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Review: 26 years on from the release of the very first Techno Club mix CD, the popular series has reached its 70th instalment. There's a celebratory feel about it, too, with series founder (and Teutonic trance behemoth) Talla 2LXC being joined by rising star Jes (who handles disc two) and the CDs coming packaged with stickers and a light-up wristband (ideal for creating that 'rave at home' vibe). Musically, it's tons of fun, with Talla 2LXC using his mix to surge between uplifting, hands-aloft cuts by John O'Callaghan, Cold Blue, John Askew and Ronski Speed & Sigma, as well as loads of his productions and collaborations. Jes takes a similar approach on her mix (CD2), flitting between her own tracks, remixes and collaborations and fine cuts by the likes of BT, Matt Fax, Sunbeam and Solarstone.

Review: Italian synthpop group Koto dropped their most seminal tune 'Jabdah' in 1986 and it has been a real dance floor classic ever since. Often coming out over the years with plenty of remixes (there have officially been 12 in all over) and versions as part of best of comps and whatever else, here it comes on a dedicated 12" picture disc with one extended version and one for DJs. It was the band's first single that charted and is still the sort of catchy and emotive tune that gets the dancefloor going and locked into its lush synth sounds and beguiling lyrics about space newspapers and waltzes.

Review: Martinelli - presumably not the Brazilian one who plays in the midst of Arsenal's attack - has his classic disco gem 'Cenerentola (Cinderella)' reissued here by ZYX, a label that is well known and revered for doing just that. First up is served as an extended vocal mix that places the sentimental vocals front and centre with the sleazy sax lines also shine bight. Following the more direct Italo disco workout that is the instrumental comes a remix of the vocal that has a much more bright, tropical and steamy hot feel perfect for summer sessions and then last of all a remix of the instrumental that might be the perfect balance of everything.

Review: Frank Zappa left a lot of complex musical mysteries for the intrepid explorer to discover, but there's unanimous appreciation for Hot Rats which makes it a great entry point into the maverick's career after his initial rock outfit The Mothers Of Invention disbanded. Released in 1969, it was a more jazz-oriented affair with mostly instrumental pieces that sometimes rocked, sometimes wigged out and sometimes did both in a manner akin to the free jazz pioneers of the era. Sonically, it's out of this world too and now it's repressed on heavyweight wax with a bonus insert to take you into the story behind one of the finest albums in the Zappa canon.

Review: The Jazz Dance Fusion series is a compilation-based series collecting some of the finest songs in the Jazzdance, Latin Jazz and Fusion. Each volume is careful cultivated by the well-known British DJ Colin Curtis. After the first three successful editions, the fourth boasts tracks like 'Mother Of The Future" by Venus Dodson, 'I Face East' by Mary Greer Mudiku and 'Ponteio' by Miho Nobuzane, to name but a few. Volume Four Part 2 is spread across two pieces of vinyl housed in a beautiful gatefold vinyl. If you are a jazz fan looking for a compilation to expand your knowledge and love the style, then look no further than this one here! Thanks ro Colin Curtis for continuing to curate such a great series!

Review: Colin Curtis returns with another finely-curated selection of the best 'Jazz Dance Fusion' records he could find. In Curtis' own words, Volume 4 reflects a combination of new music, unreleased music, and tracks that have never been on vinyl before or have not attained the recognition they deserve. A whopping 26 tracks are racked up on the digital edition, but this special vinyl record yields just thirteen further selections from that initial batch; leading the charge is the Rhodesy, hi-hatty '46 To Somewhere' by the Sultan's Swing, capturing the free-spiritedness of hitching a ride to somewhere untrammeled. Further choice sonic infections, infusing elements of vocal jazz, salsa and Latin spoken word, include Somos Amigos' 'Pa'gozar' and GeeW's 'Kyoto'. Get grooving!

Notes: Michael Gira - The Knot: Complete Words for Music, Collected Stories and Journals

Paperback; 7 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches, 408 pages, includes 101 colour images printed on high quality photographic paper.

Paperback has bookplate signed by M Gira.

Journals, stories, and songs span the years 1981 to present. Includes visual archives and artwork dating back to 1974.

"From the Preface to The Knot: This book contains the words to every song I've written worth collecting to date from all my musical projects throughout the years. I've left out various imbecilities and feckless half-starts. Also included in this book are several previously published short stories. They're taken from the collections The Consumer and The Egg, as well as a few other hand- made limited editions of stories. In a few cases I've included excerpts rather than the entire story. This was done for aesthetic purposes, with the overall feel of this current volume in mind. There are a great many journal entries in this book. For the most part they are also, emphatically fiction. They're from an ongoing journal, not a diary. My journals are where I often allow a disembodied, fictional 1st person narrator to take over and unspool imagined events, diatribes, impossible scenarios, psychic auto-cannibalisms, and corrosive or ecstatic dreams etc. Again, these are fiction. Certain things I've written about (in fiction and in song form) seem to exist beneath the surface (in myself and others) and I find them compelling to look at and to describe. I view this as a positive act. In acknowledgment of the constricting and microscopically judgmental and censorious times we live in, the usual authorial caveats apply here. Certainly there are many purely anecdotal journal entries included in this book as well, and my presumption is that an intelligent reader would be able to differentiate one from the other. Personally, I'm very suspicious of memory (especially my own), so I can't definitively vouch for the veracity of the recounting of the literal events herein either. I have also excised material that I felt too personal to include, out of respect for the people involved as well as for myself. There are several large gaps in the journal entries over the years. This is due to lost journals of the time, and in one case a lost laptop (which, painfully, contained a great deal of writing). There are also periods where I didn't keep a journal and didn't write fiction. In any event, I've tried to include fiction and journal entries that correspond roughly to the period before and after a musical album's release and the words that were written for that music. The end section of this book consists of recently unearthed visual documents and imagery and functions here as an incidental archive. The images span the years from 1974 to the present."

Michael Gira

Review: Public Castration Is A Good Idea is one of the rare instances of a bootleg instantly becoming part of a band's canon. As Michael Gira's Swans grew in stature on the outer edges of industrial rock through the 80s, their reputation as an incendiary live act rose in tandem. Some Bizarre gave their blessing to this recording which wound up as the first Swans live album, captured in the UK in 1986 in the wake of the Greed and Holy Money tours. It's a forbidding listen, as you might well expect - all clanking metal, barbed noise and Gira's troubled invocations - and it takes you right to the heart of the band in this formative era.

Review: Johnny Malek is a Detroit-based fashion designer-turned-producer who makes a strident arrival on Yoruba with this EP of gospel-infused deep house. It's a potent approach which chimes perfectly with Osunlade's esteemed label, reportedly prefacing a larger project to come. There is an abundance of Afro house drums on 'I Promise', an anthem in the making with a vocal which will lodge itself in the hearts and minds of any assembled throng it's faced with. 'Venus Rising' maintains the vibe, confirming Malek's arrival as an artist to keep tabs on in the new wave of deep house artists.

Review: The festive season can be busy, stressful and quite frankly hard work. Thank you to Joel Andrews then for serving up this perfect excuse to take half an hour to yourself and get lost in his most lush and soothing ambient sounds. The A-side is taken up entirely by 'Paradise Bird' which is rich with spring-like energies and delightful uplifting melodies. But this limited long player also offers more quiet moments of calm and introspection such as on the harp-like and heavenly melodies of 'Chamber Of The Heart.' Glorious stuff that will enrich and energise your life with its subtle and charming beauty.