Ontario Beats - Live at Manifesto, Toronto

Georgia Anne Muldrow & Dudley Perkins

Look Records, USA

There's the next level and there's the level after that. Then, squinting down on both those levels through binoculars from some unfathomable point miles above, there is Georgia Anne Muldrow. Her first album Olesi: Fragments Of An Earth (Stones Throw, 2006) sounds like a classic Soul record melted over a Salvador Dali tree branch. It's like she got her Roland TR-808 really high before starting to compose each and every song on the strange fruit salad of hip hop blues. Now combine the artist's beautifully ragged, sometimes Dilla-esque production sense with smart, surreal poetics and what you get is not just the freshest voice to emerge in the last decade of soul music. Plus her soulmate Dudley Perkins and G&D band member Dudley Perkins is right next to her! Recorded live at the Manifesto Soul Showcase at the Gladstone Hotel, Toronto.