Nearly 50 years ago, a bright-eyed Ethiopian teen arrived in Wrexham, a county borough in the northeastern part of Wales. His parents had sent him nearly 4,000 miles from home to attend a renowned ...

Back in 2007, The Heliocentrics released their extraordinary debut album Out There. In it, the London collective successfully wove a kaleidoscopic tapestry of proto-funk, psychedelic jazz, simmering ...

Snappy songs with orderly structures and neat resolutions are not The Heliocentrics’ thing. Since 2007 the Londoners have picked a path through a sprawling set of influences, a far-out journey ...

A visionary science fiction drama set to music, The Last Transmission is the product of two singular talents. The Heliocentrics are a London psych-funk collective, whose last album 13 Degrees Of ...

If there's one thing to know about Lloyd Miller, it's that he's not a fan of where pop music has gone. So disgusted is he with the state of music that he launched into a widely discussed diatribe ...

If jazz is a dead language, “Inspiration Information 3” (Strut) is speaking in tongues. This music is a revelation, sensual and brainy, rhythmically daring and melodically lush. The signifiers of jazz ...

This UK-based funk ensemble took its name from a Sun Ra album. One listen to A World Of Masks and you'll hear why. Note: NPR's First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you ...

Pioneering UK collective The Heliocentrics resurface alongside a fascinating jazz enigma, ethno-musicologist, jazz maestro and multi-instrumentalist, Lloyd Miller. Miller’s lifelong interest in ...

There's something about being a band unstuck in time that makes the question of aging and consistency almost beside the point. Out There, the debut Heliocentrics album from 2007, still sounds good six ...

Mulato Astatke, the supernaturally calm 67-year-old, delicately bounced his three wooden mallets off its aluminium bars, and an enraptured Barbican audience was transported back to a buzzing Addis ...