IRL

One look at the list of artists featured here should be enough to tell you just how important and influential IRL is as a label; Tinarowen, Terakraft, Justin Adams, Juldeh Camara, Xaos, Dub Colossus … the list goes on.

This double album set features one disc of remixes of some truly great and inventive world music and one disc of the originals.

I have dug remixes since the first dub remixes came out in the seventies but often the remix loses all trace of the original, reducing the music to samples in a mass of sounds. Not so here – the remixes are sympathetic to the originals and actually add something to them.
The whole project is curated by Nick Page (aka Dubulah) but the influence of Justin Adams is writ large across so much of the music here that you cannot ignore his presence.

Musically, this crosses all sorts of boundaries and times – the album is a celebration of 15 years of the label after all – and there really is no single sound represented but the album should be approached both as a whole and as a collection of individual musical statements. Take the Dub Colossus mix of Adams ‘Desert Road’; the original feeling of a wasteland of time and space stretching before you is retained but the swirling synths give the impression of wild and consistent winds. Then listen to Lo ‘Jo’s ‘Sur Des Carnet Nus’ in the Syriana mix which has gained an almost mechanistic element alongside wailing Arabic and French influences. You could not get much more of a variation but there is a coherent theme and the music is desperately listenable to.

Personal favourite track, and the one that has sent me back time and again, is ‘Convoy’ by Acholi Machon – the Penguin Café Orchestra mix seems to place the number in the Vietnamese jungle with insistent rhythm and ethereal fiddle.

All told a cracker of an album and a fine celebration of 15 years of one of the best underground labels around.