Despite the widespread popularity of reggae music in the UK, following its explosion onto the international music scene in the late 1960s, many of those in charge of Britain’s mainstream media were reluctant to give the exciting new sound coverage, whether in print or over the airways.
In an attempt to counter this prejudice, Trojan Records took the bold step of embellishing recordings from Jamaica with sophisticated orchestration, with the resultant ‘commercial reggae’ sound immediately finding favour with the country’s reggae fans.
Consequently, the company not just maintained, but in fact extended the procedure, employing producers to record the country’s finest British-based reggae acts.
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Future modal jazz dub, heard thru a Y2K lens by legendary blowers Pharaoh Sanders & Graham Haynes, and diffused in Bill Laswell’s illbient dub style & pattern. A slept-on, cross-generational ace sure to pique interest FFO Jon Hassell to Talvin Singh, Lászlo Hortobágyi to Material.
Drawing from musique concrète, post-punk, free psych, kosmische and of course dub, Valentina Magaletti, Al Wootton and Susumu Mukai’s Holy Tongue surpass themselves on their second album, turning in a set that’s almost completely unmoored from time and space. It’s heady, essential listening FFO The Pop Group, Popol Vuh, Equiknoxx, John T. Gast.
FM is an absolutely stunning collection of tracks by Freddie McGregor, recorded between 1977 and 1982, originally released as singles on Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith’s High Times label in Jamaica. Freddie McGregor is accompanied on the album by the Soul Syndicate band, one of the most important and defining roots reggae session groups, who worked regularly with many of the major producers in Kingston in the 1970s and ’80s.
In its opening moments, 
The 1970s was a truly glorious decade of reggae. While the likes of Bob Marley, Burning Spear and Culture powerfully highlighted political and social inequalities, and the message of Rasta, other artists, both in Jamaica and the UK, drew inspiration from the joys and pains of romantic love. The widespread popularity of love-themed reggae during this golden period is highlighted on this essential 2CD collection which brings together 46 of the most popular romantic reggae recordings ever to have seen issue.
…At the BBC: The Complete Recordings 1979-1981 covers The Selecter’s glory years, from the first of two John Peel sessions in October 1979 (coinciding with their first-on-the-bill slot on the legendary first 2Tone tour, supporting Madness and The Specials) to an April 1981 performance on The Old Grey Whistle Test, recorded months before singer Pauline Black effectively called time on the band by leaving to pursue a solo career and acting ambitions (they’d officially split the year after). The 30-track set marks the first time that all the beloved 2Tone act’s BBC recordings have been released in one place. The eight live tracks taken from a December 1979 show in Paris supporting The Specials were released on 1992’s BBC Radio 1 Live in Concert CD…
In the summer of 1976, Bob Marley & The Wailers hit the UK shortly before the heatwave, in mid-June. They’d been touring Rastaman Vibration since April – breakthrough shows in the US and Europe – and in Britain, just a few months after the success of Live! and No Woman, No Cry, filled four nights and two matinees at
the Hammersmith Odeon, announcing that reggae was no niche novelty but a potent force. In the audience was future DJ Don Letts who in the linernotes here makes an impassioned case for that residency’s significance. “It made British kids who’d never stepped in a Caribbean household feel the hum of something deeper than rock or pop. Marley showed the world the spirituality, rebellion and beauty inside our culture.” Letts also asserts that reviewers of…
Continuing Doctor Bird’s comprehensive anthology series of Lee “Scratch” Perry-produced singles, 
Since 1964, there have been numerous interpretations of The Beatles’ music. Stax, jazz, classical, Motown, country, Bing Crosby, Laibach, and easy listening have all had a go at Beatles cover albums. Mystic Liverpool: The Beatles’ Psychedelic Psongbook may be the most original, and after 60-some years, that is a huge accomplishment. 
1973 was a pivotal time for Lee “Scratch” Perry, as it was the year he built his fabled Black Ark studio, where he created much of his most celebrated work, and he released Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle, often noted as the first full-length dub album. Up until then, he worked as a freelance producer, often recording at King Tubby’s studio. 
The musician known as 
In the late 1970s, Neil Fraser, AKA 
The jig is up. The act behind the most bewildering ambient techno of the past 15 years is not a shadowy syndicate or group of evil geniuses. It’s actually just Izaak Schlossman, who started the project back in Seattle as part of a crew called Aught. The proliferation of aliases, and the artist’s eventual move to San Francisco — where he started the synth-pop band Loveshadow — caused lingering confusion. No one could decide where 
Thirty years since the release of their breakthrough self-titled album and lead singer Bradley Nowell’s passing, sunburnt reggae punk rockers Sublime are back with an hour-long love-letter to their past, and their home. The band proudly states in their 1996 chill out track “Doin Time”, that they’re “qualified to represent the L.B.C”, a statement that has stood the test of time considering how little they have faltered.
The innovations of Berlin’s Basic Channel in the mid-’90s led to a whole new way of thinking about dance music, introducing countless producers to the possibilities of reverb and delay. Producers have been working off the template they set for dub techno ever since. Less often imitated is the duo’s work as Rhythm & Sound, where they slowed their music to reggae tempos and hewed closer to the Jamaican innovations that informed their trippy production tricks. This sound is having a small moment right now. Stuttgart’s Ghost Dubs has made a career of it, both solo and with a fired-up Kevin Richard Martin; Brussels’ Carrier shaped it into cavernous forms on last year’s awesome Rhythm Immortal; all the while, co-originator and close Rhythm & Sound collaborator…
To say that history looms over