arken

A city freeze Get on your knees Pray for warmth and green paper. A city drought You're down and out See your trousers don't taper. Saddle up Kick your feet Ride the range of a London street Travel to a local plane Turn around and come back again.

And at the chime of the city clock Put up your road block Hang on to your crown. For a stone in a tin can Is wealth to the city man Who leaves his armour down.

Stay indoors Beneath the floors Talk with neighbours only. The games you play Make people say You're either weird or lonely. A city star Won't shine too far On account of the way you are And the beads Around your face Make you sure to fit back in place.

And at the beat of the city drum See how your friends come in twos; Or threes or more. For the sound of a busy place Is fine for a pretty face Who knows what a face is for.

The city clown Will soon fall down Without a face to hide in. And he will lose If he won't choose The one he may confide in. Sonny boy With smokes for sale Went to ground with a face so pale And never heard About the change Showed his hand and fell out of range.

In the light of a city square Find out the face that's fair Keep it by your side. When the light of the city falls You fly to the city walls Take off with your bride.

But at the chime of a city clock Put up your road block Hang on to your crown. For a stone in a tin can Is wealth to the city man Who leaves his armour down.

As far as funky turkish psych goes, this is as far as it goes - to the other, far end of the spectrum. Surprisingly listenable for an album consisting entirely of lenghty apologies to why the keyboardist haven't yet learned to play his instrument, this unexpected hit record is the brain-child of Anatolian star producer and enfant terrible Hözte Ergüynaman, who had been dreaming of exploding the boundaries of recorded music since his childhood as a goat herder on the Anatolian Plateau. When he met Paytele "Paye" Peyman at a studio session for a Bariş Manço record, aborted because Paye obviously had no knowledge of the instrument he wad hired to play, he booked a recording studio immediately and the rest is history. This reissue box-set of "Tha'rihe Rayote Thal Navd" (Mother, how I ended up here I have no idea) contains two extra disc of outtakes that cast new light on the stressful sessions and a PAYE PAYE beanie. 5/5, truly essential.

This is one of those "Looks like an overlooked dirty funk classic ready to be re-discovered but actually only contains schmaltzy overproduced soul ballads and Bacharach covers"-type records that will leave you feeling really disappointed and hollow. The impeccable shred guitar from substitute teacher-turned-sex god Ret will unfortunately not make things any better. Will throw you into weeks of looping thoughts about selling your record collection and abandon record collecting as a hobby for something more productive. Absolutely essential.

"Reato", the artist name meaning "Photograph of a melting brother" in some Czech dialects, dedicated his third album entirely to short abstract vignettes each dedicated to a girl from his hometown Znojmo, of which there are only 13. Making it painfully obvious which girls of these he favours, side B should be skipped entirely. Side A however, comes highly recommended for fans of Gary Numan and Tajvor Czochov (not the one from Prajvuda, the other one). 180g vinyl with extensive liner notes. Rip it!!!

Abrasive and uncompromising, this groundbreaking album from the mysterious Latvian experimentalist Gattte Karret breaks new ground in self-invented yet traditional bowed goat-string zither instruments and non-traditional Latvian throat singing. Essential.

Impeccable reissue of brazilian flute virtuoso extraordinaire Sand Flos seminal album SOO LOC FOLE, filled to the brim with rare grooves, breezy bossa nova and understated samba excursions. Three-armed and four-handed from birth, she plays the Clarinoro exclusively, conceived in 1860 as a portugese alternative to the saxophone by inventor Adolphe Caro, Adolphe Sax' eternal rival and actual evil twin. Caro, who moved to portugal to escape the inevitable comparisons to his twin brother, became fiercely patriotic in his new country and could not stand the fact that Sax made Belgium famous as "la patrie du saxophone". Caro's Clarinoro was quickly lost and forgotten after Caro's death, everywhere but Brazil, where it was seen as the instrument of choice for the sem-tetos, the dominating subculture of brazil in the 1940s. It would be wrong to call the sound of the Clarinoro unique, as it sounds exacly like a clarinet, flugelhorn and flute combined into one instrument; this redundancy probably explains why the instrument never got popular anywhere else. 5/5, essential.