New releases last eight weeks: Breakbeat

Review: Portuguese producer and Enchufada label owner Branko is back with his fourth full-length solo album and once again he pushes his own high standards even further. Soma was recorded in Lisbon over a three-day jam session that saw him asking plenty of top local Lisbon-based musicians to improvise over rhythmic frameworks. The resulting man-hours live recording was the blueprint for the album which Brano then worked into the compelling and worldly tunes you have here with vocals from the likes of London, Cape Verde, and Brazil, including Jay Prince, June Freedom, BIAB, and Tuyo.

Review: Dark Entries welcome back the inimitable Doc Sleep aka Melissa Maristuen for a superb new album of ghostly and ethereal house and techno. This is a welcome follow-up to last year's ambient and IDM exploration, Birds, and shows another side that draws on Maristuen's years of queer clubbing. It fuses aspects of New York house, Berlin techno and West-coast breakbeats and is "a love letter to the West Coast's magnificent natural landscape, the light of the Pacific sunrise." That is reflected in the sublime synths and silky rhythms which manage to both move your body but also captivate your mind. It's another cracking album from the Doc.

Review: Dualismo Sound decided to start this new Tribal Italia Breaks compilation with the aim of "reconstructing a different perspective of Tribal Italia," which was a label started in 1995 in Riccione. It was known for its mix of cosmic and Afro-disco sounds and regional DJs such as Meo, Fary, Fattori and Brahms. One aspect of the sound was that it took cub from hip-hop's sample-heavy culture and al that gave birth to the Tribal Italia catalogue. The best of it is offered up here on a worldly trip through all sorts of innovative rhythms and colourful sounds, exotic pads and tropical signifiers. A great retro-future collection of leftfield downtempo and disco, then.

Review: 'Beehive Breaks' is a new curveball from the Numero label, pitting together 15 'feminine funk' fixtures for your listening pleasure. All sourced from the label's back catalogue, we're met with an impressive array of funky-drummed, double-X'ed ditties, from Sandy Gaye's Cruella-synched 'Watch The Dog That Brings The Bone' to James Brown's soul sister #1 Marva Whitney; from teenage girl gangs The Trinikas and Promise, to Miami's queen of soul, Betty Wright; and to top it all off, there's even a previously unissued belter from Chicago's Sonics Band on there.

Review: Numero Group brings together a slew of desirable and very rare soul and funk songs together for one fantastic compilation. Many of these tracks in their original physical release form - you'd be looking at hundreds of dollars for the first pressings, so thank Numero Group for gathering these together and saving the fans from spending a lot of money and a lot of time finding them. Tracks like the amazing 'Mr.Lucky' by Betty Wright - which sounds fit for a blockbuster movie soundtrack - Trinikas' 'Remember Me' and the James Brown-like funk 'Good Things' by Pearl Dowdell are must have scarce tracks, but there's a host of yet to be discovered gemes here too, like Fay Cooper's 'Closer Together' and Betty & Angel's 'Everlasting Love'.

Review: When it comes to 90s Dutch dance music we tend to think of formative techno and the monolithic rise of gabber, but there was also some golden house music being produced around that time. Now German label Anacalypto is taking a trip into these less explored realms to offer a finely curated compilation with eight deep cuts for the discerning dancefloor. Max 404's sublime 'Infinite Legs' is an ambient house fantasy of the highest calibre, while Galaxy's 'Axis' is similarly trippy and soft around the edges, setting the tone for the deeper, techno informed shades of house we're in for across the collection. This is elegant, heads down gear which has been coveted by diggers for decades, now available freshly remastered and pressed up in one place.