The Southern Californian production team Michael Raymond Russell and Adam Douglas Manella (MRR-ADM), formerly known as MHE, have self-released one 10″ EP and a promotion-only CD. In the past, they have collaborated with the likes of Ghostface Killah, Malcolm Catto and Mike Burnham. They are currently working on their debut album for Now-Again. Also check out their site where you may play drums with your computer keys… www.dirtydrums.com

The Natural Yogurt Band first signed with Gerald “Jazzman” Short in late 2007. It didn’t take much – a mysterious UK-based duo that record brooding, beat-heavy, difficult-to-categorize demo, love Galt MacDermot, David Axelrod and Ennio Morricone’s 60s and 70s masterpieces and care most about releasing their music in the vinyl format? It was only natural, then, that Short and Now-Again’s Egon would hatch a plan for an expanded North American issue of the band’s debut – an album that had already been hailed as a fine release in keeping with the best “library music” issues of the same era.

Now, the Natural Yogurt Band are signed to Jazzman and Now-Again and plan release their sophomore album as a joint-venture between the two companies in 2010.

Coz Littler, aka Mr. Chop, is the proprietor of Cheshire, UK based Ape Recording Studios – one of the finest analog studios in the world, and a repository for vintage synthesizers, guitars, drums and gear sourced from the world over. He is also a multi-talented instrumentalist who records and releases music. His Lightworlds EP, released on Now-Again in 2009, is a futuristic blend of Vangelis-style, cinematic synthesizer prog, psychedelic funk, jazz and musique concrete – and is just a hint at where this enigmatic genius plans to take his growing faithful www.apestudios.com

When Poets of Rhythm founding members Jan and Max Whitefield traveled from their native Munich to New York to record their eponymous debut album, Sharon Jones was a name only known to the cult that bought her first, rare 45s, The Dap Kings didn’t exist and The El Michels Affair were teenagers gigging as the Mighty Imperials. Rough, raw, real funk music was decidedly out of vogue. Though the Poets had dutifully dozens of 45s and a few key LPs of their modern take on the funk sound over a decade, their recordings remained for a chosen few. Back then, “African influenced funk” meant “sounds like Fela.” The first American “real funk” label, Desco, had disappeared; Desco’s owner Phillipe Lehman searched for a new approach.

Thus, the idea that Jan and Max presented to him – to record an album chock full of funk music influenced by the African diaspora, an album as indebted to the Meters as to Mr. Kuti and his Africa 70, an album as psychedelic as those Ghanaian and Nigerian masterpieces by unknown psych-funk heroes such as Blo, Edazawa and the Psychedelic Aliens – sat perfectly with him. Desco co-founder Gabriel Roth (later the co-founder of Daptone Records and leader of The Dap Kings) brought his bass. Leon Michels, as in El Michels himself, wrote horn arrangements and played sax and flute. So did Daptone co-founder Neal Sugarman. Jan and Max’s compositions came to life and the record was mixed, mastered, packaged, and quickly released. A 7” and a 10” followed, with exclusive tracks not released on In The Raw.

And that was, basically, it. Soul Fire, the label that released In The Raw in 2001, sold a small number of vinyl LPs, and as many CDs as they could self-distribute. And the CD quickly went out of print. Soul-Fire soon folded. The Whitefield Brothers debut album, regarded as a masterpiece by those lucky enough to have heard it, languished as a “collectible” – eBay fodder for the cognoscenti.

Now Again has reissued In The Raw and we’ve closely with Jan and Max to assemble a follow up to their first, crucial slice of the funk spectrum. The Whitefield Brothers create wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve, hypnotic, defiantly psychedelic funk music that is as modern as it is grounded in the great musical traditions from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

This Jay Whitefield side-project follows the direction he began with The Whitefield Brothers. A funk odyssey through all musical cultures informed by the African diaspora.

Karl Hector has, to date, only appeared on one 7-inch, from 1996, as the leader of the Funk Pilots. For his Now-Again album, he has teamed up with Jay Whitefield (producer and guitarist for the Poets of Rhythm and the Whitefield Brothers, and founder of the now defunct Hotpie & Candy Records) and Thomas Myland and Zdenko Curlija, founders of The Malcouns.

Alongside Bo Baral, other members of the Poets of Rhythm and crack Munich- based session musicians, Whitefield, Myland and Curlija crafted nearly twenty tracks that follow the musical roads that Hector has travelled. The underlying groove that ties these ideas together, of course, is as rooted in James Brown as it is Fela Kuti. As informed by Mulatu Astatke of Ethiopia as it is by Jean-Claude Vannier and Can. Their album, Sahara Swing, is of that world. Not “world music” but that will appeal to any culture ever transfixed by rhythm on “the one.”