It’s been four years since the first cross-continental road trip took us on a worldwide tour of the lesser-known musical hotspots of the 60s and 70s, courtesy of the B-Music crew. Since then, and in tandem with Finders Keepers’ more focused collections, the B-Music comps have been an ever-expanding frenetic mind-melt of musical maelstroms: they hook you in with crossover blasts from FK’s catalogue (Ilaiyaraaja, our hot tip from last month, makes a fleeting visit), and send you scuttling off with memories of found sounds to which there’s just no tracklisting.
That’s always been half the fun with these Fat City/B-Music comps, yet also their frustration: we doubt that even Shazam can help identify half of these, as unknown Eastern ragas zip by before chucking you into some fuzzed-up freak-outs and flute-layered breakbeats. Having DJed around the world himself, Shipton mixes and matches the patches to this particular quilt so deftly, the seams are all but invisible. A perfect primer into the B-Music ethos, this swallower of fashion’s also chucked up one of the top summer mixes this year.
