Coolies started out in the late 1990s, a trio of school friends from South Auckland, NZ, making a homemade-punk noise. After a first spurt of activity they lost a couple of drummers, released hardly any music, and seemed to have gone silent. This brief new album captures their gleeful, raw, energy on a reel-to-reel recorder.
There is something to be said about listening to a good instrumental record on a cold wintry day. The right one should be picked of course, whose notes and timbres are delicate as powdery snow. The music should be austere, but with warm harmonics cutting through the cold like glimmers of sunshine. The eight pieces on this album are just the thing, and have a nice narrative arc that has me thinking of the similarities between novels and albums, how moving both forms can be, and how a good album, even without words, always tells a story. Like curling up with a good book, it’s nice to be inside on a Sunday afternoon comforted by the joys of a turntable and a warm cup of coffee.
Golem is widely regarded to be a lost psychedelic masterpiece among the sorts of people who are interested in such things, numbering David Tibet, Stephen Stapleton, and Julian Cope among its more outspoken champions.  In fact, Current 93 even covered "May Rain" on Thunder Perfect Mind.  Now, 36 years after it initially appeared, Golem has finally been reissued for the first time in its original form (though it previously surfaced as part of Durtro's Ultrasonic Seraphim retrospective in 1996). I don't think I'd quite call it a masterpiece myself, but it is definitely one of the more memorably bizarre albums to emerge from the krautrock milieu and that is certainly no small feat.
Hopelessly smitten by Buda Musique's long-defunct series of albums devoted to Angola, Analog Africa's Samy Ben Redjeb decided to try to pick up where his predecessors left off.  Characteristically, he quickly discovered that such an endeavor was much more convoluted and challenging than he had ever imagined, but ultimately made it through the gauntlet of denied visas, obligatory bribes, prohibitively expensive hotels, and ill-timed food poisoning to assemble what is possibly his finest compilation to date.