Any artist is welcome to send us a track via freshonthenet.co.uk anytime between Monday lunchtime and Thursday morning (or when we receive 200 submissions, whichever is sooner) - and all our moderators, including Tom Robinson, will listen to every track. This is our full inbox from the week beginning Mon 4 October: from Friday afternoon you'll be able to hear our shortlist and pick your favourites on this week's Listening Post which will appear at freshonthenet.co.uk/batch420

If a track you submitted does not appear in this list, it’s probably because another of your tracks appeared in our Fresh Faves or on the BBC Music Introducing Mixtape during the last three months — we ask that artists featured on either wait three months before resubmitting to give others a chance. We also don’t accept short previews or SoundCloud GO tracks that can only be heard as 30 second previews, and tracks made private after submission, which cannot be included in playlists. You will be able to resubmit the track in future. Tracks that have been previously submitted and tracks from banned artists will also be removed.

ENTIRE INBOX: Batch 420

favourite things | 11.21

We put together a playlist of the best new music of last month.

Twistedsoul Stereo: October

‘Caminhos’ is a tribute to the late samba singer and composer Sebastião Victorino Teixeira Dos Santos, better known as Catoni. The heavy swinging hip hop track bridges gaps between classic Brazilian samba sounds with hard hitting Dilla-esque grooves, raw funk and boom bap, taking us on a trip to the shores of Rio de Janeiro.
lyrics
Em que linha do horizonte meu olhar se embaraçou
Em que caminho de fonte a minha sede secou
Que estrada que prendeu na poeira os meus passos
Que noite acendeu no meu corpo o cansaço
credits
from Laroyê, track released September 1, 2021
Produced by Szabolcs Bognar aka Àbáse

Guitar & vocals by Catoni

Mixed by Benjamin Thierney
Mastered by Marco Pellegrino

Cover design by Jason Vaz
Cover collage by Exocé Kasongo aka Bantufuturist
Cover painting by Raphael Cruz

Oshu Records 2021

Caminhos (for Catoni)

Celestial Greens

Day & Age

Faded

On November 26th Albert’s Favourites present the new mini album by influential beats purveyor Daedelus and unique poet/MC Joshua Idehen. ‘Holy Water Over Sons’ is a powerful yet vulnerable collection of poems contemplating life as a black man, and protest – made vivid on platforms of otherworldly, future electronics.

‘Holy Water Over Sons’ weaves through a world at extremes, bringing back to light the racial injustices which ignited the Black Lives Matter movement. Its eight tracks of minimal mechanoid lamentation and ethereal, almost dreamlike electro-blues pulsate under meditations of race, depression, identity and grief.

First single, ‘Standing In My Own Way (Part One)’ is a meditation on lost friendship, exposing the impact the supposed qualities that make “a man” can have on destroying even the strongest bonds. 

Joshua’s words step through a delicate landscape that feels almost like a patchwork of memories. Soft, melodic Rhodes, is accompanied with a heart-breaking string arrangement by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson.

Daedelus is Alfred Darlington, a prolific mainstay of LA’s Beat Scene who’s renowned for crafting diverse, inventive and playful music for labels including Warp, Ninja Tune and Brainfeeder. Their track ‘Experience’ was sampled on the Madvillain classic ‘Accordion’ (also later used by Drake on ‘The Grind’), with Daedelus again appearing on record alongside Madlib for Dwight Trible & The Life Force Trio’s ‘Waves Of Infinite Harmony’.

Joshua Idehen is a British-born Nigerian based in Sweden. A gifted a spoken word artist and musician, he has contributed poems to Mercury-nominated albums ‘Channel The Spirits’ by The Comet Is Coming and ‘Your Queen Is A Reptile’ by Sons of Kemet. More recently, he formed Calabashed with Alabaster DePlume, a spiritual jazz crew who were recently named a 2021 one-to-watch by NME. He also worked on the most recent Sons Of Kemet album, ‘Black To The Future’.

Miguel Atwood-Ferguson is a multi-instrumentalist, arranger, composer, producer and music director who carries a dizzying list of credits. His collaborative work includes Cinematic Orchestra, Jessie Ware, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, Hiatus Kaiyote, Chaka Khan, Dr. Dre, Erykah Badu, Mary J Blige… The list goes on. Even so, possibly most notable is his historic live recording ‘Suite For Ma Dukes’, a generation defining album in tribute to the legendary J Dilla. 

With Daedelus freshly in Boston and Joshua recently in Stockholm, the pair began collaborating remotely in January 2020. Beats and verses were traded online, until the death of George Floyd and the resultant Black Lives Matter protest across the world forced a course correction. “We are living in a dark timeline”, Joshua says. “It felt dishonest not to speak on what I was feeling, watching everything unfold in the UK and US at the time.”

The results capture that darkness and anger, with an uncategorizable record that speaks directly to the times.

Standing In My Own Way (Part One) - Daedelus & Joshua Idehen feat. Miguel Atwood Ferguson

6 Visits

L.O.V.E (feat. Rejoicer, Nitai Hershkovits, Amir Bresler & Yonatan Albalak)

Birdy Island (Remixes)

Foreign Flowers (Dengue Dengue Dengue & Prisma Remix)

‘Melodi’ is the second album from Kit Sebastian. Those familiar with the band's cult classic 2019 debut record 'Mantra Moderne' will instantly recognise their unique sound that blurs boundaries of world music, jazz and psychedelia. Not to be content replicating the same album, sonically the feel of ‘Melodi’ is a maturation. It is more diverse and provides glimpses into many different worlds from the Italian Riviera to the mountains of the Caucasus, the beaches of Bahia to the city streets of Istanbul and Paris. This joyous merging of soundscapes evokes a borderless planet with music as an international language, belonging everywhere and nowhere.

Melodi

Kit Sebastian - Affet Beni

Martin Rude & Jakob Skøtt Duo released 2 albums in 2020: The Discipline of Assent & The Dichotomy of Control. For the third installation in their Stoic opus, they join forces with Tamar Osborn on saxophone & alto flute. Similar to their first 2 albums, Rude & Skøtt improvised a tidal wave of ideas and grooves in the studio of Causa Sui’s Jonas Munk, the perks of which were shipped to the UK for Osborn’s overdubs of echo-drenched sax and wah-flute. An improvisation rippling across time & space, merging a river of constantly in flux head-on improv, as well as making room for floating harmonies and studio-wizardry.

Playful, experimental and explorative, the trio ventures into a free wash of exotica drenched in deep modal jazz-vibes - with splashes of something more futuristic and modern. But contrary to what the title suggests, there are also roaring waves of energy, sizzling funky grooves to complement the ambient undercurrent. It’s a record akin to the library & film music of the 60’s and 70’s and an ode to the willful river of experimental moderation. Far in.


Bios:
Tamar Osborn: Saxophonist, composer and multi-wind instrumentalist is the creative force behind modal jazz ensemble Collocutor (On The Corner Records). She is a long-standing member of the Dele Sosimi Afrobeat Orchestra, performs and collaborates regularly with Sarathy Korwar, Jessica Lauren, Emanative, Ill Considered and DJ Khalab, and is an in-demand session musician.

Martin Rude: Multi-string instrumentalist & lead singer in Sun River, as well as stand-in bass player in Causa Sui. 

Jakob Skøtt: Drummer in Causa Sui with a slew of side projects on El Paraiso, as well as responsible for the label’s visuals.

Rude Skøtt Osborn Trio: L'Ombra Blu

"Cry On Me" is out now on Bella Union: https://smarturl.it/cryonme

Ren Harvieu - Cry On Me

he was made 
obvious
boiled down
to just those pretty words
he's been saying again
hanging them round
your neck

name
it's a name
just a name
take my name


It was said
that we'd never let
trouble come
to linger in our love
as we're fading away
tired of saving face

name
it's a name
just a name
take my name

Take My Name

Nothing Feels Like Everything

Heron feat. Miryam Solomon

’Assimilation’ is the fourth, and final, single taken from The Brkn Record’s forthcoming debut album, ‘The Architecture of Oppression Part 1’. A groundbreaking concept album from Jake Ferguson of The Heliocentrics. It is a critical journey through the eyes of Black Britons, blending powerful and sobering narratives with psychedelic and soulful symphonies.

It is a track that has an overwhelming potency and power. A visceral tour de force that stops you in your tracks. The music has a Wagnerian manner to it, culminating in a dramatic and emotional intensity, masterfully matched by the evocative lyrics and their delivery. Over a pulsing, ominous beat, spoken word artist, singer and performance poet Dylema breaks down the psychological and social violations entrenched by the pressure placed on Black and Brown people to ‘assimilate’ to so-called English culture. 

Born and raised in Nigeria, Dylema moved to England in 2000 and it is this lived experience that is expressed in the song’s lyrics, "When I came to this country, I had such a strong accent that it was really difficult to blend in. Before I opened my mouth, you had the Black thing, and when I opened my mouth you had the African thing. People were taken aback by that, and so I found myself assimilating and remembering my experience of that assimilation. I felt in order to survive in England I would have to learn how to speak like an English person. Even though I have this accent right now, it is completely fake. It never left me to have an African accent, so amongst my friends and people close to me, I slip back without even noticing. The level of skill I had to have to assimilate into England required so much of me. Even if you’re not born and raised in Africa, there are so many things that Black British people have to do to assimilate without even noticing it. I still feel like I haven’t completely assimilated and I’m ok with that now. That is what inspired me to write Assimilation. I felt someone needed to put a voice to what we actually do to ourselves to be respected or accepted in Britain.”

The Brkn Record - Assimilation (feat. Dylema)

The Brkn Record is a new project led and produced by Jake Ferguson, the co-founder and bass player for the UK’s foundational deep jazz outfit the Heliocentrics. With fellow Heliocentrics co-founder and legendary drummer Malcolm Catto, Ferguson has been a regular collaborator with globally recognised artists including Archie Shepp, Mulatu Astatke, Melvin Van Peebles, Orlando Julius and many others.

The Architecture of Oppression Part 1 represents Ferguson’s debut as a bandleader and orchestrator, and manifests as a committed and soulful response to ongoing and systemic anti-black racism, social oppression and state violence both at home in London and across the globe. Combining poetry, testimony and song with rich and cinematic backdrops, Ferguson has produced a sui generis sound that conjures flavours of Arthur Verocai, Ennio Morricone, classic library productions, Madlib-style deep-jazz beat science, and psychedelic soul. With bandmate Malcolm Catto on drums, Ferguson draws on their long years of collaborative experience in the Heliocentrics to build an album of striking texture and depth. 

But the album does not only reflect Ferguson’s full-spectrum musical prowess, experience and vision. It is equally a manifestation of his longstanding and high-profile work as a frontline activist for racial justice and social equity in London and beyond.

Alongside Malcom Catto, contributors to the album are drawn from the intersecting worlds of community activism, cultural education, politics and music, and include singer and political activist Jermain Jackman, Zara MacFarlane; Chicagoan activist, poet and singer Ugochi Nwaogwugwu; Lee Jasper, longstanding worker for racial justice and former advisor on equalities to the Mayor of London; acclaimed performance poet Dylema; Hackney community leader Janette Collins MBE and Leroy Logan MBE, founder and former chair of the Black Police Association, and the subject of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe episode ‘Red, White and Blue’.

The Architecture of Oppression Part 1 is a singular and urgent chronicle of the black British experience, an upful expression of Pan-African creative unity and community solidarity, and a militant and unbending missive from the frontline in the great tradition of The Impressions’ This Is My Country, Irreversible Entanglements Who Sent You?, Max Roach’s We Insist - Freedom Now Suite, or Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Bass Culture.

A broken record repeats itself, and never plays through – the music is interrupted or trapped in a cycle by damage to the grooves. But The Brkn Record is a work of healing and protection, and a chance to let the full story be heard – all the way to the end, no skips.

Standing In My Own Way (Part One) - Daedelus & Joshua Idehen feat. Miguel Atwood Ferguson

Albert's Favourites