Search results: KO's

Review: Clommunity is a label from the good people of Kyiv club Closer, which is one of the most revered and respected in Europe right now. This third outing deals in the sort of deep and intimate sounds you can expect to hear in the club on any given night and it comes from Closer resident Yone-ko, who is a techno maestro from Japan but currently based in Berlin. There is a melancholy to thee tunes, with their wispy pads and dreamy chords, while the rolling, scuffed up drums lock you into a state of trance. Minimal in design yet maximal in impact, this is high-grade stuff.

Review: In the words of Lisa Stansfield, some of us live for the future and some of us wonder. Others, meanwhile, just love to bash out the rave bangers. Others like DJ Kos and his pals Billy Daniel Bunter, Sanxion, Karma Krew and Dubious. All of them delivering premium euphoric goods on this limited coloured vinyl. Following Bunter and Sanxion's hair-raising remix and Kos's timeless original come two more weapons. The mysterious Karma Krew go for the feels with sweeping pads and skippy beats on 'Cracking Up' while Dubious's 'Heartbreak' takes another classic vocal sample and hurls it several decades into the future. Live for it.

Review: Malian singer, songwriter and instrumentalist Fatoumata Diawara has enjoyed a highly successful career, not just as a musician but also as an actor. Even so, it has taken a string of collaborations - including an appearance on Gorillaz album Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez - to bring her to a wider audience. London Ko, officially her third solo album, successfully highlights the open-minded, internationalist nature of her work, offering superb, immaculately produced songs that blend her Malian vocals, instrumentation and jangly guitar playing with nods to synth-pop, deep house, electronica, r&b and downtempo beats. Naturally, the album boasts several notable collaborations, with Damon Albarn guesting on 'Nesra', New York hip-hop-turned-soul queen Angie Stone lighting up 'Somaw', and Alberto Fomesca enhancing CD highlight 'Massa Den'.

Review: Kilo Kish (aka Kish Robinson) is an interdisciplinary artist and performer who has worked with Vince Staples, Miguel, Jean Dawson and Jesse Boykins III and this, her sophomore album. It's a psychedelic piece of pop art with infectious hooks and industrial beats that muses on the issues of identity, status, and race. The production is often maximalist in a fun 80s fashion with ice-cold staccato raps, self-assured bars and playful elements that keep you locked. This first pressing comes on special transparent blue vinyl via Diggers Factory.

Review: 11 years on from DJ Koze's one and only commercial mix, 2004's All People Is My Friends for Kompakt, the Pampa boss lines the 50th DJ Kicks mix, following high profile contributions from Nina Kraviz and Actress. This vinyl edition offers the best of both worlds really, featuring some 17 highlights of Kozalla's selection in their original form spread across two slabs of vinyl whilst !K7 have also thrown in a CD copy of the mix so you can hear how it's all done Koze-style. As you'd expect Koze presents one of the more far-reaching selections in the series, with Madlib-produced Freddie Gibbs nestling up alongside William Shatner, Boards of Canada remixes, Broadcast whilst the likes of Marcel Fengler, Session Victim and Frank & Tony offer some deepness.

Review: Japanese keys wizard Hiroshi Sato recorded many albums across his career, bringing the vibrant sound of synthesis into earshot with his earliest albums in the late 70s. Orient was his third solo album, released in 1979 on Kitty Records in a pitch-perfect daydream of AOR goodness. Tracks like 'Son Goku' sum up the persistent appeal of Sato's music, fusing the smoothest compositions with some playful sound design approaches, which show he was having fun with the studio gear beyond writing exquisite melodies. Elsewhere, he had fun going into full freak mode with the madcap ear candy of 'Donkama'. If you can't get enough of that era of Japanese synth pop, this reissue is an absolute must.

Review: After Dinner is like one of those molecular gastronomy adventures, where dishes are both playful and highly complex, not necessarily revealing themselves until the very end. Done with talk of food? Let's just say this is a loose art collective led by a composer called Haco, who were concerned with taking musical plurality and splicing disparate elements together to create a kind of friendly Frankenstein's monster of sound.

And friendly it definitely is. Considered a true one-off of Japanese pop-art rock-avant garde, Paradise of Replica is jaunty, it's amusing, it's beguiling and, ultimately, incredibly immersive. There are moments where the clash of pianos plucked straight from a comedy of manners opera and rough electric guitars (to give one example of the juxtapositions) feel rather strange, but it doesn't take too long for you to get sucked right into the centre of this insane sonic universe.

Review: Selected rare Togolese recordings featured here from between 1971 to 1981. According to label Hot Casa, finding these tracks and their rights holders was quite the task, involving numerous trips all over the west African country bordered by Ghana , Benin and Burkina Faso. They have selected 13 tracks, which they've charmingly described as 'a snapshot of some hundreds of rare and often forgotten tapes from the most prolific, professional and exciting phase of the country's recording history'. Highlights on this compilation not limited to: Akofa Akoussah's sultry and bittersweet crooning on "I Tcho Tchass", the life affirming Afrobeat vibes of Aime Orchis Mathey's very obscure "Tralala Vo Dou" and of course the very funky and groovy hoedown that is Adamah & Agbote's "Dzo Le Gbo Nye" .

Review: Tozibabe was a group that was way ahead of its time, firstly because it was a Slovenian all-female hardcore and punk band. They were active during the 80ss in Ljubljana in ex-Yugoslavia. Alenka Marseni-Marsa, Lidija Rupnik, Krischka and Pika all thrashed out angry rhythms and angular guitars on just one album back in 1986. This first collection of their tunes draws together their best work and makes for a high-octane and scuzzy but empowering listen that is up there with any punk material you care to mention.

Review: Many people's first taste of Nocow was amid the second half of the dubstep era - a time when boundaries between established genres and more explorative, contemporary and adventurous beats were blurring, feeding directly into the beautiful mess we see before us today in the dance music scene. Since then, he has graced us with a raft of excellent work which, much like the ethics of the time he emerged from, never really stand still or regurgitate. The difference between Odinocow and 2017's Ledyanoy Album is a case in point. Whereas then we were going through sounds that owed much to 1990s ambient techno, IDM, and associated noises, here we take a very different path, with a haunted R&B undertone running throughout the work, and plenty of nods to polished beach house, trance, and chill wave.