Joe Armon-Jones is a London based producer, composer, and keyboard player who performs under his own name and with the jazz quintet Ezra Collective. Joe’s latest record, All The Quiet (Part I), is out today on Aquarii Records, so to celebrate, he put together this playlist of tracks that helped inspire it.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
In general, this is all music that I have in my record collection, and stays near the record player. Weirdly, a theme of these tunes is a lot of them have these slightly extended intros. This is something I was thinking about with All The Quiet (Part I). I feel like intros are dying. The way that people think about video for social media, people have started to think about music that same way — like, “I need to grab people straight away or they’re gonna skip to the next tune.” With that mentality, you lose the intro. But the intro is my favorite part of a lot of tunes.
The Moments — “If I Didn’t Care”
This is one of the best intros to a tune I’ve ever heard in my life. It goes on for longer than you think it would — it’s a build-up, and then the reward is even better when you get to the tune. But the thing I really like about this one is its one of those effects that’s really difficult to get when you play to click. Because they do the intro, and then there’s this gap, but the gap isn’t just a bar. It’s more than a bar, but you can’t quantify it in beats. Then they shift into the real tune, and it’s just very beautiful they way they do it. Big up to The Moments.
Prince Alla — “Jah Morning Sun”
The way that the bassline catches you — it comes in before you think it’s gonna come in. When you listen to it, you’ll know what I mean. I think when people are trying to write dub music, it sometimes feels like all of the good basslines have been taken already, and this is just proof that there’s so many variables when it comes to that stuff, and all of the variables change how it hits you. It’s something to do with the way it’s played and the way it’s mixed, but the way that the first note of the bassline hits has a massive impact. And Prince Alla is just a great artist in general. Lots of wicked tunes from him.
LaToiya Williams — “Fallen Star”
She was around the time of Snoop releasing his earliest stuff, and I think he might of been mentoring her. She’s just an unbelievable singer who should probably be getting a lot more props than she does. I’m not sure why she’s not a bigger name than she is. This song sits perfectly in that kind of sweet spot between G-funk and actual funk. A lot of that music has rap over it, and it’s hard to find G-funk with just sweet vocals. It’s an amazing song, and there’s a wicked live performance of it on some TV show in the ‘00s.
Shafiq Husayn — “Cycles (ft. Hiatus Kaiyote)”
This album in general has inspired me for many years; It came out in 2019, called The Loop. It’s hard to pick a favorite tune from it, but I think this would be it. But the whole thing is just an exceptional album. To be honest, it’s one of the last albums I’ve listened to where I was like, “That’s a full work.” There are some singles you could pick out, but it’s just such a complete album. There are themes that come back; you get such a reward for listening to it as a whole, and that’s quite a difficult thing to do especially nowadays. The way people consume music, it pushes you to think less about the album process than the singles and cutting it up like that. But with this record, to my knowledge, there were no videos. It was just the music and the amazing artwork. I love Shafiq Husayn. He’s a genius, and this album is one of the best things he’s made.
Steve Kuhn — “The Meaning of Love”
I think my favorite thing about this song is the mix, to be honest. It’s a beautiful song and the playing on it is immaculate, but the choices that were made when it comes to the actual mix are so brave. They’re weird. It tends to be that drums are quite dry and vocals are wet, but in this case, it’s turned on its head and the drums are really wet and far away and kind of gentle — they sound like they’re in the corner of a massive room — and then the vocals have no reverb at all, completely dry and in your face. It’s a really weird choice, but it matches the emotion of the tune. That decision seems like a small one, but it has such an impact.
T-Fire — “Say A Prayer”
They’re a soul group from the ‘70s, from Nigeria. Just the sound of the record — people bang on about this, but some things are tape-y and lo-fi, and this is that to the extreme. To the point that it’s a muddy mix, but in a really nice way. It feels like a big hip-hop loop, basically. They just play the same thing round and round. And this guy is preaching on the top, and it sounds like he’s just scolding the human race for all of the nasty shit that goes on. It’s really nice. I’ve been listening to the whole album a lot, and it’s a great record. Shout out to Oliver Palfreyman, who put me onto that one.
Ahmad Jamal — “Ghetto Child”
This is off of Jamalca, and it’s an album of covers, basically. The intro for this song, if it isn’t already, could definitely be an Alchemist beat. It’s a proper self-made loop. It’s the first thing you hear when you put the record on, and it’s sonically immaculate. Everything that happens immediately, it just sounds beautiful. I’m not madly into the actual arrangement of the song, but the intro is 15 seconds of pure brilliance.
Ijahman Levi — “I’m a Levi”
There’s two versions of this song: There’s a slow roots version and then there’s a steppers version. The steppers version is the one I’m talking about. This is another one of those amazing intros. It takes you by surprise, where it goes and the chords that are used. There are some chords in there that you’re not expecting, especially in this style of music. I’ve been listening to this on YouTube for ages, but the rip of the record is not as good as the actual record. It sounds good, but it’s not anywhere near as nice sounding as the actual record. I know people say that a lot, but genuinely, the snare doesn’t sit right on the rip, but on the record itself it’s perfect. Immaculate mix.
Ronald Snijders — “Kaseko Attack”
This is from the album A Safe Return. I think this one is probably the biggest inspiration for my album. When you listen to A Safe Return, you’re impressed by the musicality and how beautiful the songs are and its original sound. But then you look on the back of the record and you see this huge list of instruments, and at the bottom it says, “All instruments played, produced, and mixed by Ronald Snijders.” So he’s on a Prince thing, but with jazz and funk — and in the ‘70s which means recording something to tape, and then overdubbing over that to tape. The constraints and the time and the perseverance that it would have taken to make that record then is just insane. And to make it sound like a band, and sound so clear — sometimes you can hear when someone’s done something on their own, because it’s extra and they’ve gone a bit too deep into it. It’s too complex, because they’ve had so much time to overcomplicate it. But this just feels like a session. It feels like there’s an amazing connection between the musicians, but it’s just him.
And he mixed the album himself. I’ve been trying to mix my own stuff and get better at that for a long time, and I’ve only just crossed that threshold with this album, where I feel like I could release music that I’ve mixed myself. It took building a lot of confidence to get to that place, and hearing albums like this gives me that confidence.
Lifetones — “For A Reason”
Liftones is Charles Bullen and Julius Cornelius Samuel, both incredible musicians from different scenes and backgrounds. Julius was more fully in the reggae scene and had been making dub for a long time, while Charles Bullen was more experimental, avant-garde. The meeting point between those two sounds is crazy. This whole album is insane. I’ve never really heard anything like it. It’s like a dub tune, steppers beat, but in 5/4 — but not in a kind cheesy, I’m-trying-to-be-clever way. You just kind of realize half-way through the tune, “Oh, this is not in 4/4.” It’s very hypnotic. The way he sings is not how you’d normally hear someone sing over a dub record. It’s a very different sounding record that kind of reminds me of the Clash or Bad Brains.
I used this record as a drum reference for the engineer on my record. The first track is actually called “Lifetones.” It’s inspired by that group and what they mean to me. And after I wrote that song — I wrote it at night, just before I went to bed, and was like, “I’ll call this ‘Lifetones’ for now,” since it was what I’d been listening to and thinking about that day — the next day, I got a message from the guy from Lifetones that was like, “Hey, man, I’ve been listening to your stuff and I really like it. We should meet up.” It was a weird coincidence. I was like, “I’ve just written a tune inspired by you!” So I kept the title.
As told to Annie Fell.
