My music on heavy rotation up to 30 March

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I’ve just spent a couple of months with these amazing records:

Mats/Morgan Band - ‘Mats/Morgan Band Live’ Elements of rock, jazz and funk are thrown into a blender of preternatural technique, blinding precision and uncanny ensemble togetherness. Visiting affecting locations from scary to hilarious, via lyrical and kinetic, this is one of those albums that leaves your jaw on the floor and your ears in orbit. Hard to believe it’s live.

Beefy - ‘With Sprinkles’ A bouncy, goofy affirmation of the great joy of geekhood, this beautifully performed and produced album of nerdcore hip-hop is always funny, sometimes touching, and unadulterated fun from start to finish. It dates from 2010, and its references to stuff like the PS3 lends a certain period charm as well (that’s definitely within the cut-off date for ‘vintage’ in our post-postmodern era).

Guapo - ‘History of the Visitation’ A band of many faces, on this 2013 album Guapo are proponents of slow-building, long form, fuliginous, psychedelic jams - clearly improvisatory, but also very coherently structured, and devastatingly epic in effect. This music puts the progressive back into progressive rock: in other words, it genuinely expands the vocabulary of the genre. Very serious art, and top whack malarkey.

Atomic Farmhouse - ‘Who’s Henry Anonymous’ Murky, downbeat hip-hop, snarling up cartoonishly from the gutter, and insistently asking that most resonant of contemporary questions: ‘who the fuck is Henry Anonymous?’. As raw as it gets, but somehow extremely sophisticated as well - these artists know exactly what they are doing, which is making bullshit-free, uncompromisingly creative music.

Bootsy’s Rubber Band - ‘Ahh… The Name Is Bootsy, Baby!’ An early document of Bootsy Collins’s rigorously musical silliness. This funk classic from 1977 combines daft-as-fuck (but very witty) humour, unfeasibly deep grooves, cartoonish flash, and if you listen closely, extremely complex and intelligent creative work. Charismatic, borderline insane, and irresistible to the feet and hips.

I’ve also been snuggling up with some superior shorter releases from Vulfpeck (hard tight krautfunk), Goryl (wiccan acoustic doom), and The Incredible Tall (badass multicultural boom-bap).