Back in stock: Balearic/Downtempo

Review: Actress fleshes out the heavy melodics on his tenth studio album Statik, a testament to the producer otherwise known as Darren Cunningham's continued preference for making full-length works born of uninterrupted flow states. Debuting for the Norwegian imprint for the first time here, Statik centres on a 'sense of stillness', as ever demonstrating the producer's signature blend of icy, hissy textures with post-club progressions. Albeit this time, he plays up an extra-monochromic found-footage sound, across which all manner of aquatic and cetaceous melodic references are heard.

Review: Amadou & Mariam, the legendary Malian duo, celebrate their nearly 50-year career with La Vie Est Belle, a new album that blends their greatest hits since 1998 with fresh tracks. The album showcases the duo's profound impact on the global music scene, highlighting their pioneering role in Afro-pop. Among the album's highlights is the brand-new single 'Beaux Dimanches' (Ever Mihigo Rework), which sounds like their vintage work. The album also includes 'Mogolu,' a Manu Chao-composed track that effortlessly fuses Afro-beat rhythms with modern electronic elements, a reflection of Amadou & Mariam's enduring ability to innovate. Amadou & Mariam's influence spans far beyond their roots, having collaborated with major artists like U2, Coldplay, and Stevie Wonder. Their musical journey began at the Bamako Institute for Young Blind People in the 1970s, and they quickly won over audiences across West Africa before gaining international recognition in the late 90s. La Vie Est Belle revisits iconic tracks like 'Je Pense A Toi,' 'Sabali,' and 'Bofou Safou,' along with collaborations from Dimanche a Bamako and Welcome to Mali, featuring artists like Damon Albarn and K'Naan. The album also explores their more recent works, including tracks from La Confusion and collaborations with contemporary artists like BLOND. With La Vie Est Belle, Amadou & Mariam reaffirm their status as global music icons, continuing to blend traditional Malian sounds with modern influences, all while spreading messages of peace, love and unity through their music.

Review: Setting aside the tired old debates about what does and doesn't count as Balearic - at this point, that's down to the listener - the hard-to-describe genre does at least lend itself to the humble re-edit. If 'anything goes', then nothing is off limits. The shadowy Balearic London crew put that to the test on this versatile and rather good selection of reworks. They begin by slightly pitching down, tooling up and dubbing out pop 'classic' the Macarena on 'Mac & (Less) Cheese', before heading into safer Balearic territory via the glistening guitars, rubbery grooves and wide-eyed sound effects of 'Release The Hounds!' Elsewhere, 'Cities of Gold' is an extra-percussive slab of deep instrumental synth-pop/proto-house excellence, while 'Stellar Style' does a fine job in re-framing and tweaking an AOR pop gem from the early-to-mid 80s.

Review: In the late summer of 2019, DJ Rocca and Chris Coco spent time together at the intimate La Casella festival in Umbria, Italy, where they chatted about Italo disco, the Rimini/Riccione riviera in the 90s and classic Italian clubs. Inspired by their conversations and imagined memories of scenes they weren't part of, they set out to make the music which over time, evolved into CocoRocca DiscoTeca, an imaginary retro-futuristic club blending past influences with future possibilities. It draws on dub, house and disco and is now resented on this wonderfully escapist full length which starts slow and dreamy, raises the pulse then slows down to a nice emotive finish. A fine reimagine of some classic sounds.

Review: Brooklyn-born street soul artist Martine Girault was an epitomal artist in the genre, and her extended stopover in the UK would prove instrumental in its development, despite her American origins. She was fittingly also a favourite of many international label staples from Eskimo Recordings to Opaz; while in the UK, she collaborated with producer Ray Hayden of Opaz for her standout single 'Revival'. A significant underground hit, 'Revival' veers on the aspirated side of the downbeat street soul sound. Girault's style is both angelic and hoarse, and riffs on the temporal bubbles of the contemporaneous genre new jack swing, while getting at something much higher than either style alone can peg. This reissue reproduces the song in pristine stereo, and brings out the ghost-noted piano hook to extra pop-out effect.

Review: A veritable time capsule of a bygone era that now seems enviably innocent - fallout of Thatcherite politics, economic crises, and wars in the Middle East aside. Perhaps not too dissimilar from today, then, irrespective of your personal feelings towards Happy Mondays the baggy Mancunian swagger-ers did contribute one of the most distinctive voices to the Madchester and indie-acid crossover era, and one that oozed an air of disassociation from mainstream politics of the day. Adding to the sense of this being a period piece, Balearic Beats comprises four remixes of Ryder et al's original work, three of which from one of the leading figures in the dominant narrative about house music arriving in the UK - Paul Oakenfold. The tracks are low-slung, hypnotic, and have an atmosphere that's as thick as the air on a Mediterranean evening.

Review: Accomplished UK talent Medlar's Islands albums mark another leap forward for the always evolving producer. It finds him merging electronic textures with live instrumentation and some top-tier collaborations from Dele Sosimi, Rebekah Reid, Finn Peters and more. 80s fusion, jazz, deep house and amapiano influences all collide into summery sounds that work as well in the club as they do pumping out of the car stereo. From the lush, afro-laced opener 'Take a Trip' to acid-tinged house, freestyle rap and blissed-out Balearica, each track has its own charm and personality. With less reliance on samples and more organic improvisation, this record could well be Medlar's best yet and certainly a great soundtrack to summer.

Review: Death by Tickling is a masterfully intricate new collaborative album from Scotch Rolex and Shackleton. The is the sort of brain boggling and mind melting album that demand to be listened to loud, in the dark, on a great sound system or up close on headphones. It's a melange of languid dance music rhythms with experimental synths and percussion adding freaky details up top. Full of wildly unpredictable changes and weird time signatures, zoned out trance music and darkened dub, cosmic synth freak outs and ferocious sound designs, this is a truly unique record on every level.

Review: Nala Sinephro's latest full-length record, Endlessness, hears the London-based jazz and electronica musician dive deep into the fundaments of nature and existence. Via a decalogue of 'Continuums' - which begin slowly on a note of muted brass and serenely laggard drumming, the first of which rarely stoops to settle on any particular rhythm, more than indulging the not infrequent metric detour - the album swells into a slow but sure expansion in cosmic jazz, which not explicitly but implicitly elicits cosmic thoughts, universal ponderings that exceed the limits of single lifetimes.

Review: With long-serving Balearic DJs Mark Barrott (he of International Feel fame) and Pete Gooding at the controls, you'd expect the latest volume in White Isle venue Hostal La Torre's ongoing compilation series to be on-point. It is of course, with the pair variously offering up a lesser-known (and stunning) David Morley ambient remix of Golden Girls' rave classic 'Kinetic', the tribal-meets-jazz-funk headiness of No Zu, the humid, boogie-era stripped-back soul of Raw Silk (the brilliant 'Storm'), soft focus beach-side exotica (Margaret Wakely's 'Hard To Leave The Island'), pitched-down Italian dream house revivalism (Timmy Stewart remixing the Vendetta Suite), spiritually minded piano jazz (Lola Perrin), picturesque synth-scapes (Suzanne Ciani) and Barrott's own Balearic bliss ('Travelling Music').