New compilation of ’90s Brussels label SSR Records features Move D, Gemini, Glenn Underground

Hi Scores is beyond excited to present SSR Records: In Retrospect. This 2LP compilation album presented in a beautiful gatefold sleeve and through all digital platforms, wishes to highlight the immense and hard to grasp legacy of the Brussels based label.

SSR Records was founded in 1988 by Marc Hollander as a sub label of his Crammed Discs and spanned the nascent years of house, acid, rave, trance, new beat, hip-hop, future jazz and broken beat, collaborating internationally and racking up close to 200 releases until it was put to sleep in 2002. Far ahead of their time, SSR Records released music of both European and North American artists that hadn’t broken through yet, such as those collected on this compilation: Move D, Nu Era, Gemini, Bjørn Torske, Glenn Underground or Matthew Herbert.

SSR Records was run by Crammed Discs chief Marc Hollander and Minimal Compact singer Samy Birnbach aka DJ Morpheus. SSR Records: In Retrospect comes with extended liner notes, exploring the pivotal milestones in the history of the adventurous label and zooming in on the origins of all records featured on the compilation.

All nine tracks on SSR Records: In Retrospect were selected by Hi Scores’s head honcho Kong DJ and have been remastered. Created between 1990 and 1996 and in the at the time pioneering spheres of house, breakbeat, electro and trance music, these treasures from the vast SSR catalog today stand as a stunning testimony to a truly remarkable and timeless musical legacy. Kong DJ: ‘While collaborating with Crammed Discs on the releases of Aksak Maboul in 2016 and Zazou / Bikaye in 2018 on Ensemble, I began to grasp the impressive catalog of the label and its sub labels, including SSR. Surprised by the tiny footprint SSR had left on the world wide web – often the case for labels ceased before the internet revolution – I wrote an article for British website The Vinyl Factory. This would later prove to be the first step towards this compilation album, collecting favorites from the label as a kid in a giant candy store.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Avalon – Linked (Move D Remix)
A2 Alegria – Danger (It’s For Real) (Alien Remake)
A3 Gemini – 7:15 PM
B1 Solar Quest – Acid Nation
C1 Modulate – Dreams
C2 Nu Era – Pisces
C3 Hans G – Anything You Like (B2)
D1 Q-Burn’s Abstract Message – Mess Of Afros (Glenn Underground Remix)
D2 Hector Zazou & Harold Budd – The Light Gave Us Away (House Mix By Herbert)

Hi Score will release SSR Records: In Retrospect on May 26th, 2023.

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The Mauritanian family band who pioneered Saharan blues

As artists like Mdou Moctar, Tinariwen and Ali Farka Touré popularise Saharan Desert Rock across the world, this release by Belgium’s Radio Martiko explores the foundational emergence of the genre. Recorded in 1972 at the Boussiphone Studios in Casablanca, Ahl Nana contains the first recordings of modern music from the Saharan region. An essential nugget of history, this album charts the reinvention of traditional Saharan music with the introduction of the electric guitar.

Listen to the whole album just below

TRACKLIST

A1 Adji Kar Teri Miri
A2 Yer Sabou Yerkoy
A3 Emolli Tidwall Eheme
B1 Bayna Daouali
B2 Zeinab Moussa
C1 Ahlane Ouassahlane
C2 Timidawane Hewana
D1 Ya Llali Ya Ouichi
D2 Hob Mene
D3 Nahnou Sigharou El Ouatane

Radio Martiko will release L’orchestre National Mauritanien on February 10th, 2023.

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Jeff Mills releases second score for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

‘Metropolis Metropolis’ is influenced by the 1927 film’s overall storyline and plot.

Out now via his own Axis Records label, Metropolis Metropolis combines elements of classical and electronic music and marks the second time Mills has produced a soundtrack of the film – his previous Metropolis score came out in 2000. Where his original score was produced to fit specific scenes and moments in Lang’s original, this latest version is more influenced by the overall storyline of the film.

“Creating music for Fritz Lang’s masterpiece film Metropolis has been and continues to be a great experience,” Mills said in a statement. “The film is a story about ‘man vs man’ with the help of a machine. Its dramatic theme is as relevant now as it was when the film debuted in 1927. A film to be enjoyed, but also noted and examined.”

Fritz Lang’s film, set in a futuristic vision of the year 2000, depicts a dystopia in which rich people rule over the working classes, who live and work beneath the city. It was based on Thea von Harbou’s 1925 novel of the same name.

TRACK LISTING

A. Jeff Mills – The Masters Of Work And Play
B. Jeff Mills – Metropolis Metropolis
C. Jeff Mills – Maria And The Impossible Dream
D. Jeff Mills – Transformation The Aftershock And Evil
E. Jeff Mills – Yoshiwara And The Players Of Chance
F. Jeff Mills – Liaisons And Complicated Affairs

Axis Records will release Metropolis Metropolis on March 3, 2023.

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The artist formerly known as Tikiman returns with first solo album in over a decade

The nine-track Tikiman Vol​.​1 is out through Berlin’s Kynant Records in March.

Legendary reggae and dub techno vocalist Paul St. Hilaire, AKA Tikiman, is releasing his first solo album since 2006.

Over his 30-plus year career, St. Hilaire has become one of dance music’s quietly legendary figures. Born and raised in Dominica, he moved to Berlin in 1994 and has lent both his voice and his musicianship to some of the most iconic electronic music from the German capital – and beyond. Renowned for his collaborations with Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus (AKA Rhythm & Sound), he has also appeared on records with Deadbeat, Rhauder, Larry Heard aka Mr. Fingers and Stereotyp (G-Stone Recordings), amongst others.

However, few know the extent of St. Hilaire’s compositional and technical mastery. From his home studio in Kreuzberg, which includes an extensive collection of vintage hardware, self-built instruments and notebooks scribbled with endless lyrics, he has created a vast archive of material spanning ambient dub, avant-jazz, lush techno and lovers rock.

You can listen to snippets from the whole album just below.

Tikiman Vol. 1 is a heady, downtempo tour de force of patois metaphors on education, displacement and personal vs. global histories, as is evident on slippy album opener Bedroom in My Bag: Mister, mister / Where are you going? / I’m heading for a faraway land / What are you having in the bag in your hand? / Help us to understand / He said, I’ve got my bedroom in my bag.

Overall, the album’s lyrics reflect on life between Berlin and Dominica, specifically St. Hilaire’s hometown of Grand Bay, where he has worked with various musicians famous for the island’s different genres of carnival music. St. Hilaire himself always favoured the island’s more “discrete” music, developing a sonic synergy between two different geographical strains of groove and minimalism, and combining them with foundational Caribbean mixing techniques, which provide the basis for his songwriting and distinct
baritone.

Tikiman Vol.1 offers a rare insight into St. Hilaire’s complex artistry, from the eyes-down grooves of Little Way and the guitar-heavy digi dancehall experiment Keep Safe, to the subtle hypnosis of Ten to One and the softly crashing synth waves of closer Three And A Half, evoking not only beaches but also coasts and borders. It’s a fitting expression of both the breadth of St. Hilaire’s work, as well as his history as one of the few black, Berlin-based artists who, despite remaining largely overlooked, has influenced the city’s electronic music culture since its beginnings.

TRACKLIST:

A1 Bedroom In My Bag
A2 Little Way
A3 Keep Safe
B1 Bright One
B2 The Weather Man
C1 In Fortis
C2 Ten To One
D1 In Door
D2 Three And A Half

Kynant will release Tikiman Vol. 1 on March 31st, 2023.

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Jeff Mills soundtracks Dior runway show

The Dior Men’s Fall-Winter 2023 show was held at the historic site of Giza.

At a customized science fiction influenced film set beneath the three Great Pyramids of Giza, Dior’s Top Men’s Designer Kim Jones enlist the other worldly sounds of Mills to sonically represent his new collection entitled Celestial with an intentionally symbolic selection of tracks that are considered vital classics to its genre of Electronic Music.

Jones, being well educated in Techno Music Academia understood the meaning of these tracks as he carefully applied the sound to an amazing display of 75 Star Wars-esque costume influenced looks. With the Ancient Egyptian Pyramids towering above the audience in the moody night sky, it was the future of unfolding before our very eyes.

Tracks include

The Art Of Stalking – Suburban Knight
Daphnis (Keeler’s Gap) – X-102 (Jeff Mills)*
Microbe – Jeff Mills*
A Tale From The Parallel Universe – Jeff Mills
Gamma Player – Jeff Mills*
Resolution – Jeff Mills
Step To Enchantment (Stringent Mix) – Jeff Mills
The New Arrivals – Jeff Mills*

*available on Sequence: A Retrospective Of Axis Records

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Natural Mystic

Throughout her life Brazilian singer-songwriter Joyce fought against blacklists and being sidelined from here own projects to represent her true self in her songs. Lost 1977 Joyce album with Mauricio Maestro and legendary producer Claus Ogerman released for the first time.

Not long after the dawn of her career, as a teenager in Rio de Janeiro, Joyce was declared “one of the greatest singers” by Antonio Carlos Jobim. Yet despite reputable accolades and the fact that she has since recorded over thirty acclaimed albums, Joyce never quite achieved the international recognition of the likes of Jobim, João Gilberto and Sergio Mendes, all of whom became global stars after releasing with major labels in the US.

There was a moment when it seemed Joyce might be on the cusp of an international breakthrough. While living in New York, she was approached by the great German producer Claus Ogerman. Ogerman had already played a pivotal role in the development and popularisation of Brazilian music in the 1960s, recording with some of the all-time greats like Jobim and João Gilberto, as well as North American idols like Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Bill Evans.

“I met him in New York City, in 1977”, recalls Joyce. “I was living and playing there, and João Palma, Brazilian drummer who used to play with Jobim, introduced me to Claus. We had an audition, he liked what we were doing and decided to produce an album with us.”

Featuring fellow Brazilian musicians Mauricio Maestro (who wrote/co-wrote four of the songs), Nana Vasconcelos and Tutty Moreno, and some of the most in-demand stateside players including Michael Brecker, Joe Farrell and Buster Williams, the recordings for Natureza took place at Columbia Studios and Ogerman produced the album, provided the arrangements and conducted the orchestra.

But mysteriously, Natureza was never released, and what should have been Joyce’s big moment never happened. As Joyce remembers, “I returned home, but Claus and I remained in contact, by letters and phone calls. He was very enthusiastic about the album and tried to hook me up with Michael Franks. He wanted me to go back to NYC in order to re-record the vocals in English with new lyrics, which I actually wasn’t too happy about. But then I got pregnant with my third child and could not leave Brazil. And little by little our contact became rare, until I lost track of him completely. And that was it. I never heard from him again.”

While Claus was known to be something of an elusive character, the album’s disappearance might also have been a result of timing. The Brazilian craze was coming to an end, making way for disco and new wave at the end of the seventies, and Ogerman struggled to find a major label interested in a new Brazilian sensation. Additionally, as Joyce mentions, it wasn’t quite finished. Ogerman wanted to add finishing touches to the mix and to record alternative English lyrics for the US and international markets – a critical artistic difference between Joyce and Ogerman.

As the military dictatorship’s grip on Brazil began to subside in the 1980s, Joyce had a handful of hits in her home county, including a tribute to her daughters ‘Clareana’, and the iconic ‘Feminina’ – an intergenerational conversation between mother and daughter about what it means to be a woman. But already a feminist pioneer, these successes were hard fought. Joyce had caused controversy as a nineteen-year-old when she became the first in Brazil to sing from the first-person feminine perspective, and the institutional sexism she faced was worsened by the dictatorship who would often censor her music. Even once the Junta was out of the way, Joyce found herself up against the male-dominated major record companies in Brazil, who sought to dictate her career and sexualise her image, before dropping her for refusing to play along.

A few years after the success of her albums Feminina and Agua E Luz in Brazil, Joyce’s music began to find its way to the UK, Europe and Japan, and Feminina and Aldeia de Ogum became classics on the underground jazz-dance scenes of the mid to late-eighties and early-nineties.

The full-length version of Feminina from the Natureza sessions was first heard on a Brazilian Jazz compilation in 1999 and Descompassadamente was licensed for a CD compiling the work of Claus Ogerman in 2002. Following these, word began to get out about an unreleased Joyce album with Claus Ogerman and the legend of Natureza grew.

Forty-five years since it was recorded, Natureza finally sees the light of day, as Joyce intended: with her own Portuguese lyrics and vocals. Featuring the fabled 11-minute version of Feminina, as well as the never before heard Coração Sonhador composed and performed by Mauricio Maestro, Natureza’s release is a landmark in Brazilian music history and represents a triumphant, if overdue victory for Joyce as an outspoken female artist who has consistently refused to bow to patriarchal pressure.

TRACKLISTING

A1. Feminina
A2. Mistérios
A3. Coração Sonhador
B1. Moreno
B2. Descompassadamente
B3. Ciclo Da Vida
B4. Pega Leve

Far Out Recordings will release Natureza on December 2th, 2022.

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