This is a concept album, the subject matter being obvious and is instrumental. I'm pleased to say that Hammer is not being a creationist here, he refers to the concept as being valid whether a day is 24 hours or a hundred million years, I go for the latter!

Almost all the instruments are played by Hammer, with exception of violin from another ex-Mahavishnu, Steve Kindler and congas. It is evokative and beautiful, full of lovely melodies. Even though the album had a major label backing, it sank, from memory, without a trace. pity as it deserves recognition. Just listen to the sample, a good guide to the album as a whole. Hammer went on to write music for crap TV programmes before dropping out of the music industry completely some years ago.

Recommend as a forgotten jewel.

Recorded at various European performances from the spring of 1972, this is a substantial addition to the catalog of a band that only put out two studio albums. The sound is good, and the performances almost wholly instrumental art jazz-rock, not far removed from those heard in the early 1970s by the Soft Machine, drummer/singer Robert Wyatt's previous band. It's electric pianist Bill McRae who wrote most of the material. Wyatt goes off into some wordless scats at one point, but these aren't conventional rock-songs-with-lyrics at all. There is an admirable variety of textures with some distortion and buzzing, cooked up by McRae and guitarist Phil Miller, but it doesn't boast very accessible melodic ideas, preferring to furrow into angular and at times ominous progressions. The eerie, lectronically treated vocal scatting on Wyatt's mischievously titled "Instant Pussy" is a highlight. Five of the nine songs, incidentally, do not appear on the band's studio albums.

Richie Unterberger

An official "boot" from King Crimson in 1982, complete with an essay by Robert Fripp on the back cover giving his views on bootlegs!

Recorded at Generation Sound Studios, New York, New York on June 21 & 22, 1974. TIMELESS is right–in the future, this is the kind of interplanetary jazz they're going to be playing at the docking stations of newly colonized planets. Recorded in 1974, TIMELESS is very much a product of its age. Lightning fast guitar and keyboard runs, hi-hats, and drums writhe around each other in serpentine fury, giving way to moments of stately grace and calm waters such as "Love Song." Composer John Abercrombie has remained one of the great session men and in-demand guitarists in both jazz and avant-garde circles since the mid-'70s. TIMELESS may inhabit the central nervous system of '70s fusion, but the playing of Abercrombie and colleagues Jan Hammer and drummer Jack DeJohnette manages to transcend the virtuosity of the genre, via crackerjack ensemble performances and some truly arresting compositions.

This is one mother of an album The Counter-Eurovision took place at the Cirque Royal in Brussels on March 31 and April 1, 1979. It was organised by CAFI (Collectif d'Animation pour la Formation et l'Information des Travailleurs) under the initiative of Pour le Socialisme and the weekly newspaper POUR (Belgium)

Linton Kwesi Johnson's aptly titled sophomore Island release finds the poet typically terse in expression and taut in flow. With his poetic skills honed by experience, he wisely invites the listener to draw on his empathy and fill in his own antiromantic details in this sonic portrait of displaced black lives "inna foreign." Less a scream of rage and more a stew of simmering resentment, poems like "Inglan is a Bitch" extract humor from what is, after all, "noh funny." LKJ's savaging of "Di Black Petty Booshwah" is balanced by the love moment in "Loraine," a delicately wistful anecdote of missed opportunity. In "Reggae Sounds" and the title track, Bovell and LKJ celebrate riddim culture's "word plus sound equals power" formula, elucidating the links between core-of-the-earth bass lines and a people's grinding struggle.

Amazon.com Elena Oumano

Husker Du really hit their stride on this sprawling 1984 release. ZEN ARCADE established the band as one of the leading lights on the American indie scene. The 23 songs are loosely linked to a narrative structure about a young man who leaves, only to discover the world to be as oppressive and full of hypocrisy as home life had been. The songs show a marked increase in variety.

Being one of Paisley Underground's leading lights (and one of the movement's most staunchly retro units) the Rain Parade followed up their debut in style with the EP "Explosions in the Glass Palace", 21 minutes of ringing, effects laden guitars swirling around semi buried vocals in an alucinogenic fashion. The biggest highlight is predictably the live staple "No Easy Way Down" where the band embarks on a droning journey of darkly ear catching layers of sound, being ocasionally brought back to Earth for a memorable chorus.

Brilliant.

Backed by a local lineup featuring Alex Chilton bassist Rene Coman and co-producer Jim Dickinson, Stuart and Prophet immersed themselves in Memphis ambience to record the loose and likable Here Come the Snakes, an overtly Stonesy record that travels the backroads of American music to fine effect. Again switching easily among rock, blues and country idioms, what's left of Green on Red sounds relaxed and confident, a warm and boozy vehicle for Stuart's amusingly wry regrets and social observations. For once, Green on Red has realized its downwardly mobile ambitions.

If you had to pick just one album to represent dub "King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown" is the disc. The title really says it all: the collaboration between the premier engineer and the top roots producer of the mid-’70s resulted in definitive King Tubby interpretations of some of Pablo’s deepest rhythms. It also demonstrated conclusively that a studio engineer could be considered as creative as the singers, musicians and visionary producer who made the music. A dub is essentially a remix In the hands of an engineer as good as King Tubby (1941 – 1989) it became an artform, and an incredibly popular one.

Sun Ra's "Other Planes Of There" is without question one of the classic Arkestra albums, although it is somewhat idiosyncratic. Recorded in 1964, this disc sounds like a cross between the earlier big band stylings of "Jazz In Silhouette" and the later stellar journeys of "Heliocentric Worlds."