Nostalgia 77

Benedic Lamdin supplies the production behind Nostalgia 77, moving fluidly between sampled fragments and live players to shape his intricately treated recordings. Following a series of 7Sevens singles, he issued his debut full-length Songs for My Funeral in 2004 and quickly returned with The Garden on Ubiquity the following year. Borderlands appeared in 2006 alongside the live document Sevens & Eights: Recorded Live at the Jazz Cafe, with Everything Under the Sun arriving in 2007. The next year Tru Thoughts released Weapons of Jazz Destruction under the Nostalgia 77 Octet name; Lamdin, handling guitar duties, enlarged the ensemble to encompass drums, upright bass, brass, reeds, and winds. After issuing the compilation Nostalgia 77's One Offs, Remixes & B-Sides, he recruited veteran British jazz and improv figures pianist Keith Tippett and vocalist Julie Tippetts in 2009 for the expansive ensemble session Nostalgia 77 Sessions, Vol. 1, which also featured upright bass, saxophones, guitar, and drums alongside the piano and vocals, with Lamdin serving as both producer and engineer. Throughout the second half of the 2000s he maintained an active production schedule for Jeb Loy Nichols, Elizabeth Parks, Larry Stabbins, Alice Russell, Sara Mitra, Fringe Magnetic, and Golden Age of Steam. Nostalgia 77’s most wide-ranging statement to date, Sleepwalking Society, surfaced in early spring 2011 and spotlighted German vocalist Josa Peit while tracing lines between classic Ellingtonian jazz, British folk, and blues. In 2012 Lamdin, his core group, and additional U.K. jazz musicians released The Taxidermist as Nostalgia 77 & the Monster. Reverting to the Nostalgia 77 name, Lamdin resumed work with Peit on 2014’s A Journey Too Far; that same year the remix collection Kingdom of Dub appeared, its tracks reworked from his catalog by producer Prince Fatty, while a further collaboration with the Monster, titled Measures, came out in December.