Tags: Psychedelic Disco

Review: The Duca Bianco label swerves its usual various artists' format to allow CW - who has appeared on those before - to step up with his own solo EP. He is a mysterious artist but is well known for his immersive record collection and legendary sets on the London scene. He is one-third of the Beauty & The Beat party and brings his unique twists of Afro and soul to this quartet of tunes. 'Karambolage' opens up with lots of big horns and noodling string sounds over a ramshackle beat then things take a cosmic turn on the rather more psychedelic 'Six Times Seven' with its Nippon-koku polyriddims, while 'Ou Ka Jis Fe Kole' is a party starter with a Zouk dub edge and 'Nzimbab' is built on a low slung and swaggering rhythm.

Review: Andy Meecham has released a lot of fine music as The Emperor Machine, but little as perfect as his recent album, Island Boogie. Here a trio of cuts from that set are given the remix treatment. Hardway Brothers (AKA A Love From Outer Space co-founder Sean Johnston) will grab the headlines for his takes on 'Wanna Pop With You', and rightly so. His 'remix' (A2) cannily combines elements of Meecham's original - synth, bass, bits of Severtine Mouletin's vocal - with oodles of hallucinatory sounds, psychedelic guitars and a tough mid-tempo beat, while the 'Dub' strips things back further whilst upping the trippy vibe. Elsewhere, Tigerbalm delivers a rework of 'La Cassette' that sits somewhere between dub disco and proto-house, and Meecham provides a skeletal, dub-wise 'Version' of his fine La Fox cover, 'S-S-S-Single Bed'.

Review: YIN YIN, the highly touted Dutch quartet from Maastricht, returns with a sonically expansive third album Mount Matsu. Recorded collectively in their own studio in the Belgian countryside, the album is a kaleidoscope of sounds and influences, occupying a no-man's land between Khruangbin and Kraftwerk, surf music and Southeast Asian psychedelia, Stax soul and mutant 80s disco, City pop and Japanese instrumental folk (sokyoku). Mount Matsu hears YIN YIN at their most mature and adventurous stage yet; infectious pentatonic melodicism calling for multiple rewinds.

Review: Label affiliates Mytron and Zongamin make a combined return to the ever-on-point Canadian stable Multi Kulti, delivering an extended selection of typically off-kilter, genre-bending sonic mastery. In what appears to be a match made in the leftfield heavens, the duo join forces to explore dance-ish music's outer reaches, blending tribal motifs with 8-bit sampling and all manner of wonkiness. From the blissful bells of Conjunction With Reality to the bass-heavy throb of GHX, there is unsurprisingly plenty to savour here. Opening cut '08932168' blends enchanting lead melodies with rolling polyrhythms and dubbed-out effects before the equatorial percussion of 'Calliope Omniglot' makes way for the wiggy atmospherics of the collection's title track. Highly recommended.