2021 might not seem the most likely of years for the globalisation of dance music to intensify, what with the lack of travel and the lack of... well... dancing. But, in fact, thanks partly to the enforced time spent online which led to a lot of discovery for a lot of people, and partly to a simple yearning to get back out there dancing, the connections made have been wild. And no record exemplifies this quite like Toya Delazy’s Afrorave. 

“Flashbacks / driving in your car volume pushed right up to max / all those late nights I’d try to drink them back” These are almost the first words you hear on this record, coming in as South London Afrobeats producer P2J’s bass tones roll in on the opener “Under my Skin”. And they’re a perfect introduction to the theme and mood of the record too.

Amon Tobin is hard to pin down. His music has mutated over the years. He initially fitted in with Ninja Tune’s late-Nineties/early-Noughties roster of post-hip hop stoner breaks, heavily jazzed. But in more recent years, he’s wandered into an area where glitchy soundscaping and avant-classical experiments are laced with warped sampling. Then there’s his industrially heavy Two Fingers crunch-step project.

As the summer folds away on itself, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns. Beset by backlogs at pressing plants and delayed by COVID, it's finally here, jammed to the gunwales with commentary on a grand cross section of the finest music on plastic. Dive in!

VINYL OF THE MONTH

God Damn Raw Coward (One Little Independent)

To coin a cliché, the fourth album from London pop-dance success story Rudimental is a game of two halves. The first is off-putting and dull but halfway through, the band seem to wake up. There are 16 songs on the album. The eighth, “Handle My Own”, is the first one to make the ears prick up, and from track 11 on we’re in continuous business.

People Just Do Nothing is a mockumentary BBC TV series, now ended, about fictional Brentford pirate radio crew Kurupt FM. It’s also a comedy based entirely on the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in that the humour derives from the worldview of all the key characters – tawdry, hopeless garage MC/DJ chancers – being confidently blinkered to the point of absurdity, while all else points to their utter uselessness.

The latest edition of theartsdesk on Vinyl combines the best new sounds on plastic with the vinyl reissues that are pressing buttons. Ranging from heavy rockin’ book-style boxsets to the funkiest summertime 7”s, all musical life is here. Dive in.

VINYL OF THE MONTH

This Is The Deep The Best Is Yet To Come (Part 1) (B3)

Ask someone in the early 2000s to predict which cities were going to be influential in electronic music in coming years, and it’s unlikely many would have picked Kampala, Uganda. But here we are.

Things got out of hand at theartsdesk on Vinyl this month and these reviews run to 10,000 words. That's around a fifth of The Great Gatsby. It's because there's so much good music that deserves the words, from jazz to metal to pure electronic strangeness.

It’s funny how the most high tech music can sound very traditional. In the case of producer / instrumentalist / occasional singer Ziúr, it’s the tradition of her hometown of Berlin that is expressed in her whirrs, clangs and mutated voices.