Various
Juyungo (2lp)
'AFRO-INDIGENOUS MUSIC FROM THE NORTH-WESTERN ANDES' - The fifth in Honest Jon's' series of LPs compiling classic music from Ecuador. The music is transfixing, magical, unlike anything else. From start to finish this album is continuously and profoundly immersive. It's a kind of journeying, trippy meditation about slavery and cultural resistance, identity and mix, places and spaces, futures and pasts. It's inscrutable to net-surfing, algorithms, Shuffle. But for a taste try the insurgent marimba roller Agua Largo, jet-propelled by Rosa Huila's rapturous blend of African spiritualist and Christian chant. 'Healing music,' Zakia called it on Gilles Peterson's BBC show recently. And the ravishing pasillo Kasilla Shungulla - 'calm your heart' in the Quichua language - a duet between the Peruvian master-guitarist Raúl García Zárate and viola da gamba by Juan Luis Restrepo from Medellin, recorded in a baroque church in Buzbanza, Colombia. Housed in a gatefold sleeve with a sixteen-page coloured booklet that includes detailed and bi-lingual notes, and stunning photographs.