Deep Cuts
& Sonic Lore

The record

A Japanese jazz-funk masterpiece from 1975, cut with the legendary trombonist Hiroshi Suzuki at the front of the band. The title track is built on a deep, locked bass groove and the unmistakable warmth of a Rhodes electric piano.

Suzi's horn sits above the pocket rather than driving it - the rhythm section does the heavy lifting, and the trombone floats in and out of the light.

Sample history

The record has been sampled extensively across underground hip-hop - the brief names it a cornerstone of the crate-digger's canon, though the precise flips are left to the listener's ear.

The record

Cosmic Japanese fusion from 1977, and a landmark of early synthesizer work. Fukamachi ran a Moog and a Yamaha CS-80 - one of the first truly polyphonic synths - and used them to push traditional jazz harmony into something space-age.

The CS-80's layered, warm polyphony lets chords hang in the air like constellations, a sound that would later become shorthand for sci-fi soundtracks.

The record

High-energy Japanese-American fusion recorded in New York City in 1973. Nakamura pulled in Steve Grossman on saxophone, and the band locked into heavy, driving percussion and breakbeats that feel built for the dancefloor as much as the jazz club.

The New York session gives the record a particular electricity - the city's rhythm section energy fused with Nakamura's Japanese arrangements.

The record

A rare groove instrumental from 1975, produced by Donald Byrd. The band leans on a funky clavinet and airy flute riffs, with a horn-section brightness that keeps the whole thing light on its feet.

Byrd's production gives it a polish that rare groove records of the period often lacked - everything sits clean, every hook is given room.

Sample history

A legendary sampling source for 90s boom bap - the brief flags it as one of the era's most-pulled rare groove instrumentals, though the specific tracks that flipped it are not named here.

The record

German psychedelic krautrock from 1974, and a deep cut even by the genre's standards. Peter Giger plays a microtonal sitar-guitar - one of the 'super-stringed instruments' that let him bend notes far beyond the fretboard's usual reach - alongside avant-garde percussion textures.

The result is a record that drifts between meditative drone and free-form clatter, never quite settling into either.

The record

From 1979's Trans Harmonic Nights, by a core member of Tangerine Dream. Baumann was a pioneer of Berlin-school sequencer minimalism, and here he turns that discipline toward something unexpectedly melodic.

The track's electronic propulsion is steady and hypnotic, but the melody rides on top with a lightness the school's darker records rarely allowed.

The record

From 1981's Deceit, by the post-punk experimental titans This Heat. The band built the track from tape loops and handmade acoustic manipulation - cutting, splicing, and physically working the tape rather than playing through it.

The result is a web of revolutionary polyrhythms that has influenced post-rock and modern noise ever since.

The record

Avant-garde saxophone and synthesized vignettes, originally written for 1980s Japanese television ads. Shimizu turned the humblest of commissions - a commercial - into brilliant ambient minimalism.

The 'Seiko' piece is one of the most celebrated of these, a short, luminous sketch that outlives the product it was made to sell.

The record

From 1972's I'm the One, by a groundbreaking synthesizer pioneer. Peacock processed her own vocals live through a Moog modular synthesizer - singing into a machine that transformed her voice in real time.

The result is raw intimacy wrapped in avant-garde electronics, a sound that had no real precedent in 1972.

The record

From 1979's The Return of the Durutti Column, released on Factory Records. Vini Reilly's shimmering, delay-drenched guitar is the whole weather of the track, and Martin Hannett's production - including a bird-chirp sequencer - sets it in a strange, pastoral electronic dawn.

It is a record that feels like a place before it feels like a song.