Fela Kuti - Army Arrangement - VINYL LP

Knitting Factory Records reissues Fela Kuti's Underground System on vinyl LP, previously only available as part of the Box Set series. The last album of newly recorded material to be released during Fela's lifetime, 1992's Underground System is an outstanding swansong. While Fela's recorded output slowed up as the '80s progressed - largely as a result of ongoing arrests, beatings and jailings - his final years of recording produced some of his strongest work, notably Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense (1986), Beasts Of No Nation (1989), Overtake Don Overtake Overtake (1990) and Underground System. The audio has been restored and remastered from Fela's original Nigerian recordings. The artwork has been meticulously recreated from original album artwork.

Knitting Factory Records reissues Fela Kuti's V.I.P. on vinyl LP, previously only available as part of the Box Set series. V.I.P. (Vagabonds In Power) was recorded live at the Berlin Jazz Festival in autumn 1978 and released the following year. It is a ferocious and lyrically exalted attack on the abuse of state power. The festival straddled the cusp of the break-up of Afrika 70 and the formation of Egypt 80 in spring 1979, and V.I.P. (Vagabonds In Power) was the last album Fela made with the drummer Tony Allen, who had been with him since 1964 and acted as Afrika 70's bandleader. The audio has been restored and remastered from Fela's original Nigerian recordings. The artwork has been meticulously recreated from original album artwork.

Vinyl LP pressing includes . Alagbon Close, originally released on the independent Jofabro tag in 1974, marks the first full flowering of Afrobeat, as a music and as a principled political philosophy. Instrumentally, the album brings together the several signature elements of Fela's Afrobeat, which had not previously been molded into such a unified, finely-balanced form on record. Lyrically, it is a full-on confrontation with an enforcing power of the Nigerian state Alagbon Close in Lagos was the headquarters of the Nigerian Criminal Investigation Department. Many of the musical elements which make Alagbon Closeso compelling can be heard on earlier recordings, but on this album, Fela pulled them all together to devastating effect, in the process creating the classic Afrobeat paradigm.