Coming this summer – proto-punk and garage Zamrock! The celebrated guitarist Paul Ngozi’s essential debut album. Featuring Chrissy Zebby Tembo. Hardbound casebook CD; ltd. deluxe LP edition contains bonus disc with rare 7″ tracks. Out 08.26 – download a free mp3 now!

We’ve been talking about an anthology centered around Zambian guitarist/vocalist Paul Ngozi for a while now. And – while we’re not there just yet, we’re announcing the issue of his masterwork. His debut album – issued under the name Ngozi Family – is important record: not just in the Zamrock genre, but in the global rock canon. Day of Judgement is an introduction to the most intense, raw and inimitable golden era Zamrock recorded, as it paved the way for a dozen Paul Ngozi and Ngozi Family releases (the most famous being drummer Chrissy Zebby Tembo’s My Ancestors) that straddled the line between funk and punk, of driving hard rock and Zambian folk melodies and rhythms.

Day of Judgement was released in 1976, the same year as other, now famous, Zamrock albums, from WITCH’s Lazy Bones!! to Rikki Ililonga’s Zambia to Musi-O-Tunya’s Give Love To Your Children, all reissued on Now-Again. But Day of Judgement sounds like none of its counterparts. Part of that stems from its frenzied primitivism, the Ngozi Family’s attempt to overcome a lack of musical acumen with sheer force of will.

That will allowed Paul Ngozi to overcome a humble upbringing to become the most unlikely combination: Zamrock’s most beloved star in its brief but now-well chronicled arc; the only musician to maintain his fame and recording prowess in the dark ages of the ’80s; an inspiration to not only aging but young Zambians — and now others, beyond Zambia’s borders.

But one cannot imagine Paul Ngozi without this album, a full-on aural assault that sounds as wild nearly forty years after its release as it must have sounded in the developing Zamrock landscape from which it emerged. We listen to this anachronistic yet prescient album now as a wholly original, completely unpredictable album in line with those from mavericks from across the world – from the Ramones to the Sex Pistols to Death. And, though it’s been over two decades since Paul Ngozi’s passing, his voice and vision still seem exciting, powerful, unique, unvarnished, new.

Day of Judgement will see release as a hardbound casebook CD and in LP form. A limited deluxe edition of the LP will contain a bonus disc which collects four songs from rare Ngozi Family 7″ singles, issued contemporaneously with Day of Judgement.

Day of Judgement will be available to our subscribers at Now-Again Deluxe two weeks prior to the album’s release date. Download a free MP3 from the album – the devastating “Hi Babe” – below.

Download: “Hi Babe”

Long out of print, Karl Hector’s Afrodelic debut LP coming again on vinyl, with a bonus 7″ containing two new songs. Out 08.19

Karl Hector & The Malcouns’ debut album Sahara Swing was out of print on vinyl for about a year and a half leading up to our issue of their sophomore album, Unstraight Ahead. We couldn’t stand to part with the dog-eared copies we still had at the office, and felt bad every time we saw a dealer get $40 for a copy on Discogs. So we decided to repress – and the band added two new tracks, both vocal and instrumental versions of “Roads of Otumpa,” as a bonus 7″.

They will only be available as part of this LP reissue, and as a digital exclusive to our subscribers at Now-Again Deluxe at Drip.fm. Stream the vocal version at our Soundcloud, now.

If you’re a frequent visitor to this site, you might have seen/heard Egon’s set at Boiler Room’s debut in San Francisco. This is the many-times-postponed follow up for their “Collections” series, which we and the Boiler Room crew have tried to get right. It aired live at noon (BST) on Friday June 27th and is available as an archive here:

From Boiler Room’s site:

“He took us on a wondrous musical journey spanning psych, funk, prog and more; interspersed with useful information about each release such as which presses to look for if keen, and what’s going to be reissued for our ears to delight in.

We traveled through Spain with Madlib favorite Pan y Regaliz, Eastern Europe with our old loves Indexi and Drago Mlinarec plus a newfound one, Drugi Nacin; Iran with Kouroush Yaghmaei, over to the African continent with Zambian legends Ngozi Family (keep your eyes peeled for a respective anthology on the label in 2015), Ethiopia with Mahmoud Ahmed, Nigerian band The Hikers, and an unmissable slew of Angolan 45’s – this just to name a few.”

Out now – the long awaited second album by the originators of Afrodelic Kraut Funk – brand new excursions into another world of sound feat. members of Poets of Rhythm and Whitefield Brothers. Eco-wallet CD and digital album available immediately; LP preorder at our Rappcats store!

As we told you when we announced Unstraight Ahead, this album finds Karl Hector and his cohorts exploring territories even outside of the expansive scope of their debut album Sahara Swing. On this album, the West African sounds of Ghana and Mali meet the East African sounds of Mulatu Astatke’s Ethiopian jazz and are tied together with the groove heavy experimentalism of The Malcouns’ 70s Krautrock godfathers: Can, of course, but also more obscure and equally adventurous groups like Agitation Free, Ibliss and Tomorrow’s Gift.

It’s out now on CD and digitally – via our store at Rappcats, on iTunes and via our Now-Again Deluxe subscription service at Drip.fm. Preorders for the LP – with an anticipated ship date of 07.07.

Download: “Push Na Ya”
Buy: Karl Hector & The Malcouns Unstraight Ahead at Rappcats
Buy: Karl Hector & The Malcouns Unstraight Ahead at iTunes

Sixteen Things We Know About Damon is a short film by Andrew Gura: a voice and music driven story that uses animated archival stills, stock footage and typography, lo-fi textures, left-field sound design to tell the nearly impossible backstory behind Damon’s Song of a Gypsy – one that encapsulates the last bloom of the flower power movement before it decayed into the haze of the ‘70s underground. It traces the arch of a pop hopeful descending into chaos, becoming the tortured soul who would create an LP to file alongside works by other lost greats of the late ‘60s, from Shuggie Otis to Rodriguez.

Filmmaker and video director Gura (Madvillain, Nas, Saul Williams) first collaborated with Now-Again’s Egon in 2002, for a short film he produced about the search for the Omaha funk ensemble L.A. Carnival. Ten years after that film, Gura and Egon traveled to Fresno, California, to discover more about Stephen David Heitkotter and his legendary psychedelic rock album. It was over the course of working on a Heitkotter short that the two turned their attention to Damon and his landmark Song of a Gypsy album. Although no archival footage of Damon’s sessions exist, Gura created a short film that captures the milieu into which this masterpiece was born, and Egon tells Damon’s story in a series of vignettes that opens the door to investigate more about this lost masterpiece.

Song of a Gypsy is out now as an LP w/download card, hardbound 2 CD casebook with bonus tracks and digitally. You can purchase it via our webstore at Rappcats or on iTunes.