Tag: Soundway Records

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Auckland’s The Circling Sun Shares Meditative and Yearning “Mizu”

The Circling Sun is an Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau-based jazz collective featuring some of New Zealand/Aotearoa’s finest players, including

The Kiwi-based collective draws from and pays homage to progressive and deeply spiritual Afrocentric jazz. And while being reverent, their approach emphasis both authentic expression and innovation, making their work strikingly original and meditative.

The acclaimed collective’s sophomore album Orbits is slated for a July 11, 2025 release through Soundway Records. The highly-anticipated follow-up to 2023’s critically applauded, full-length debut, Spirits reportedly sees the collective balancing melodic immediacy with harmonic depths with motifs that gradually unfold into complex, multi-layered arrangements. The material takes sonic cues from the mid 70s, channeling the genre-blending, genre-defying energy of Rashaan Roland Kirk and Yusef Lateef‘s Atlantic Records-era period while brining the bubbling synthetic textures on Spirits more fully into focus. Along with that, a standout feature throughout the album is the collective’s collaboration with the Love Affinity Choir, which isn’t a mere flourish or embellishment, but as the material’s textural and narrative force.

Simultaneously layered and ethereal, the choir’s harmonies and melodies float through the material like a celestial current — at times grounding, at times transcendent. Lyrically abstract yet spiritually grounded, Love Affinity Choir’s vocal contributions express universal themes of love, peace, escapism and awe, all while guiding listeners through a shared cosmic journey.

Orbits’ latest single “Mizu,” is a dreamily meditative and breathtakingly beautiful song sees the Kiwis paying homage to Brazilian jazz while intricate percussive motifs and bubbling and gurgling synths help shape the song’s melodic phrasing while propelling the song forward. Love Affinity Choir’s vocal contributions give the song a deep spiritual yearning; the sort of yearning reminiscent of John Coltrane while also being a deeply needed moment of calm and beauty in our mad, mad, mad world.

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Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Italian Percussionist Gabriele Poso Releases a French West Indies Inspired Banger

Gabriele Poso is an acclaimed Italian multi-instrumentalist, master percussionist, Worldwide FM presenter and director of the Yoruba Soul Orchestra. Poso’s musical passion has taken him around the world, Initially to Rome, then to Puerto Rico, Cuba and most recently, Berlin. Between 1998 and 2001. Poso delved deeply into the study of Afro-Cuban percussion — first at Rome’s Timba School of Music, under the guidance of Roberto “Mamey” Evangelista, one of the country’s most important representatives of Afro-Cuban culture and music. In late 2001, Poso relocated to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he attended the Universidad Interamerica de Puerto Rico and continued his studies, which culminated with a masterclass at Havana’s Escuela Nacional de Arte.

Poso’s solo debut 2008’s From The Genuine World was released through Osunlade’s Yoruba Records, which de supported with tours across Europe and elsewhere. His sophomore effort, 2012’s Roots of Soul was released through German label INFRACom! Poso’s third album, 2014’s Invocation was released through German label Agogo Records. 2018’s Awakening was released through British label Barely Breaking Even. 2019’s Batik was released through British label Soundway Records. Interestingly, each album found the Italian percussion looking east, across the Atlantic for inspiration and rhythms.

n October 1, 2021 release through Wonderwheel Recordings. Recorded in Leece, Italy, almost entirely by the Italian master percussionist, the stars of the show are drum and percussion. And much like its predecessors, the album’s material finds Poso continuing to look across the Atlantic for inspiration and rhythms — this time the French West Indies, in particular Guadeloupe and Martinique. “I’m in love with everything about the sound of their drums, it’s very unique warm and deep sound,” Poso explains.

“I put a lot of attention to the sound on this record, exploring new ways for me to record, through analog tape and different analog tools, such as analog delay,” Poso says of the forthcoming 10-song album. “That’s very much present in the whole album and gives a new direction to my sound with a psychedelic touch and a dancefloor attitude that is stronger than the previous album.”

“La Bola,” Tamburo Infinito’s second and latest single features a dancehall and soca friendly bass line, the sort of spaced-out reverb that the late, great Lee “Scratch” Perry would love, exultant horns drenched in reverb, and seemingly infinite layers of Afro Caribbean percussion. The end result is a euphoric, club banger that’s soulful and lovingly crafted.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

 

Martin Morales is a Peruvian-born, British-based, DJ, record collector, audiophile and pioneer of Peruvian food in the UK and was recently named GQ‘S Food and Drinks 2017 Innovator of the Year — but he’s also known as the co-founder of renowned world music label Tiger’s Milk Records. And although he’s spent half of his life in the UK, Morales in recent years has frequently returned to his birthplace — and in particular, the Andes — in search of recipes, records, sounds and inspiration for a variety of projects under the umbrella of his London-based company Ceviche. Morales, along with Tiger’s Milk co-founder Duncan Ballantyne, former Soundway Records label manager, and Peruvian DJ and crate digger Andres Tapia del Rio teamed up to create a series of compilations featuring the sounds of the Amazon and Andres, starting with the ANDINA: The Sound of the Peruvian Andes — Huayno, Carnaval and Cumbia 1968-1978. 

The compilation is meant to offer a fresh perspective on Peru’s multifaceted heritage, brining to light the divergent, exciting traditions that have emerged from Peru’s strip of the Andes Mountains, including cumbia, folkloric harp, Lima-based big band jazz that was influenced by their highland countrymen and so on; however, the compilation was never intended to be a definitive or complete overview of Andean music. Besides focusing on a particular period of music, 1968-1978, the compilation is selection of what they think are the most exciting insights into Andean musical culture, with the debut release of many tracks outside of Peru since their original release on Peruvian labels like Iempsa, Sono Radio and El Virrey — but perhaps more important, the sound most represented is a cumbia where groups imbued a tropical, Colombian style with Andean folk rhythms and rock-like electric guitars, the number of traditional folk numbers recorded and released during that era and of course, carnaval music; in fact, some of the featured bands took touchstones on much-loved music criolla — black music from the coast — but filtered through cumbia, and others employ Afro-Peruvian sounds. Or in other words, the Andean sound draws influences from the musical and culture legacies of indigenous Latin America and the African diaspora. The album’s first single Los Compadores Del Andes’ “La Mecedora” pairs is a cumbia featuring a tight, African Diaspora-influenced, percussive groove with a breezy, organ-led tropicalia, and bright blasts of brass, but perhaps most important, the song reveals a deep truth about the sounds of Peru and its Andean regions — that it’s arguably one of the most unique yet dance floor friendly of the entire region, while giving you a view into the sounds that were popular during the late 1960s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

 

Since appearing on DJ Shadow‘s 2006 album The Outsider, the critically applauded, mostly instrumental London, UK-based act The Heliocentrics, comprised of Malcolm Catto (drums, production), Jake Ferguson (bass), Adrian Owusu (guitar) and multi-instrumentalist Jack Yglesias, have cemented a reputation for a compositional approach based on the band’s four musicians’  live improvisation in the studio as a way to avoid typical songwriting and compositional processes and generic song structures, and for a boldly genre-defying aesthetic as their sound possesses elements of jazz, hip-hop, trip-hop, psych rock, acid jazz, krautrock and musique concrete. Unsurprisingly, as a result of being uncompromisingly difficult to pigeonhole, the members of The Heliocenters have collaborated with an impressive array of artists including Muluta Astake, The Gaslamp Killer, Lloyd Miller, Orlando Julius, the legendary and iconoclastic Melvin Van Peebles and others.

Spending well over a decade together, the members of the band refer to their songwriting and recording process as “almost a form of telepathy” with “musical changes that otherwise would be near impossible to write .. . ” Interestingly, the band’s fourth full-length effort, A World of Masks, which is slated for a June 9, 2017 release through  will further cement their reputation for being difficult to pigeonhole; but it also marks several new directions for a band that constantly pushes themselves in new directions sonically and thematically. First, the London-based band’s fourth album is the first official release through their new label home Soundway Records after several years on Los Angeles-based Now Again Records — and secondly, the album finds the band collaborating with Barbora Patkova, a young Slovakian vocalist, who the members of the band discovered through a mutual friend. According to the band, Patkova’s sound and vocal stylings “instantly worked with us,” and they quickly discovered an artist, who like them was intimately familiar with an improvisational approach and had lyrics at the ready to sing, frequently in her native Slovakian over any music thrown at her.  Lastly, A World of Masks is the first release of rather prolific year or so period for the band: they recently wrote the score to the critically acclaimed documentary about LCD, The Sunshine Makers and have plans to collaborate with the legendary Marshall Allen and the Sun Ra Arekstra, and to continue their collaboration with Gaslamp Killer with a new album as well, ensuring that The Heliocentrics will be a go-to band to collaborate with on genre-stretching and genre-defying works.

The London-based act’s latest single “Oh Brother” is the second official single off A World of Masks and the single is an awe-inspiring, heady and cinematic mix of psych rock, acid jazz, jazz fusion, 60s blue eyed soul and a subtle hint of psychedelic Bollywood in a song that possesses an explosive and feral immediacy paired with Patkova’s sultry and soulful Nancy Sinatra-like vocals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uncategorized by William Ruben Helms

The founders of Ceviche, a renowned Peruvian restaurant in London’s Soho section, are naturally connoisseurs of Peruvian culture and they created Tiger’s Milk Records to share Peru’s rich (and rarely shared) music both past and present. Tiger Milk’s debut […]

Uncategorized by William Ruben Helms

The founders of Ceviche, a renowned Peruvian restaurant in London’s Soho section, are naturally connoisseurs of Peruvian culture and they created Tiger’s Milk Records to share Peru’s rich (and rarely shared) music both past and […]