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Marshall Allen - New Dawn

Two days after his 100th birthday, Marshall Allen started recording New Dawn, his debut solo album. A member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra since 1958, Allen assumed leadership of the band in 1995. Throughout his nearly seventy-year career, Allen has never released a solo album under his own name, and yet, instead of capping such a legendary output, New Dawn seems to herald a new beginning. A love letter to spacetime, it channels a century of musical intelligence into seven tracks, showing Allen at his most protean — freely moving from relaxed, transdimensional palettes to bluesy big band and beyond.

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Noura Mint Seymali - Arbina

Noura Mint Seymali hails from a Moorish musical dynasty in Mauritania, born into a prominent family of griot and choosing from an early age to embrace the artform that is its lifeblood. Yet traditional pedigree has proven but a stepping-stone for the work Noura and her band have embarked upon in recent years, simultaneously popularizing and reimagining Moorish music on the global stage, taking her family’s legacy to new heights as arguably Mauritania’s most widely exported musical act of all time. Gamely wielding the griot’s idiom, a form itself distilled from centuries of trans-Saharan musical knowledge, Noura Mint Seymali’s sound as heard on this record carves out a unique position in the musical cartography of West Africa, at once her country’s leading proponent of the avant garde and yet a rigorously devoted tradition-bearer.

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Morteza Mahjubi

Improvisation & Avaz in Bayat-e Zand (Golha-yi Rangarang #290) (feat. Abdolvahab Shahidi) - Morteza Mahjubi

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Shrubbies - Memphis in Texas

Memphis in Texas was the first and only album by Shrubbies. In the aftermath of Lake of Puppies, an alt folk/pop band featuring William D Drake, Sharron Fortnam (North Sea Radio Orchestra/Cardiacs/Lake of Puppies/Led Bib/Lost Crowns) and Craig Fortnam (North Sea Radio Orchestra/Arch Garrison/Lake of Puppies) formed Shrubbies with Sarah Smith (Cardiacs/Sea Nymphs) on sax and keyboards, and Ben Clarke on drums. When he left the band, Dominic Luckman (Cardiacs) joined the fold! Following Sarah’s departure from the band, Dan Maitland signed up. They played enthusiastically on the London circuit from 1996-1999, made this record, released it then split up. Craig’s songs are settings of poems that Sharron wrote in her bedroom next the North Sea

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