Collection: The Heliocentrics

The Heliocentrics exist somewhere between a band and a research project. Drummer and producer Malcolm Catto, bassist Jake Ferguson and multi-instrumentalist Jack Yglesias built the group around the Quatermass Sound Lab, their all-analogue recording studio in East London, and have used it since 2005 to make records that refuse to stay in any genre long enough to be categorised there. The debut "Out There" (Now-Again, 2007), drawing from James Brown's funk universe, Sun Ra's rhythmic disorientation, David Axelrod's cinematic scope and musique concrète, announced a band that had absorbed an implausible amount of music and was going to do something specific with it. The break that defined their reputation came in 2009 when Gilles Peterson brought them together with Mulatu Astatke, the Ethiopian pianist and vibraphonist who had invented Ethio-jazz in the 1960s alongside Duke Ellington arranger Richard Evans, and the resulting "Inspiration Information" (Strut) won Peterson's Worldwide Album of the Year. Working with Astatke clarified something about the group's approach: they are, at bottom, a rhythm section built for collaboration, disciplined enough to serve another musician's vision without losing their own identity. That sensibility has produced a discography of collaborations alongside the solo albums, working with Orlando Julius, Melvin Van Peebles, Lloyd Miller and, through Malcolm Catto's production work independently of the Heliocentrics name, Yusef Kamaal's "Black Focus" (2016). The Madlib connection is real: Catto appeared on Madlib's "Shades of Blue" in 2003, and the group later released two albums on Madlib Invazion. They remain active and based in London.