Lonnie Holley - Tonky - VINYL LP

Vinyl LP pressing. When an album peaks at #3 on the Billboard Top 200, amasses a large fanbase worldwide, and quickly becomes certified platinum, it's clear it's something worth plugging into. With their debut album, the socially-charged Core, San Diego's Stone Temple Pilots deliver a hard-hitting grunge record that delves into dark lyrical territory, driven home by Scott Weiland's powerful vocals. With hit singles InchPlushInch and InchS*x Type ThingInch going on to become definitive songs of the 1990s, the band garnered a great deal of media attention - at times incredibly negative - for their whirlwind success. Rolling Stone readers named the group the Best New Band of 1992, whereas it's staff christened them the Worst New Band. Despite their polarizing reception, the Pilots would secure a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance for InchPlushInch and Core would be certified eight times platinum in 2001. Songwriting, you could say, is the band's definite core.

We were first introduced to Marumo's 'Modish' album via DJ Okapi's amazing resource the 'Afrosynth' blog, which archives South African bubblegum/disco from the 80s & early 90s. Aside from this blog, this music would otherwise remained unknown outside of South Africa, apart from the most hardcore of digger and record collector. 'Modish' was originally released on Spades Record in 1982 and was recorded by producer West Nkosi, who was a member of supergroup 'Mahlathini & The Mahotella Queens'. He worked with the big hitters in South African music such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Teaspoon & The Waves, Patience Africa and many more. Marumo were made up of a group of musicians from the Athlone School for the blind in Bellville, close to Cape Town. The band members, John Mothopeng, Munich Sibiya, Simon Falatsi and Marks Mbuthuma, had previously played in the groups Batsumi, All Rounders and The Orations and came together to record this versatile album. It covers a wide number of genres from Sotho soul, Mbaqanga, disco-funk, gospel & spacey-synth slow jams. Flash forward 30 or so years later and lost dead-stock copies of the album start to appear and Marumo's music begins to be heard across the world in the DJ sets of Motor City Drum Ensemble, Invisible City Editions, Floating Points, DJ Okapi and others. We included the afro-disco-funk beauty of 'Khomo Tsaka Deile Kae?' on our Mr Bongo Record Club Volume Three compilation, but felt 'Modish' needed to be available and heard in it's entirety. We hope you enjoy!

There are poets like the great Mary Oliver, who mightsuggest that one's primary function when moving through theworld, for as long as they have life and the ability to move throughthe world, is to play close attention to that which others may foolishlycall small, or quotidian. The brain and heart are both containers, withas much space as you wish for them to have, and to live is to createcollections of found affections. Sounds from your beloved andfamiliar blocks, movements of the trees and the people beneaththem, the way someone you adore may hold you for a few lingeringseconds before releasing from a hug and vanishing into a crowdedcrosswalk. To think of our living, our making, and our loving in thisway means that, at least for some of us, we may be propelled forwardby the prospect of what's next. What moment we can hold and placein our overflowing pockets.The work of Lonnie Holley is, for me, a work of this kind ofaccumulation and close attention. The delight of finding a soundand pressing it up against another found sound and another until,before a listener knows it, they are awash in a symphony of soundthat feels like it stitches together as it is washing over you. Tonky isan album that takes it's name from a childhood nickname that wasaffixed to Holley when he lived a portion of his childhood life in ahonky tonk. Lonnie Holley's life of survival and endurance is one thatrequired - and no doubt still requires - a kind of invention. Aninvention that is also rich and present in Holley's songs, which are fulland immersive on Tonky, an album that begins with it's longest song,a nine minute, exhaustive marathon of a tune called InchSeeds,Inch whichbegins with a single sparse sound and then expands. Chants, faintkeys, strings, and atop it all, Holley's voice, not singing, but speakingplainly about working the earth when he was young, the violence heendured in the proce