Coming this fall – an interplanetary space/love odyssey featuring Melvin Van Peebles (Brer Soul, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song). Following Heliocentrics’ Out There and 13 Degrees of Reality albums. 2 CD – Instrumentals included on bonus second disc; ltd. deluxe LP edition contains instrumentals on bonus disc. Out 10.07 – download a free mp3 now!

It’s been a while – six years in fact! – since we first mentioned the collaboration between maverick filmmaker/songwriter/author and all around baadasssss Melvin Van Peebles and Malcolm Catto and Jake Ferguson’s Heliocentrics ensemble. We’re happy to finally set a street date and offer a sample of the madness to come.

The Last Transmission is an interplanetary space/love odyssey told in twelve chapters; it comes nearly ten years after Van Peebles’ appearance as the third member of Quasimoto on Stones Throw Records’ 2005 release The Further Adventure of Lord Quas. For the Heliocentrics, The Last Transmission represents their third Now-Again album, following Out There in 2007 and 13 Degrees of Reality in 2013.

Van Peebles makes for the Heliocentrics’ ideal foil: he did graduate work in astronomy in Holland in the 1950s and maintains an avid interest in cosmology. The Heliocentrics, as their name conveys, draw inspiration from both the philosophic leanings of the likes of Stephen Hawkings and interstellar mysteries, like those surrounding the Malian Dogon tribe’s knowledge of the Sirius B star hundreds of years before it was discovered. Their music is as indebted to Sun Ra’s interstellar jazz as it is inspired by psychedelia’s spiritual expanse.

The Last Transmission, presented as a vocal album and an expanded instrumental selection on a bonus disc, can be taken as both the band’s interpretation of Van Peebles’ poem and a musical voyage inspired by Van Peebles’ vivid imagery. The band considers it their defining work, the result of more than a decade of playing and recording together. They’ve found a voice as a band, one that meshes with Van Peebles,’ as he weaves an intergalactic “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

In between producer/drummer Malcolm Catto’s thunderous syncopation and producer/bassist Jake Ferguson’s bellowing bass lines, amidst the analog electronics and atmospheric interference naturally accorded by their organic analogue process, Van Peebles’ voice floats in and out, spectral in its tone, complete in its conviction in the unfathomable sense that life’s eruption in the cosmic expanse made, and in love’s ability to transform and transcend death.

The Last Transmission 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 instrumental version of “The Cavern” – below.

Download: “Chapter 5 – The Cavern (Instrumental)”

Via Rappcats, on Egon’s mix done for the release of Madlib’s Rock Konducta album:

“This is a mix of late 60s to mid 70s rock music from all over the world: America to Germany to Japan and everywhere in-between. It’s the type of rock Madlib used for the Rock Konducta records, and is a mixture of the incredibly rare and random dollar bin finds that makes crate digging in the rock idiom so much fun. A lot of this is underground – one example was literally recorded by Dusseldorf twenty-somethings in a bomb-shelter, a literally exorcising of Nazi demons through Krautrock – and some of it is from bands that had pop aspirations but recorded something heavy and probably a bit odd as the one-off awesome track on an otherwise forgettable album. Live mix using 2 CDJs, no edits, some mistakes, that’s the way it goes. Shout outs to Twink, Bunker Records, Franz Wippel, any band that spells April with a “y” instead of an “i,” state-run labels from former communist countries who had the nerve to get down with hard psych and Madlib, of course, for finding the funk in all of this.”

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.”