Various
Music From Mathematics Vol. 1

Leisure Dub and Armanious return to follow up their debut release ‘Weekend Waiting’ (one of Gilles Peterson’s records of the year in 2021). It’s electronic late night soul on the A side with a heavy baseline mix made for sound systems on the B side.

The new Cristian Vogel album "1Zhuayo" sounds as if non-musicology & ultra-blackness is not an end or a destination to be arrived at, but as if it is the point of departure, much like tomorrow relates to the day after tomorrow. As if we have left the space of certainties and are moving instead into one of manifold possibilities. They are anticipated in the micro-structures of sound, which is the process of playing with and against the software. Beyond genre delimitation and fragmentation, it is non-music in the post, without itself immediately becoming a cliché, like deconstructed club music or hyperpop. Without being superficially conceptual, the musical material alone succeeds in creating a different, coherent, sonically possible world.

Yes No Maybe de MoniqueaMoniquea's Yes No Maybe is an album that is steeped in the synthesizer-heavy aesthetics of 1980's R&B funk (often referred to as "boogie") but is modern enough to move past the "retro" label into something that builds a fresh sound upon the blueprints created by seminal 80's acts such as Prince, Midnight Star, or Evelyn "Champagne" King. It is Moniquea's vision to set herself apart by "bringing back" a more standardized song structure to the burgeoning modern funk genre, an ideal which can be considered a commodity in what has largely branded itself as an avant-garde musical movement. Yes No Maybe's production, provided by XL Middleton & Eddy Funkster, is the springboard for the main focus of the album, Moniquea's vocals, delivered in a sassy, yet silky tone which shows that she has done her homework in studying her predecessors, while turning it into something modern, and uniquely her own.