Few people are onto great records as quickly as a great record store.
Phonica’s end of year lists are always a treasure trove for undersung gems, so we realised we ought to just give the shop’s learned staff their own slot on FACT. Every Saturday, the team behind the counter at the Soho institution select five vinyl records you should pick up this week.
RANDOMER
Kids Play EP
(L.I.E.S.)
Randomer smacks it out the park as bloody usual with five fresh tracks for L.I.E.S., kicking off with the quietly nightmarish title track and keeping the mood subtly deranged throughout, with possessed bells going off everywhere and drums staggering towards you like zombies’ legs. Deliciously evil.
TMO
Insomniac EP
(Public Possession)
Leonid Lipelis produces tracks under a panoply of different aliases including TMO, which finds the Moscow producer recording spontaneous one-take jams with his sizeable array of hardware. The result on this nifty 12″ is ‘Melodic Jam’, which toys with an out-of-whack melody over gritty, pounding drums, and ‘Jam IV’ on the flip, which takes things in a duttier direction with a heap of bleeps.
GNORK
Deer IV 12″
(Black Venison)
Hungarian producer Gnork kicks off Deer IV with a certified stomper that’s dreamy and tough in equal measure and worth the price of admission alone, before heading into deeper, darker realms on three more vintage-sounding house cuts.
CLAP! CLAP!
Simple EP
(Black Acre)
As Clap! Clap!, Italy’s C. Crisci soaks up his beloved African rhythms and spits them out as sideways-up, sample-driven floor-heaters that capture his globe-spanning tastes, and the Simple EP offers five strong examples of that – heavily percussive, occasionally a bit jazzy, and totally diverse.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Science Fiction Dancehall Classics 3XLP
(On-U Sound)
Trevor Jackson rifles through Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound archive to put together a whopping three-disc compilation of early electronic, dub and post-punk cuts that he’s labelled “Science Fiction Dancehall Classics”, and from a teenage Neneh Cherry to Massive Attack’s Shara Nelson to On-U Sound regulars like Mark Stewart + The Maffia, it’s overflowing with overlooked and unreleased goodies that deserve another spin.