consecrate.

He began covering every surface of the Black Ark in marker pen writing, the painted sleeves taken to their extreme. Then he burned it. Or watched it burn. Or it caught fire during attempted reconstruction in 1983. The story changes. Perry claimed he destroyed it to purge unclean spirits: “Nobody gave me anything, people just took everything. So the atmosphere in the Black Ark studio was changing. Then I decided to make a sacrifice as the energy wasn’t good anymore.”

In 1981 he released a 12-inch accusing Blackwell of being a vampire. He repeated the accusation for the rest of his life.

The third and fourth pressings arrive after the building is gone. Both descend from Perry’s 1978 master, not the 1977 original. Both have the cow sounds. Both have the thickened walls and the manic percussion. They aren’t new buildings. They’re the rebuilt structure lit two more ways.

Go Feet, 1982. Pressed at Sonopress in West Germany, distributed by Arista. West German industrial precision applied to Jamaican backyard mysticism. Blood & Fire, 1996. Mastered by Kevin Metcalfe at The Town House in London, digitally restored by Andy Walter at Abbey Road. Steve Barrow’s liner notes are essential reading. They worked from the original Black Ark quarter-inch tapes for every track except “At The Feast,” where the tapes were missing and they had to source from vinyl. The building reconstructed from its own ruins, with one room rebuilt from a photograph.

Ashanti Roy on making the record: “Lee is a man who likes to work and work and work. And then listen. And then work some more. Because he is a man who likes perfection.” Watty Burnett, the man whose voice became the cow, on leaving Perry: “It really fuck me head up until now; I sleep and I dream about it.”

Perry, decades later, living in Switzerland, far from Washington Gardens: “The Black Ark lives in my head.”

Architecture isn’t just what you build. It’s what you build around what already exists. The 1977 pressing is the foundation before anyone intervened. The 1978 is the building Perry constructed on top of it, made for someone who never came to see it. The Go Feet and the Blood & Fire are two different ways of lighting the same rooms. One commercial, one reverential.

Four pressings. Four renderings. Same rooms, different light.

I passed all four around at Auricle. Some folks leaned in, asked which LP was first, and which was my favourite. Others gave me the look you give the guy who shows up with four copies of the same album. Both reactions are fair. They’re not actually the same album. But you do have to sit with them for a while to hear it.

Joke’s on them anyway. I have a fifth copy at home. 1992 VP Records pressing. Left it on the shelf out of restraint.

Thanks for reading and listening.

I didn’t know it then, but the same hunger had been driving a far more remarkable black market a few blocks away for decades. Not for jeans, but for music.

Music on Ribs

In the Soviet Union after the Second World War, almost everything Western was forbidden. Jazz, rock and roll, music by emigres now considered traitors. Even certain rhythms like the foxtrot were banned for allegedly encouraging “wild, licentious behaviour.” State radio played an unbroken stream of approved songs while an entire generation was cut off from the music they loved.

So they pressed it onto X-ray film.

Bootleggers bribed hospital workers for discarded medical scans, cut them into discs using the edge of a plate, burned a hole through the centre with a cigarette, and pressed grooves in by hand. Because the images of ribs and skulls were still burned into the surface, they called them “bone records” or “music on ribs.” You could fold one into a shirt sleeve for a quick transaction at the roentgenizdat — the X-ray press markets that sprang up across Leningrad, Moscow and beyond. The same streets where teenagers were trading jeans for rubles, a generation earlier, had been trading Duke Ellington pressed onto someone’s chest X-ray.

The sound quality was terrible. Most bone records could only be played five to ten times before they disintegrated. But through them, Soviet teenagers heard Elvis Presley. The Beatles. Every copy was slightly different, every listening experience unique, every act of pressing play a small act of defiance.

The authorities eventually caught on and banned bone records in 1958. By then, reel-to-reel tape had arrived and the underground moved on to its next format. The music never stopped moving.

Reykjavik Volcano

You probably know the basic story. In March 2008, Björk closed a concert in Shanghai with “Declare Independence” and shouted “Tibet! Tibet!” at the end. She was immediately banned from performing in China, and the government responded by announcing it would bar any artist who had ever engaged in activities that “threatened national sovereignty” — a policy that swept up everyone from Oasis to Bob Dylan to Lady Gaga in the years that followed.

What’s less well known is what happened next, and it’s one of the most fascinating pieces of music internet lore I’ve come across via this Reddit thread on r/bjork.

For over a decade after the ban, her music remained streamable in China. It wasn’t until around 2020, when ideological controls tightened across the board, that she was quietly wiped from Chinese platforms entirely. Every album, gone. Every collaboration, gone. Even her recent duet with Rosalía, unplayable.

Almost every album. The censors, it seems, forgot about the Sugarcubes.

Her pre-fame Icelandic band remains perfectly streamable to this day, sitting there in plain sight, apparently beneath the notice of whoever drew up the blacklist.

What happened next is where it gets really interesting. Chinese fans, deeply attached to her music and deeply frustrated with the censorship machine, invented an entire secret language to keep her alive online. If you want to trade her vinyl on second-hand apps, you have to play a game of charades. Listings describe records as coming from “Reykjavik Volcano” or “The Icelandic Toddler Mom.” Homogenic gets filed under “Icelandic early childhood education songs.” Volta becomes “The Bigfoot.”

And then there’s the linguistic joke hiding in plain sight. “Tibet” sounds almost identical to the Chinese phrase for “kicking the blanket,” Ti Bei, so under videos playing her music, people post parenting questions: “What should I do if my child keeps kicking the blanket at night?” Others comment cryptically about altitude, or simply write “Higher, higher” — a double pun on the Tibetan plateau and the Declare Independence lyrics.

The Streisand Effect in full force. A generation of Chinese Gen Z listeners discovered her music precisely because it was forbidden, drawn in by the mystery of comment sections that looked like secret societies discussing Iceland, altitude, and infant sleep habits. The censorship machine created her most devoted fanbase.

A Republic Within a Republic

Fela Kuti understood something profound: if the government is going to come for you anyway, you might as well make the confrontation the content.

After returning to Nigeria from the United States in the early 1970s, transformed by the Black Power movement and furious at military rule, he founded the Kalakuta Republic, declaring his compound in Lagos independent from the Nigerian state. It housed his family, his band, a recording studio, and a free health clinic. The Afrika Shrine, his permanent performance space nearby, was where he played to thousands night after night, the music mixing Yoruba rhythms, jazz, and funk into what he called Afrobeat, the lyrics an unbroken critique of the generals in power.

The raids were frequent. Fela kept playing.

With radio stations forbidden from playing his music, the live performance was the broadcast. Thousands packed in night after night to hear the latest, because Fela’s songs were essentially news reports — eyewitness accounts of raids, corruption and government violence delivered over extended Afrobeat grooves that could run forty minutes without stopping. Then those performances were pressed to vinyl, the records circulating through Lagos and across Africa carrying the news that official channels wouldn’t touch. The album was the newspaper. The Shrine was the only free press in town.

Then in 1977 he released Zombie, using that metaphor to mock the Nigerian military’s blind obedience. The album was a massive hit. The government sent a thousand soldiers to the Kalakuta Republic. In the assault, Fela was severely beaten. His elderly mother was thrown from a window. She died from her injuries weeks later.

His response was to carry her coffin to the residence of General Obasanjo, the head of state, and to write two songs: “Coffin for Head of State” and “Unknown Soldier.” The raid became the record. The repression became the material. He was arrested approximately two hundred times across his career. He kept playing. He was eventually jailed on trumped-up currency charges. He kept playing. He was released. He kept playing.

Today Afrobeat as a global genre, the sound of contemporary Lagos that has taken over dancefloors everywhere, traces directly back to music a military government tried to eliminate.

If the Fela section sent you down a rabbit hole, this 12-part podcast will keep you there.

The One Drop

What connects all of these stories — bone records, Björk code names, and the Kalakuta Republic — is the same thing that connects Jamaican sound system culture to dub techno to drum and bass. The one drop always finds a way through.

Tinariwen’s Eyadou Ag-Leche, reflecting on decades of being banned, jailed and exiled by successive Malian governments, said it best: “You cannot imprison a sound.”

The bone record disintegrates after ten plays. The master tape burns. The streaming algorithm scrubs the catalogue. And somewhere, someone uploads it again as “Icelandic early childhood education songs.”

The one drop creates infinite ripples. You cannot stop them.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Sandy

The story begins in late-’60s London with working-class kids, both black and white, obsessing over Jamaican music. Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” hit No. 1 in April 1969, while the Harry J Allstars’ “Liquidator” reached No. 9 that same year.

These weren’t niche underground tracks; they were the pulse of the British street. These kids dressed sharp in boots, braces, Sta-Prest trousers, and button-down Ben Shermans. They borrowed as much from Kingston’s rude boys as they did from their own mod elders. For them, the music was sacred.

That is what skinhead meant before everything went sideways.

Before we go deep, I invite you to hit play on the selection below or listen on Apple Music here.

The Sound

Skinhead reggae sits in a raw, transitional gear. It is faster than rocksteady but lacks the heavy, smoke-filled dread of the ‘70s roots era. This sound, which ran roughly from 1968 to 1972, wasn’t yet Rasta music. It was street-level dance music made to be played on sound systems and in sweaty clubs. In those spaces, nobody cared where you came from as long as you were there for the music.

The Original Cinematic Universe

One of the most fascinating parallels to modern music is how these producers handled their releases. Long before hip hop artists began using “Part 2s” or recurring characters to build a brand, Joe Mansano—Joe the Boss—was serializing his music.

As a record shop owner in Brixton, Joe saw the wave coming and positioned himself at the center. Trojan gave him his own “Joe” sublabel, where he and trombonist Rico Rodriguez turned 7” singles into a serialized narrative. Tracks like “The Bullet” were followed by “Return of the Bullet.” Courtroom dramas unfolded across releases like “The Judge,” “The Accused,” “Trial of Pama Dice,” and eventually “Appeal of Pama Dice.”

This wasn’t just a collection of songs; it was a proto-cinematic universe built on wax. Like a modern rapper dropping a sequel to a hit narrative track, Mansano kept his audience returning to the shop to find out what happened next to the characters in his songs.

King Horror: The Theatre of the Weird

While Joe Mansano was building narratives, Laurel Aitken was experimenting with persona. Recording under the name King Horror, Aitken leaned into a style that strayed boldly into novelty territory, though never in a way that felt cheap.

Tracks like “Loch Ness Monster” and “Dracula, Prince of Darkness” featured lurching, menacing instrumentals paired with theatrical, almost unhinged vocals. It was B-movie reggae: a weird, spooky universe that shouldn’t have worked but absolutely did. This wasn’t novelty in the sense of a joke; it was an expansion of what reggae could be. The skinheads of the era ate it up because it was raw, imaginative, and perfectly suited for the dark, high-energy atmosphere of the dancehall.

The Theft

How did a subculture born from Jamaican-British cultural fusion become synonymous with racism?

The shift happened in the late 1970s. As the post-war economic boom ended, the National Front (NF) explicitly targeted disaffected working-class kids for recruitment. At its peak, the NF claimed to be Britain’s fourth-largest party with roughly 20,000 members. They kept the boots, the braces, and the shaved heads, but they gutted the soul of the movement. By the early ‘80s, media coverage had cemented a new association: skinhead equaled racist thug. It was a deliberate theft.

The Reclamation

In 1987, Marcus Pacheco founded SHARP: Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice. The goal was simple: take it back. SHARP members physically fought neo-Nazis out of music venues and emphasized the black Jamaican roots of the subculture. They dismissed the racists as “boneheads,” viewing them as impostors rather than inheritors of the tradition.

Why It Matters Now

Skinhead reggae is having a quiet moment. Reissue labels like Harlem Shuffle are pressing limited 7” runs of Joe the Boss, and The Great Skinhead Reunion in Brighton continues to draw global crowds from Japan to Mexico.

This resurgence isn’t just about the records. It’s about the story the music tells: a story of working-class kids finding liberation in a shared culture. Every time someone DJs a set of boss reggae or laces up their Docs to see a ska band, they are participating in an act of reclamation.

Reclaim the skinhead. Not the haircut. Not the boots. The idea.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Sandy

Sly didn’t just play the drums; he re-engineered how we perceive rhythm. Whether you are a crate-digger hunting for 7-inch 45s or a listener who values the human grit behind the desk, Sly’s fingerprints are everywhere.

The Taxi Gang Classics: Essential 45s

To understand where this all began, you have to look at the early golden era of the Taxi label. These are the tracks where the “Taxi Sound”—that monolithic, high-fidelity drum and bass signature—was perfected.

The Tamlins – “Baltimore” (1980) This Randy Newman cover is perhaps the most perfect example of the Taxi Sound. It showed how Sly and Robbie could take a non-reggae composition and completely re-engineer it into a sophisticated, crystalline anthem.

General Echo – “Drunken Master” (1980) Bridging the gap between roots and the emerging dancehall scene, this track is bouncy and playful. It shows Sly’s ability to create a fun selection that still carries serious audiophile weight.

The Taxi Gang – “Unmetered Taxi” (1982) An essential instrumental for any DJ box. This is a masterclass in minimalist rhythm. It is so timeless that its blueprints were still being used for major hits decades later.

The Compass Point Years: A High Water Mark

As the 80s dawned, Sly and Robbie’s reputation for surgical precision took them to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. For me, the Grace Jones trilogy (Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing, and Living My Life) remains an absolute pinnacle of recorded music.

At Compass Point, Sly proved that a reggae rhythm section could anchor a global pop sound without losing its grit. They took the foundational grooves of Kingston and applied them to post-punk and new wave. They weren’t just session players; they were curators of a vibe. They understood that in a high-end studio, the space and silence between the notes are just as important as the drums themselves.

Beyond the One-Drop: Tactile Futurism

While many associate reggae with a steady pulse, Sly was always looking forward. In the 80s, he transformed the studio into a laboratory, successfully bridging the gap between organic roots and digital technology.

His use of Simmons electronic drum pads is the perfect example of the “Middle Path.” He didn’t use tech to replace the soul; he used it to expand the palette. He brought a metallic, snapping energy to the rhythm section that felt both alien and deeply human. This relentless curiosity led to some of his most fascinating experimental projects:

The Nordic Noir Crossover: His collaboration with Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær on Nordub (2018) is a high-water mark. It blends Kingston grooves with cold, atmospheric jazz in a way that feels cinematic and vast.

The NYC Avant-Garde: Teaming up with producer Bill Laswell for Rhythm Killers, Sly proved that digital gear could still have a snap and a soul alongside giants like Herbie Hancock and Bootsy Collins.

The Trip-Hop Connection: On Drum & Bass Strip to the Bone (1999), produced by Howie B, Sly’s foundations were stretched into glitchy, late-night textures.

Fingerprints on the Tape

Sly was a master of the tactile approach, adjusting his style to fit the emotional weight of a song while maintaining that unmistakable “Sly” snap. In an era where we are increasingly flooded by bot-generated loops, Sly Dunbar reminds us what intentionality looks like. You can’t program the intuition he had—the way he leaned into a groove or the subtle variations in his hi-hat work that gave a track its life.

A Legacy in Every Groove

As we spin those original pressings this week, it is worth remembering that Sly didn’t just follow the rhythm. He built the foundation that everyone else walked on. He showed us that technology, when handled with human intent, doesn’t have to be sterile. It can be soulful, adventurous, and timeless.

The Riddim Twins are reunited now, but the blueprints Sly left behind will continue to influence every discerning listener who looks for the soul below the surface.

Thanks for reading and listening.

—sandy

The Policy: What Bandcamp Actually Said

In early January 2026, Bandcamp’s support team laid it out clearly. Music generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on the platform. Using AI tools to impersonate other artists or their styles is also prohibited. Users are encouraged to report anything that looks heavily AI-generated.

Bandcamp also updated its terms to explicitly forbid scraping content from the site to train AI models. This is a growing concern among artists whose work gets scooped up without consent. This is not a partial restriction like we have seen on Spotify. It is a full ban on AI-made tunes.

Bandcamp has stated they reserve the right to remove music on suspicion alone and are heavily relying on fan reporting to help their team identify 'slop' that isn't immediately obvious.

We Saw This Coming

If you read my 2025 wrap-up — “2025: The Year We Needed Space” — you will remember I flagged a seismic stat. By November, 34% of new music uploaded daily to Deezer was fully AI-generated. That is 50,000 fake songs per day, up from just 10% at the start of the year. At the time it felt like a tipping point. Now it is clear the backlash has begun.

A Nuanced Reality: AI as Tool and Collaborator

It is tempting to treat all AI-generated music as soulless, but that is neither accurate nor helpful. At its best, AI is a tool, an ensemble member, or even a co-composer. Some of the most forward-thinking artists have embraced AI to push artistic boundaries:

• Grimes launched Elf.tech, a platform that allows fans to make music using her AI-generated voice.

• Arca’s Echo (Danny the Street) is a soundtrack for MoMA that never repeats because the AI constantly mutates the music.

• Brian Eno, the godfather of ambient, has long used generative systems. His Reflection project included an app that played an infinite, ever-shifting version of the album.

• Björk created Kórsafn in collaboration with Microsoft. It is a generative AI soundscape that evolves in real-time based on weather and sunlight.

Perhaps the most compelling example of the nuance involved is Holly Herndon’s PROTO. The album features “Spawn,” an AI trained specifically on the voices of her human ensemble. Herndon views Spawn not as a replacement, but as an ensemble member or a performer. It is worth watching whether Bandcamp takes this down. PROTO represents a collective intelligence built on consenting data rather than the “invisible ocean” of scraped data used by many corporations.

Navigating the Middle Path

While a few days in, the Reddit response is 90% positive, many creators are asking for clarification on where the “substantial part” line is drawn. To find a way forward, we might consider a middle path.

Generative vs. Generat-IVE The middle path starts with a hard line between a machine making decisions and a human building a system. Technology should function like a “generative instrument” where the artist designs the constraints. We should reject prompt-based output that only requires a subscription.

Radical Metadata Instead of a total ban, we could advocate for a metadata standard. If an artist uses AI to generate a texture or clean up a vocal, it should be tagged as such. This respects the listener’s agency and prevents unlabeled output from devaluing the work of artists doing the heavy lifting by hand.

The “Dub” Analogy: Tactile Tech For those of us who love old reggae and dub, technology isn’t the enemy. When Lee “Scratch” Perry used the studio as an instrument, he was using cutting-edge electronics to manipulate sound. That music feels human because it is tactile. You can hear the physical movement and the hiss of the tape. The middle path for AI looks like that. If a tool helps an artist find a new “grit” or a sense of space, it serves the culture.

A Statement Against the Stream

Bandcamp’s decision stands in contrast to a digital economy where music is often treated as mere content. It says that music is culture. If you care about real music made by real people — with stories, with grit, and with fingerprints all over the tape — Bandcamp just told you that it still values that too.

Thanks for reading and listening. Especially if you are human, but even if you are a bot!

Sandy

Every December, I sit down to write a “Best Of” list, and every December, I realize that my favourite album of the year is usually whatever I listened to last Tuesday. I try to be objective. I try to remember what I loved in February. But the truth is, the music that makes the year-end list is the music that survives the churn.

And this year, the churn was mathematical.

2025 was the year the floodgates of generative audio truly opened. In November, streaming service Deezer reported that 34% of all new music uploaded to its platform daily is now fully AI-generated. That is 50,000 new fake songs every single day, up from just 10% back in January.

And it’s not just clutter; it’s effective camouflage. Studies show that 97% of listeners can no longer distinguish between these machine-made tracks and human creations. Spotify had to purge 75 million “spam” tracks in September alone just to keep the ecosystem functional.

It was the year music risked becoming a utility—a gray sludge of perfect, prompt-generated loops designed to be ignored. In response, I found myself retreating. I didn’t want “content.” I wanted friction. I wanted human error. I wanted 58-minute jazz improvisations where you can hear the room tone, and electronic music that sounds like it was built by hand, not a model.

Looking at my play history, a theme emerges. It wasn’t a year for hooks. It was a year for texture. It was a year for dub, for hauntology, and for sounds that demand you stop scrolling and actually listen.

The Sequence

Before we get to the albums, I wanted to map out how these records actually talk to each other. This isn’t a shuffle. It’s a sequence I’ve arranged to move from the basement to the rooftop—starting with deep dub pressure, moving through the modular jazz fog, building into a kinetic peak, and finally dissolving into ambient light just in time to catch the sunrise.

Apple Music version here

Enjoy the playlist or go deep on any of these and you’ll find a world. They all reward full immersion.

The “Heavyweight” Division

If 2025 felt heavy, these albums were the only things heavy enough to match it.

The Bug vs. Ghost Dubs - Implosion I was waiting a long time for this one to drop, and it didn’t disappoint. Kevin Martin (The Bug) has always known how to crush a speaker, but pairing him with Ghost Dubs stripped away the aggression and left only the pressure. This isn’t music you listen to; it’s an environment you enter. Tracks like “Hooked” and “Burial Skank” feel like walking through a brutalist building underwater.

Carrier - Rhythm Immortal This record feels like it was dug out of the earth. It’s dub techno, but stripped of the “techno.” It’s rusty, mechanical, and incredibly patient and features phenomenal sound design.

Sa Pa - Ambeesh Another stellar release on the deftly curated Short Span label, this one completely rewired my brain. Slippery, non-linear, and refusing to sit still. If Implosion is the concrete foundation, Ambeesh is the fog rolling over it.

Trance States (No Drugs Required)

The “Anti-Algorithm” section. Music that repeats until you lose track of time.

The Necks - Disquiet The Necks are considered by some to be a jazz trio, but really they are a single organism. Disquiet continues their streak of making music that changes so slowly you don’t realize it’s happening until you’re somewhere else entirely. This one isn’t available on vinyl, but I’ll allow it.

Natural Information Society - Perseverance Flow Joshua Abrams and crew do not write songs; they weave baskets. This album is a masterclass in locking into a groove and staying there until it becomes spiritual.

[Ahmed] - Sama’a (Audition) Spiritual jazz that feels ancient and urgent all at once. It’s demanding listening, but the payoff is massive.

The Ghost in the Machine

Synths, Hauntology, and the future looking backward.

Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer Daniel Lopatin returns to the “junk” aesthetic—taking the debris of modern culture and sculpting it into something beautiful and terrifying. “For Residue” might be the track of the year.

Barker - Stochastic Drift If techno is usually about the ground (the stomp, the kick), Barker makes music for the ceiling. He continues his crusade against the kick drum, creating dance music that operates in zero gravity. It is shimmering, weightless, and incredibly precise, like watching a mathematical equation resolve itself in real-time.

Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - Public Works and Utilities Music for a future that never happened. This is hauntology at its peak: stark, lonely, and strangely comforting. It sounds like a public information film from 1978 melting in the sun.

Steve Hauschildt - Aeropsia While everyone else was going dark, Hauschildt went crystalline. This is high-definition ambient. It’s precise, clean, and absolutely gorgeous.

The “Recency Bias” Award

The album I picked up three weeks ago that I am currently convinced is the greatest thing ever made.

SML - How You Been This record is pure energy. It’s the sound of the Los Angeles jazz scene crashing into modular synths and not apologizing. It’s loose, it’s funky, and it creates a bridge between the jazz heads and the electronic nerds. If I had heard this in January, it would still be here. But hearing it in December makes it feel like a victory lap.

The “I Don’t Ever Pick an Album of the Year, But If I Did...” Award

Djrum - Under Tangled Silence

Felix Manuel (Djrum) has always operated in the gaps between genres, but on Under Tangled Silence, he stops bridging those gaps and simply builds a new world on top of them.

This is a stunning progression from his previous work. He leverages his classical piano training not as a gimmick, but as a skeleton key to unlock his electronic production. The result is a record that feels impossibly wide—blending delicate, cinematic composition with the fractured, restless rhythms of IDM and bass music.

It is designed to be consumed whole. It pulls you from moments of meditative near-silence into complex, knotted beat structures that are too intelligent for the dancefloor but too physical for the armchair. It is a “listening album” in the truest sense. I don’t know how Manuel tops this, but watching him try is going to be the best part of the next few years. A future classic.

Honorable Mentions (The Crate Digs)

Mulatu Astatke - Mulatu Plays Mulatu: The king of Ethio-jazz proves he can still silence a room.

Debbie Gaskin & Eternal Love Combo: The surprise of the year. A Toronto release that sounds like a lost gem from 1982. Pure reggae-calypso-soul joy.

Loscil - Lake Fire: Essential listening for anyone living under grey skies.

Fabiano - Landmarks: Drumless, futuristic soundscapes for the inner astronaut.

In a year where it felt like everything was synthetic, these records reminded me how real it can get.

Thanks for reading and listening. Catch you in 2026!

Sandy

If you go back to a playlist (err, lets be real, a mix tape) from 1982—Toto, Steely Dan, even early Michael Jackson—the songs rarely ended. They retreated. The chorus would repeat, the volume knob would slowly turn counter-clockwise, and the band would play on into an imaginary infinity.

The “fade-out” was a promise. It told you the party was still going, you just weren’t invited anymore. It gave the music a sense of permanence, implying that the groove was eternal and the recording was just a snippet of a jam session that never really stopped.

But look at the Billboard Hot 100 today (Yes,still a thing), and you’ll hear something different. The Hard Cut.

Songs no longer walk away; they hang up on you. We assume this is just a style choice, a shift in fashion. But like most things in the modern music industry, the death of the fade-out isn’t just aesthetic—it’s economic. In an ecosystem ruled by the skip button and the infinite loop, a long goodbye is a liability.

The algorithm doesn’t have time for a sunset.

The Jude vs. The Guy

To understand what we’ve lost, we have to look at the two extremes of the spectrum.

On one side, we have Hey Jude. The song is seven minutes long. The fade-out alone is nearly four minutes of that. It is a collective hallucination; a chant that feels like it could last for eternity. The fade-out here isn’t an ending; it’s a suggestion that the song is now too big for the recording equipment to contain. It leaves you feeling full.

On the other side, we have the song that arguably defined the streaming era: Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy.

It doesn’t fade. It doesn’t even resolve. It just... stops. The final seconds are a dry, mumbled “I’m the bad guy,” followed by silence. It’s a hard reset. It is designed to be looped. If you play it on repeat, the end snaps perfectly back onto the beginning without a breath. It keeps the energy high, the retention metrics solid, and the listener locked in.

The Selector’s Cut: The Hour-Long Fade

If the fade-out is a form of hypnosis, then Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 (1984) is the master class.

For the crate-diggers and the Paradise Garage historians, E2-E4 is a holy relic. Recorded in a single, one-hour take, it is the ultimate “selector” weapon—a track that Larry Levan would famously let run for its entire duration on the dancefloor.

But the magic of E2-E4 isn’t just its length; it’s how it treats the concept of an ending.

It is essentially two chords, rippling over and over for 58 minutes. It doesn’t have a traditional structure. It is a flat circle. By the time you reach the 50-minute mark, the music has ceased to be a “song” and has become an environment. You stop listening to it and start living in it.

Because it goes on for so long, you almost experience the fade in your brain over the course of days. When it finally does finish, it feels less like a song ending and more like you are physically leaving the room. The music stays; you go.

That is the sensation the algorithm killed. The feeling that the music exists without you.

If you’ve got a few minutes of infinity to spare, you can bliss out with Manuel Göttsching here:

The Economy of the Slam

So why did the music stop fading? Because the ecosystem changed.

In the vinyl era, the fade-out was a functional necessity. It prevented the jarring “click-pop” of the needle lifting off the groove. It was a mechanical handshake.

In the streaming economy, silence is death. Platforms pay per play (usually triggering after the 30-second mark), and they are incentivized to get you to the next track immediately. A fade-out is, by definition, a signal that the song is over. In the attention economy, telling the listener “it’s over” is a fatal error. It gives them permission to leave, to check Instagram, to switch vibes.

And it changes how we listen. Without the fade, there’s no decompression, no lingering moment to let the mood settle. You’re yanked forward. Always on to the next, never quite leaving the last.

The “Hard Cut” keeps you trapped in the loop. It slams the door in your face so fast you have to knock to get back in.

It’s efficient. It’s high-energy. It works for TikTok edits where sound needs to be a “block” that can be cut anywhere. But we lost the sunset. We lost that moment of reflection where the chorus repeats and you imagine the band driving off into the distance. We traded a moment of reflection for a moment of retention.

The algorithm might be happier, but I miss the long goodbye.

Thanks for reading and listening.

But wait—it’s a false ending. (You saw that coming, right?) Here’s a playlist.

If you’re in the mood to drift, dissolve, or disappear, here are some tracks that perfected the art of not ending. This one’s a little more canonical than usual—more legends than lost cuts—but when it comes to the art of fading out, the classics earned their spot. Consider it a temporary dip above the surface.

Let them trail off into your afternoon. Or loop them and pretend they never ended in the first place.

Here’s the playlist in full on Spotify or Apple Music version here.

Or, hey listen to what you want to below and YouTube your way into infinity.

Prince – Purple Rain
The fade-out as emotional catharsis—guitar howling into eternity.

The Rolling Stones – Can’t You Hear Me Knocking
Starts tight, ends loose. The jam becomes the destination.

David Bowie -Heroes
Not a traditional fade, but a spiritual dissolve.

The Beach Boys - God Only Knows
Harmonies cascading into the infinite.

Roxy Music - Avalon
Slips away like mist at midnight.

Kraftwerk - Computer World
Precision-engineered hypnosis fading into silence.

Daft Punk – Voyager
The digital disco dream slowly evaporates.

Talk Talk - New Grass
A 9-minute song that feels like it fades over hours.

Television - Marquee Moon
The solo keeps unspooling after the track is gone.

War - Low Rider
Fade as eternal cruise mode.

Isaac Hayes - Walk on By
The fade aches.

LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends
Modern classic. Ends by letting go—quietly, reluctantly.

Thanks for reading and listening ;-)

That’s it. That’s all. This isn’t a Marvel movie.

We all have those songs we know by heart, but barely know at all. The ones we belt out at parties or hear in a supermarket aisle without realizing they were written by people trying to change the world — or at least point out how broken it was.

For some bands, that irony became their legacy: the moment their sharpest ideas were smoothed into pop singalongs. These are the artists who slipped radical, philosophical, or deeply political ideas into catchy hooks and then watched as the world danced to the opposite of what they meant.

Devo — The Joke That Came True

For most people, Devo begins and ends with Whip It, a jerky, synthetic anthem that could be about discipline, self-help, or masturbation, depending on how you squint at it. But Devo’s real project was far bigger: they were an idea band built on the theory that human beings were de-evolving. Their name wasn’t a gimmick; it was a manifesto.

Before “Whip It,” Devo laid out their whole philosophy in The Truth About De-evolution, a 1976 short film equal parts art-school experiment and cultural prophecy. It’s where they first argued — with deadpan absurdity — that humanity wasn’t evolving, but de-evolving. Watch it below in all its restored glory!

When Whip It became a hit, they saw it as proof that they were right. Their satire of American conformity was swallowed whole by the very culture it mocked. It was both maddening and poetic — the ultimate feedback loop of irony. Devo didn’t just predict de-evolution; they experienced it on the charts.

Chumbawamba — The Anarchists at the Pub

Tubthumping was inescapable in the late ’90s — a soccer chant about getting knocked down and getting up again, soundtracking frat parties and sports montages. But Chumbawamba were an anarchist collective who had spent over a decade making folk-punk about labor strikes, class struggle, and police brutality. When their one global hit landed, they didn’t retreat from their politics, they used the platform to funnel money to striking workers and call out corporations in interviews.

They were painfully aware of the irony: their anti-capitalist message had been turned into a frat party classic. A few years earlier, they had released Enough Is Enough, a fierce collaboration with hip-hop group Credit to the Nation that called for unity against racism and fascism that served as proof that their politics were never subtext, but the point. But they also understood the Trojan horse they’d built. If the revolution had to sneak in through a pub anthem, so be it.

10cc — The Love Song About Not Loving

I’m Not in Love is one of the great soft-rock slow dances of the 1970s. It’s a breathy, romantic swirl of synths and multi-tracked voices. But it’s also a song mocking emotional repression. 10cc’s whole project was irony wrapped in immaculate pop production; half the band came from art-school pranksterism, the other half from commercial pop genius. They made songs that sounded sentimental but were actually about sentimentality itself.

Under the gloss, 10cc’s through-line is pop as critique. They wrote like ad creatives turning the camera on their client: mocking capitalism in The Wall Street Shuffle, puncturing art-world pretensions in Art for Art’s Sake, and turning carceral power into uneasy slapstick in Rubber Bullets. Their politics were stealth, less slogan than running commentary on how money, media and desire shape what we feel and what we’re sold.

If I’m Not in Love showed 10cc’s emotional irony, Art for Art’s Sake reveals their social one. The song takes the old aesthetic maxim — that art should exist purely for beauty’s sake — and twists it into a satire about greed and commodification. “Art for art’s sake, money for God’s sake,” they sing, with studio precision and a smirk. It’s a perfect snapshot of 10cc’s worldview: dazzling production used to expose the absurdity of pop and profit worshipping each other.

Unlike some of the others here, 10cc didn’t seem frustrated by the misunderstanding. They were amused. It was their favourite trick: making people slow dance to a song about the impossibility of love.

The Kinks — The Village Green Prophets

Ray Davies might be the most misunderstood songwriter in British rock. The Kinks are remembered for You Really Got Me and Lola — loud, funny, and endlessly replayable. But under those hits lies a body of work obsessed with postwar class anxiety, cultural decay, and the loss of identity in modern England. Albums like The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) are as politically observant as anything The Clash ever wrote, just dressed up in music-hall melodies instead of protest chants.

Written in 1969 for Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), Shangri-La is Ray Davies at his most devastating. The song starts as a gentle ode to middle-class comfort — the dream home, the car, the fenced-in peace of postwar suburbia — then slowly unravels into satire. Davies exposes that so-called paradise as a trap: a mortgage-fueled illusion of freedom masking debt, conformity, and quiet despair. Few songs capture the bitterness beneath Britain’s suburban dream as sharply as this one.

Davies wanted to hold a mirror up to Britain, but people mostly saw a singalong reflection. He once said he was writing about England’s soul, not its soundtrack. Pop radio chose the latter.

The Clash — Accidentally Pop

By the time London Calling came out, The Clash were already being called “the only band that matters.” It’s ironic, then, that their most approachable song, Train In Vain, wasn’t even listed on the album cover. It was added last-minute, a soulful pop song about heartbreak tucked onto one of the most politically charged records ever made. The Clash never saw accessibility as betrayal — they saw it as strategy. You can’t start a revolution if no one’s listening.

Early on, The Clash made their stance impossible to miss. “White Riot” — their debut single — was inspired by the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival uprising, when Black Londoners fought back against police brutality. Joe Strummer’s message wasn’t about division but solidarity: if the system’s stacked against all of us, why aren’t white kids rioting too? It’s as raw and political as punk ever got — a call to wake up, not burn out.

The Cost of Being Heard

In their own ways, each of these bands wrestled with the same dilemma: what happens when you finally get people’s attention — but not their understanding? Pop success brings reach, but it also rounds off edges, turns manifestos into slogans, and protest into party fuel.

Still, maybe that’s the price of entry. A catchy song might not change the world, but it can sneak a dangerous idea into the world’s head. Sometimes the revolution sounds like a chorus you can’t stop singing.

@modoliveofficialGet tickets to see Mad Professor in Toronto NEXT WEEK on October 10th at Lee's Palace with Odario! 🎟️ Link in bio. #livemusic #reggae #torontoevents

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Then it was off to Autechre — whose set turned out to be the perfect counterpoint — but more on that in a bit.

Experiencing both of these shows back to back got me thinking: what does “live” performance really mean in electronic music?

There’s an inherent challenge when it comes to electronic music and live performance: what exactly are we watching? With a guitarist, we see hands strumming strings, feet tapping pedals. With a drummer, every physical motion maps to sound in a fairly transparent way. But with electronic musicians, much of the action is hidden — inside software, behind racks, behind patching. What are they doing up there?

That opacity has long fueled skepticism — the idea that many electronic sets are just fancy playback. Deadmau5’s critique that much of electronic performance is “button pushing” doesn’t just call out laziness; it challenges the very definition of performance. If we can’t see the action, do we believe it’s happening?

Electronic musicians, of course, have embraced the challenge. They’ve invented strategies to prove presence, to turn hidden dial turns and algorithmic shifts into something we can collectively feel.

The Disappearing Act: Autechre in Darkness

You couldn’t really see Autechre perform. The stage was shrouded in near-total darkness, save for the exit signage and laptops dimmed to the lowest possible setting. No light show, no flourish, no visual cues. It was like listening in a void. And yet, it felt intensely alive.

Autechre’s shows are famously improvised. Each set is a unique unfolding and no two nights are the same. The darkness becomes a kind of collaborator: you’re forced to listen, to internalize, to respond internally. In that space, sound becomes architecture, and you become a participant in the unfolding shapes.

And while Mad Professor had us watching every fader move and delay echo in real time, Autechre left us in complete darkness, straining to locate ourselves in the sound. One show was all about exposure, the other about concealment. Both were unmistakably live — but in completely different ways.

Nothing to see here!

Exposing the Process: Gesture, Transparency, Spectacle

Some performers go the opposite route. Rather than hide the mechanics, they display them, emphasizing transparency.

Herbert and the art of sampling

At one show I was lucky to attend, Herbert physically cracked apart a Britney Spears CD and recorded the sound of it breaking. He then used those audio fragments as raw material to build a new track, live. The remix wasn’t a club edit, it was a conceptual performance about transformation, authorship, and sound itself. You saw the gesture, and then you heard the result.

Keep in mind, this is the same artist who once made an entire album out of pig sounds — literally sampling a pig from birth to slaughter.

I’ll spare you a visual on that, but here’s a video of Herbert making a song from a soda can.

Daft Punk’s Pyramid Spectacle

Then there’s the other extreme. I was fortunate to see Daft Punk’s pyramid show. It was an overwhelming spectacle that leaned fully into the power of lighting. Their 2006 Coachella performance (and the Alive 2006/2007 tour that followed) used the sheer brute force of synchronized visuals. The result was an audiovisual behemoth. As legend has it, they bought up almost every available LED fixture in North America to make it happen.

ROBOT! HUMAN! ROBOT! HUMAN!

Floating Points: Bridging Jazz, Orchestra, Electronica
Then there’s someone like Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), whose trajectory has traversed DJing, dancefloor tracks, electronic composition, and live orchestral collaborations. His album Promises with Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra is an example: blending jazz, electronics, and orchestral space into a single, evolving composition.

In live settings, he’s brought together symphonies, jazz musicians, and modular rigs to create one-off performances that blend the heady with the visceral — highbrow, yes, but deeply physical and immersive, too.

William Basinski’s reel to reel ballet

Another artist who blurs the line between gesture and sound is William Basinski. When performing his tape-based works, he manipulates loops on reel-to-reel machines with the delicacy of a turntablist from another era. There’s an eerie grace to how he moves in a kind of slow-motion ballet. As the tapes flutter and degrade, he gently adjusts, letting the physical medium dictate the pace. It’s minimal but deeply emotional, and you can feel the tension between control and surrender in his every movement. The gesture becomes the performance.

Modular / Patchwork Visibility
And of course, many modular artists intentionally keep the patch cords exposed, knobs twitching, LED rings blinking. That visual metabolism of patching — the act of rerouting signal, flipping cables, shifting voltage — becomes legible to the audience. You see the process, not just the result.

Input as Performance: From Police Scanners to Google Maps

For some artists, performance is defined not by gesture but by source.

In the 1990s, Robin Rimbaud, who is better known as Scanner, made waves by incorporating live police chatter and intercepted cellphone conversations into his sets. It was eerie, voyeuristic, thrilling. The act of tuning in became the act of creation. Surveillance turned into improvisation.

Thankfully, its not as easy to drop in on cell phone conversations these days!

Kraftwerk, ever the pioneers, found their own way to localize the live experience. During their 2000s-era tours, they’d sometimes project a Google Map of the city they were performing in behind them — starting with a wide shot of space and Earth, then zooming all the way in until Google Earth was displaying the concert hall itself. Hyper-minimal, but deeply effective. The audience would roar in recognition. Even in a show calibrated to the millisecond, they found a way to make it about here, about now.

Improvisation, Glitch, and the Edge of Control

Improvisation remains one of the strongest claims to authenticity. Autechre does it. Floating Points often leans into it. Some use generative systems or semi-autonomous patches that evolve in response to operator choices, not just fixed presets.

Then there’s the art of disruption: glitches, breakdowns, silence, reversal — moments when the music unravels and you sense the thread being held just by intention.

What Are We Watching, and What Do We Expect?

Maybe the better question isn’t what are they doing up there, but what do we expect performance to look like? In rock or jazz, the physical is legible. In electronic music, the task becomes one of translation, making invisible motion audible and making digital decisions feel immediate.

When artists choose to hide themselves, or display their wires, or build spectacles of light, or integrate orchestras, what they’re really doing is redefining performance. They ask us to listen, to trust, to feel presence even without visible proof. And when it works, it’s unforgettable.

Thanks for reading, listening and watching!

Sandy

But when I think about collections that truly shaped culture, that reached beyond the personal and changed how people listen, I’m inspired by these.

Sister Mary Ignatius Davies (Alpha Boys’ School, Jamaica)

Focus: Jazz, blues, R&B, ska

Why it matters: Founded in 1880 by the Sisters of Mercy in Kingston, Alpha Boys’ School began as a home for “wayward boys” — often orphans or youth from tough backgrounds. In the early 20th century, it introduced a music program that would quietly shape the sound of Jamaica and eventually, the world.

The school's brass band training was rigorous. Under the stewardship of Sister Mary Ignatius Davies, music became a path out of poverty and into creative power. Her own record collection — heavy on jazz, blues, and early R&B — became both inspiration and instruction. She played sides on a sound system for students and curated a kind of informal syllabus that included everyone from Charlie Parker to Count Basie.

The school’s alumni list is staggering: Don Drummond, Tommy McCook, Lester Sterling, Cedric Brooks, Rico Rodriguez, Yellowman, Johnny Osbourne. These aren’t just great players. They’re foundational figures in ska, reggae, dub, and dancehall.

And those genres didn’t stay in Jamaica. They influenced punk in London, hip-hop in New York, electronic music in Berlin. If Alpha Boys’ School shaped Jamaican music, it shaped global music.

Sister Iggy’s crate was one of its cornerstones.

John Peel (BBC, UK)

Focus: Punk, post-punk, reggae, global underground

Why it matters: John Peel’s radio shows on the BBC introduced countless listeners to music they never would have heard otherwise. He broke acts like The Smiths, Joy Division, The Fall, PJ Harvey, Napalm Death, and even early hip-hop and techno. His Peel Sessions became essential rites of passage for emerging artists.

Peel’s collection — over 65,000 vinyl records and another 40,000 CDs — wasn’t just a stash. It was a gateway. It was so well-organized that his personal cataloging system is now part of the British Library’s National Sound Archive.

When he died in 2004, his collection remained mostly intact. A portion was digitized for the public in the John Peel Archive, a beautifully browsable digital library that shows just how deep and wide his influence was.

Questlove (The Roots, USA)

Focus: Soul, funk, hip-hop, jazz

Why it matters: Questlove’s vinyl collection is estimated to include over 200,000 records. That’s not counting the samples in his brain. His home is basically part library, part studio, part shrine. But what makes it influential isn’t just its size — it’s how it’s used.

He brings those records to life: through The Roots’ arrangements, his DJ sets, his writing (Mo’ Meta Blues, Music is History), his production work, and the Summer of Soul documentary. He’s a scholar with turntables, and his collection is as much a time machine as it is a playlist.

And it’s not just records. Questlove is a collector in the truest sense: he’s known to keep old Soul Train episodes on VHS, vintage magazines, promotional posters, ticket stubs, and handwritten setlists. He once admitted he hoards restaurant menus from every tour stop. All of it adds up to a tactile memory bank and a collector’s instinct driven by curiosity and preservation.

Here’s an early MTV clip from when his collection was a meagre 35,000 records.

In this recent video, Rainn Wilson talks with Questlove about his sprawling vinyl collection and the art of collecting in general. Also: I now need a whole documentary on Rainn’s friend who collects thrift store monkey paintings.

Gilles Peterson (Worldwide FM, UK)

Focus: Afrobeat, Latin jazz, broken beat, global groove

Why it matters: I am so jealous of Gilles Peterson. He has pre-release copies of tracks on vinyl months before they were available, if they even come out officially at all. He’ll routinely drop an unreleased 12-inch from a Brazilian jazz band no one had heard of, and the world would catch up six months later.

His record collection is so vast he had to buy a second house to store it. Literally. And it’s not hoarding; it’s harvesting. Gilles doesn’t just collect for himself. He programs radio (Worldwide FM), runs Brownswood Recordings, and curates with a selector’s spirit. If he plays a song, it usually sparks a ripple across global music circles.

BreakBeat Lou (Ultimate Breaks & Beats, USA)

Focus: Funk, soul, drum breaks, sample-ready classics

Why it matters: If you’ve ever heard a classic hip-hop beat from the ’80s or ’90s, you’ve probably heard a record BreakBeat Lou unearthed. The Ultimate Breaks & Beats series, which he co-created, compiled clean, rare, essential drum breaks from his personal collection.

Think about these tracks: “Funky Drummer” by James Brown, “Impeach the President” by the Honey Drippers, “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band, “It’s a New Day” by Skull Snaps. These became the backbone of hip-hop — from Eric B. & Rakim to N.W.A to DJ Shadow.

Lou’s collection wasn’t just influential — it was foundational. Sampling culture as we know it wouldn’t exist without those records.

Check out this clip where Rich Medina sits down with BreakBeat DJ Lou, who takes us through some deep cuts.

David Mancuso (The Loft, NYC)

Focus: Soul, disco, spiritual jazz, ambient

Why it matters: The Loft began in 1970 in David Mancuso’s NYC apartment. For the next decade-plus, it became one of the most spiritually and sonically influential dance spaces in the world. The parties weren’t clubs. They were gatherings. No alcohol (though there were certainly plenty of drugs), no commercial agenda, just music and community.

While Jamaica and reggae owe a huge debt of gratitude to Sister Iggy, disco has Sister Alicia to thank. Mancuso grew up in an orphanage, and she wouldfrequently play from a stack of 45s for the kids to enjoy. That early experience planted the seed for a lifelong relationship with music. Not just as sound, but as shared experience.

Mancuso didn’t DJ in the traditional sense. He played records — full-length, unmixed — on one of the most lovingly engineered sound systems ever built. JBL monitors, Koetsu cartridges, McIntosh amps, audiophile cables. Every detail mattered.

He did his collection justice. These weren’t just dance records, they were spiritual texts. From obscure Afro-Latin grooves to long ambient jazz pieces, his selections helped define the emotional palette of early disco. He directly influenced Larry Levan (Paradise Garage), Frankie Knuckles (The Warehouse), and countless others. House music owes him more than it knows.

Mancuso's approach was simple but radical: let the record breathe, let the sound shine, let the people feel.

Final Thought

The most influential collections don’t just reflect great taste — they shape it. They don’t sit on shelves. They spin in bars, clubs, and basements. They echo in samples, live in liner notes, and spark entire movements.

Thanks for listening and reading

Before there were Spotify links, there was the mixtape. A mixtape was never just a collection of songs. It was a story, an argument, a seduction, a confession—whatever you needed it to be.

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (and its film) captured the mythology of the mixtape, with its rules and rituals. Sequencing mattered: the first track had to grab you; the second sparked intrigue; the closer had to linger. Abrupt tonal shifts were taboo. You couldn’t just stack your greatest hits; there had to be pacing, drama, peaks and valleys. A mixtape was practically cinematic. Making one demanded time, patience, rewinding, re-recording—attention that felt almost devotional.

A delightfully obsessive breakdown of the “subtle art” of mixtape-making, perfectly capturing Hornby’s sensibility.

And like I wrote in Mythical Lists in Music, lists are never neutral. Professor Werbin reminded us that every list carries meaning—about taste, about power, about belonging. A mixtape is just another kind of list, but one where the stakes feel personal.

The Romance (and Risk) of the Mixtape

For all the rules about sequencing and flow, the mixtape was never just about songs. It was about messages. Giving one to someone could feel as loaded as a love letter. My girlfriend of decades ago once became upset when I gave a mixtape to another person. “Too intimate!” she exclaimed. And she wasn’t wrong: a tape wasn’t casual. It was hours of labor, curation, intention—a gift of selfhood in tracklist form.

That intimacy carried over into the playlist (and Tinder!) era too. A friend of mine recently received a playlist right after a first date. Sweet? Creepy? Overly forward? We weren’t sure. We spent hours psychoanalyzing the tracklist, trying to decipher the hidden meaning in each choice: Was that melancholy ballad a confession of heartbreak? Was the upbeat closer a sign of hope, or just poor sequencing? The point wasn’t whether we were right—it was that the playlist invited speculation.

Spoiler alert: she broke it off with him soon after, and the song selection was definitely a factor. Proof, maybe, that music really does speak louder than words.

Hip hop pushed the idea of the mixed tape even further. What started as party tapes in the Bronx—DJs recording live sets to share—evolved into a parallel shadow economy. By the ’90s and early 2000s, mixtapes weren’t just fan-to-fan curation. They became career tools. Essential for testing new material, building buzz, bypassing labels. Think 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, Drake. The mixtape became both art form and business move.

(Pitchfork: 50 Best Rap Mixtapes of the Millennium)

For younger listeners, though, the mixtape probably came to life in a different way. Guardians of the Galaxy introduced a whole generation to the concept with its “Awesome Mix Vol. 1”—a lovingly handmade cassette that became the film’s emotional core. For many Gen Z, Peter Quill’s tape wasn’t nostalgia, it was a first encounter with the power of a curated song sequence.

And then came the digital shift. Mixtapes weren’t tapes anymore. CDs, iTunes, Spotify made sequencing effortless but maybe less intimate. Anyone can make a playlist in five minutes. Does that dilute the act’s meaning? Or does it simply change the terms?

I’ve made them for friends, for partners, for myself. I made one for my wedding, and I still take comfort knowing a few of my DJ sets are floating around on cassette and even VHS (you still have that one from that San Francisco party, Matt?). They’re little time capsules.

Lately, I’ve shied away from sharing new ones on Below the Surface. I pour myself into a mix, only to discover Spotify lacks some key tracks, while Apple Music misses others. When the mix is personal, I want it to feel whole.

David Byrne’s wedding playlist is a reminder that, even in 2025, the impulse remains unchanged. Whether it’s a handmade cassette, a bootleg hip hop tape, a burned CD, or a Spotify link, a playlist is still a way of saying: here’s who I am, and here’s how I want you to hear it.

Thanks for reading.

Sandy

What no one in the room realized is that fifty years later those same records would be coveted objects. They would be sampled by hip hop producers, reissued by boutique labels, and prized by crate-diggers for their strange beauty.

This is library music. It was not supposed to be heard, and yet it refused to stay in the background.

Why Library Music Existed

Television stations, advertising agencies, and film studios in the 1960s through the 1980s needed an endless supply of background cues. Commissioning new scores for every car commercial or wildlife documentary was too slow and too expensive.

Library labels like KPM, De Wolfe, Bruton, and CAM solved the problem. They hired skilled musicians to record albums of pre-cleared tracks, organized by mood. Titles read like catalog entries: “Light Industrial,” “Pastoral Scenes,” “Action Themes.” Producers could browse, pick what fit, and move on.

Because the records were not made for the public, the musicians often had remarkable freedom. A driving funk cue by Alan Hawkshaw could end up funkier than many commercial funk records. A “science documentary” theme might explore strange synthesizer textures years before electronic music was mainstream.

Hidden Gems

Alan Hawkshaw – The Champ (KPM 1968). Written as a funky workout cue, it later became one of the most sampled tracks in hip hop , appearing in Eric B. & Rakim, De La Soul, and countless others.

Keith Mansfield – Funky Fanfare. Once a television ident, later placed by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill and Grindhouse.

Brian Bennett - Glass Tubes. This track turns a simple rhythm into a hypnotic mechanical pulse, sounding at once industrial and dreamlike.

De Wolfe’s electronic catalog from the late 1970s and early 1980s contains many proto-electronica experiments, with B. Chatton’s Vapour Trails is a standout. I am sure Boards of Canada would agree.

And the rabbit hole goes deeper. Library catalogs did not stop at funk grooves or electronic experiments. In the mid-70s, KPM even put out The Reggae Album (KPM 1253), a full LP of instrumental reggae cues designed for television and film. For most people it is an oddity, but for me it is a personal favorite. The rhythms are authentic, the grooves are deep, and yet the whole thing was made to sit quietly in the background of some forgotten television program. It is exactly the kind of hidden treasure that makes library music so addictive to explore.

Mister Toaster is a personal fave.

From Background to Hip Hop DNA

In the 1990s, crate diggers uncovered the treasure trove hiding in these forgotten LPs. Hip hop producers in particular found gold.

MF DOOM sampled many De Wolfe cuts, including Keith Mansfield’s Funky Fanfare.

Even Drake gets in on the act, sampling Glass Tubes for Summer Sixteen.

What had been faceless filler became the raw material for some of the most celebrated hip hop records. If you want to go deeper, check out this playlist I camae across that features KPM originals along with the hip hop songs that sample from them.

The Streaming Parallel

Now open Spotify and you will find entire playlists filled with anonymous tracks. Peaceful Piano, Lo-Fi Chill, Deep Sleep. Some are ghostwritten by nameless musicians for hire. Others are generated by artificial intelligence.

Like library music, these tracks are designed to be functional. But there is a difference. Library music often overflowed with creativity. Spotify filler is designed to suppress it.

The KPM players were jazz musicians, funk players, and experimentalists who smuggled ideas into functional music. Today’s playlist fodder is engineered to be as unremarkable as possible. It is background sound that never distracts, never surprises, and never lingers once the playlist ends.

Where library LPs ended up being sampled, reissued, and celebrated, today’s anonymous playlist tracks feel destined to disappear the moment the algorithm replaces them.

Why It Matters

Music history is not only written by the stars. It is also shaped by the anonymous and the overlooked. The session players of the 1970s did not think they were making timeless music, but they were.

Which raises the question. Will anyone in twenty years dig through today’s anonymous piano tracks the way we dig through KPM LPs now? It feels unlikely. And that contrast only makes the brilliance of library music stand out more.

You can still hear that spirit living on today. Bands like Khruangbin and BADBADNOTGOOD build whole worlds out of instrumental mood and texture, carrying forward the idea that background music can be more than background. In their hands, atmosphere itself becomes the art.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Sandy

Some of these records aren’t on streaming platforms at all.

The ones that are often demand full-length immersion, not snippets.

Sa Pa’s Ambeesh, released on Short Span, unfolds so subtly that clipping a single track feels like slicing a scene from a film. Florian TM Zeisig’s A New Life, on Belgium’s Stroom label, drifts in soft pads and bittersweet repetition, and its effect depends on letting it run start to finish. Even workaday titles like Mammo’s General Patterns (also on Short Span) or Andrea’s Living Room repay the trust you give them across a full listen.

This isn’t playlist bait. It’s music built to be absorbed whole, crafted by artists and labels that quietly resist the algorithm’s shortcut logic.

It turns out the limitations were the point.

Why This Matters

In the rush of summer, there’s something radical about choosing albums over algorithms. These records reward patience, not immediacy. Every shift in texture, every slow fade, every looping pattern becomes meaningful because you’re listening with intent.

So here’s to slow summer listening: pick one of these records, hit play, and let the music unfold on its own terms.

Listening Guide: Careful Plays Only

Sa Pa – Ambeesh
Dubby, fog-shrouded soundscapes that unfold like shifting rooms.

Mammo – General Patterns
Subtle grooves that barely pulse but pull you into motion.

Florian TM Zeisig – A New Life
Dreamy, melodic ambient on Belgium’s Stroom label with soft pads, gentle repetition, and a bittersweet tone that lingers long after it ends.

Burial – Comafields / Imaginary Festival
Ghostly, vinyl-crackling fragments that feel bigger than a single track.

xtclvr – Blessed Loops
Hypnotic, meditative loops that are warm and easy to lose yourself in.

Perila – Omnis Festinatio Ex Parte Diaboli Est
Intimate texture work that reads more like a private sound diary.

Jonnnah – Me, With You
Whisper-quiet ambient pop, like eavesdropping on a private reverie.

Purelink – Faith
Ambient lappings over subtle beats, water-like in motion and tone.

Andrea – Living Room
Domestic electronica that feels soft, welcoming, and lived-in.

mu tate, Nexcyia & Exzald S – Labège
Expansive dub-ambient hybrids, a drone-scaped landscape.

rRoxymore – Juggling Dualities
Rhythms that morph between club energy and conceptual textures.

Special Guest DJ – Our Fantasy Complex
Surreal club structures bending and stretching like a dream.

ex_libris – 001 and 002
Experimental tone collages that feel like paging through a sonic notebook.

Priori – This but More (Loidis reconfiguration)
A rework stretched into something hazy, dubby, and spacious.

Fabiano – Landmarks
Gentle melodic electronica with just enough grit to keep it grounded.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Sandy

But this isn’t just a country thing — it’s basically the story of every musical rebellion ever. Jazz went from scandalizing polite society in New Orleans brothels to being taught in conservatories as “America’s classical music.” Punk started as anti-establishment rage and ended up as fashion statement at Urban Outfitters. Heavy metal went from rebellious youth culture to Black Sabbath playing in grocery stores while you shop for organic kale (RIP Ozzy). Hip-hop moved from marginalized Bronx communities to Jay-Z selling champagne and Kanye hawking $300 sneakers. Even alternative rock, literally named as the alternative to mainstream, became the mainstream.

Pop culture has this insatiable appetite that devours everything, including the movements that start as rebellions. So what do you do when you know any authentic rebellion will eventually get stripped of its meaning and turned into a product?

Maybe hyperpop found an answer. During the last few years, artists such as 100 gecs and SOPHIE tried a new strategy - instead of fighting the machine, become the machine, but cranked up to such absurd levels that it almost breaks. They took pop music’s most artificial elements - auto-tune, sugary hooks, digital production - and pushed them so far past artificiality that they created something genuinely weird. It’s rebellion through acceleration instead of rejection.

However, I do wonder if a lot of hyperpop fans simply like the music without getting any of the philosophical stuff in behind it. They hear the sugar rush beats and think it’s just really intense pop music. Take Charli XCX’s “brat summer” - she applied hyperpop principles not just to music but to the entire pop star machine, turning celebrity artificiality into performance art. But how many people posting lime green photos understood they were participating in meta-commentary on pop culture?

Most, probably just liked the vibe.

It’s fine. Good music should stand on its own terms. But it does make me wonder if hyperpop is doomed to the same fate as Outlaw Country where the rebellion gets consumed and all that’s left is the aesthetic.

Which brings me to a ridiculous thought: what if Outlaw Country artists eventually adopt hyperpop’s approach and create “hyper outlaw” country that maxes out the genres tropes? Picture confessional songwriting pushed to extreme oversharing levels - songs of itemized lists of everyone who’s ever wronged them, starting with Tommy who broke my pencil in second grade, or rebelling against mundane items like expiration dates (“Real outlaws trust their gut, not some corporate timestamp”). It could be taking the outlaw aesthetic and pushing it so far past its own established tropes that it exposes how “outlaw” has become its own kind of conformity.

The outlaws rebelling against their own rebellion by becoming so outlaw they break the concept entirely. Wouldn’t that be something?

And then there’s the Cylon question lurking in the background. What happens when AI starts making music that rebels against human musical conventions? When algorithms trained on every genre in history begin generating their own “authentic” rebellion? The machines rebelling against the humans who taught them how to musically rebel in the first place.

That’s probably a whole other post. For now, I’m still trying to figure out if hyper outlaw country would be amazing or terrible.

Thanks for reading.

Sandy

Last month at my "One Drop" night at Bar Gobo, I played Caleb Sweetback's Zion Here I Come — a gorgeous piece of mid 70s heavy roots reggae that exists only on a handful of original 7-inches scattered across the world. Three separate people came up to me, phones in hand, frustrated that technology had failed them. That's the moment you know you've found something special.

The Selector Tradition

In Jamaican sound system culture, the selector is more than a DJ. While the operator plays the record, selectors curate journeys. They choose each record with intention, building narratives that connect genres, eras, and emotions. It's not about seamless transitions — it's about the space between songs, the moment when one vibe settles and another begins.

My monthly night takes its name from reggae's "one drop" rhythm, but the concept means more to me: that a single drop — whether it's a Lee Perry production, a dub echo, or a bass line — can ripple out and influence everything. All roads lead to reggae and dub, and from there, the connections are endless.

The Hunt for Rare Cuts

What makes original Jamaican 45s so special isn't just their sound — though there's nothing quite like the way those vintage Island pressings hit on a proper hi-fi. It's that they represent a moment in time when music was communal, when sound systems were the internet, and when a single seven-inch could change everything.

I've been excited to pull out some Cedric Brooks 7-inches and LPs recently. That cosmic saxophone bridging reggae and free jazz in ways that still sound revolutionary. There's also The Invaders' You Touch My Soul, a sweet slab of pure Studio One gold that never fails to make the room feel the weight of musical history.

These aren't museum pieces. They're living, breathing documents that connect 1970s Kingston to contemporary listening rooms like Bar Gobo, where people gather not to dance but to really listen.

The Ripple Effect in Action

The beauty of being a selector is tracing those connections in real time. I might start with a classic roots reggae cut — say, something from Burning Spear — then drift into King Tubby's dub version, which naturally leads to contemporary dub techno from Basic Channel or Deepchord. The rhythms are related, the space and echo techniques directly descended from those innovative Jamaican engineers.

Then comes the curveball: Chromatics' haunting cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." Suddenly we're in dark synthwave territory, but the connection is there — the same use of space, the same understanding that sometimes what you don't play is as important as what you do.

Sacred Space

Bar Gobo's listening room setup changes how people experience music. Instead of background noise, every track gets full attention. The vintage hi-fi reveals details you'd never catch on phone speakers or even decent headphones. You hear the room tone in those old Jamaican recordings, the way the bass frequencies were captured, the slight tape hiss that adds warmth rather than distraction.

When I drop something like a rare Canadian Stranger Cole 7-inch or an obscure Scientist dub, people don't just hear it — they feel it. That's the magic of proper sound reproduction in a space designed for listening.

Beyond the Reggae Box

While reggae and its offshoots form the foundation, One Drop isn't about musical purity. It's about musical truth. I'll slide in some Alice Coltrane spiritual jazz, ambient electronics from Gas, or even contemporary artists like Burial who clearly understand dub's spatial concepts. The connections are real, not forced.

The goal isn't to educate or appropriate, but to celebrate the ripple effects. To show how Lee Perry's innovations at Black Ark studio influenced not just reggae but ambient music, how Augustus Pablo's melodica lines connect to modern electronic music, how the space and silence in dub opened up possibilities that artists are still exploring today.

The Listening Experience

In our age of playlists and shuffle, the selector's role feels more important than ever. It's about creating an arc, building tension and release, knowing when to go deep and when to surface for air. It's understanding that the person who came for reggae might leave having discovered something completely new, all because you took them on a journey that respected their intelligence and curiosity.

Every month, I try to create that space where a 1976 Jamaican 7-inch can sit next to a 2020 ambient track and both feel essential. Where people can discover that their love for one type of music might actually be a love for something much bigger.

The one drop creates infinite ripples. My job is just to help people hear them.

If you are in Vancouver you can catch me at Bar Gobo next on July 24th. Hope to see you there.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Sandy