The Heliocentrics - A World Of Masks (2017 Soundway Vinyl LP)

The Heliocentrics - A World Of Masks | Vinyl LP - 2017 Soundway (SNDWLP093)

The Heliocentrics are a London band built around the drummer Malcolm Catto and the bassist Jake Ferguson, who have spent two decades making a dark, psychedelic strain of jazz-funk in their own studio, recording to tape for that thick analogue warmth. They take their name in the spirit of Sun Ra, and their music pulls in psych rock, library music, hip-hop and electronics as readily as jazz. They have backed everyone from the Ethio-jazz pioneer Mulatu Astatke to DJ Shadow. A World of Masks, from 2017, is one of their more song-shaped records, built around the Slovak singer Barbora Patkova, whose voice floats cool over the grooves on the title track and "Human Zoo". The band is fleshed out with horns and strings, and two guests from the London jazz scene sit in - Shabaka Hutchings on bass clarinet and Jason Yarde on baritone. It is cinematic and hypnotic, closer to a soundtrack than to a conventional jazz record.

The record landed just as the London jazz scene was breaking into the wider world, and while the Heliocentrics sit slightly apart from that crowd, older, stranger and more rooted in psych and library music, they share its openness and its refusal to stay in one lane. It has become a favourite among crate-diggers and cosmic-jazz heads, the kind of record that turns up on plenty of shelves and rarely leaves them. This is the 2017 Soundway pressing, self-produced by Catto and Ferguson, on standard black vinyl.