Vinyl Crate

DJ Symphony Of Wu-Tang Clan Vinyl DJ Course

Simon Green aka Bonobo presents the 20th Anniversary Edition of Dial M for Monkey, nine perfectly formed tracks on a perfectly formed album. Now housed in beautiful packaging, with a rotating viewfinder, cyrstal clear vinyl and newly designed inners, it's outer beauty matched the beauty contained within the music. From the opener, 'Noctuary', with its creepy stoned-Hammer feel, through the headnod sitar-funk of 'Flutter', on into the Rhodes-meets-Gamelan of 'D Song', the first third of the record sets out the tone for what is to follow – all beautifully melodic and perfectly assembled but with enough of a creeping undertow to stop the music becoming empty or saccharine. 'Change Down' is all double bass folk and cut-up drums, 'Wayward Bob' is a devilish waltz, while single 'Pick Up' is a straight funk ‘n’ flute throw down. 'Something For Windy' sounds like a dub of a postman on his rounds, 'Nothing Owed' is epic pastoralia, while 'Light Pattern' rounds things off with what sounds like the theme to the best TV programme never made. With all instruments played, sampled and sequenced by Green’s own fair hand, there is a consistency here, both within the tunes and across the record that crate diggers can only dream of.

YĪN YĪN, the highly touted Dutch quartet from Maastricht, returns with a sonically expansive third album Mount Matsu. Recorded collectively in their own studio in the Belgian countryside, the album is a kaleidoscope of sounds and influences, occupying a no man’s land between Khruangbin and Kraftwerk, surf music and Southeast Asian psychedelia, Stax soul and mutant 80s disco, City pop and Japanese instrumental folk (sōkyoku).

In the late 80s and early 90s, boom bap was king. On the East Coast, hip hop producers and artists like Pete Rock, Grand Puba, and Gang Starr’s DJ Premier dropped beats dripping with jazz and soul. These crate diggers scoured shops and mined records for soulful hooks, jazzy breaks, and funky grooves to scratch, sample, and blend. And though the Golden Age eventually came to an end, hip hop instrumentalist Madlib ushered in a renaissance of this jazzy, sample-driven sound in the late 90s and 2000s.