…The slightly delayed 20th Anniversary Edition comes with a second disc of standout remixes from the time, plus a handful of fresh versions.
Banco de Gaia (basically studio wiz Toby Marks and whomever he invites over) get their ethnic-electronic groove on again, but this time with extra vision. Maybe it’s the four years since the last proper Banco de Gaia album, or maybe the troubled globe of 2004, but whatever it is, You Are Here feels better put-together than any other Banco album before and the most direct message to the listener that Marks has ever attempted. You can use the cover art as a representation of the general feel of the album. Marks’ music is elaborate as ever but it’s compact in purpose, like the cover’s red dot and just as vivid. If Banco could…
Category: *editions*
…Remastered by Helge Sten.
Back in 2008, Motorpsycho MK3 was beginning to gel and settle. Kenneth Kapstad’s entry into the band a year earlier had not only started to inspire a new and different writing, as shown in their first album, Little Lucid Moments, but also given the musicianship a solid kick up the behind. By summer 2008 the engine room was back to firing on all cylinders, ushering in a new era of intense and ambitious work for the band.
In hindsight it’s hard to quite remember the sequence of events, but some time early in 2008, an invitation to play the Terrastock Festival in Louisville dovetailed with an opportunity to fulfill the long held ambition to record at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini.
Is Kōenjihyakkei’s Angherr Shisspa the greatest Zeuhl album ever made? It could be. …although it’s debatable how much that actually counts for. So, any noise created that helps celebrate this excellent 20th anniversary reissue is not just good for the stature of the album but also for Zeuhl in general, as it is itself a largely overlooked genre. ‘What is Zeuhl?’ you might feel justified in asking. Zeuhl is a moody and bass-driven hybrid of jazz fusion, prog rock and chamber music, typically featuring complex compositions which slough off conventional song structures and apply operatic vocals. This form requires a lot, even from virtuoso musicians. In reality though any definition of Zeuhl is a closed loop because this is music that sounds like Magma; and the term…
2025 mix by Jon Altschiller.
As we enter 2026, who could have imagined the Bruce Springsteen Live Archive series would be entering its twelfth year? The first show in the series, Apollo Theater, March 9, 2012, was released in November 2014; remarkably, 100 more have followed, expanding Springsteen’s live recording canon into territory once exclusive to the Grateful Dead.
Tours from 1975 on are represented in that 100, with many covered in depth. Frustratingly to all, a few gaps remain, limited by technical challenges (#freetherisingtour) and tape availability. But the Archive series is open-ended: new sources and playback breakthroughs remain ever possible.
For this year’s holiday release, we revisit…
…remastered & with 5 bonus tracks.
“Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day”, maintains Paul McGann’s character near the start of Withnail and I. He plays Marwood – the ‘I’ of the title – in a drunken and druggy but decidedly unpsychedelic cinematic glimpse into the late 1960s. The film initially flopped in cinemas at the height of 1980s yuppiedom, only to find cult adoration (and over quotation) via subsequent release on video. Everything has its right time in the end. And so it is with Henry Badowski’s one and only album Life Is a Grand, which is finally getting the reissue it justly deserves after all but disappearing, along with its creator, to near complete indifference following its release in 1981. Indeed Badowski himself seems more…
When Eraserhead premiered in 1977, it didn’t just mark the beginning of David Lynch’s singular career — it rewired the language of underground cinema. A nightmarish journey through industrial decay, existential dread, and fractured identity, the film remains one of the most haunting works ever committed to celluloid. Shot in stark black and white, Eraserhead unfolds like a fever dream — where sound, space, and emotion bleed into one another in an uncanny, hypnotic dance. But what truly sets Eraserhead apart, even beyond its disquieting visuals, is its sound. David Lynch, working closely with sound designer and technician Alan Splet, constructed an aural landscape as vital and disturbing as any of the film’s images. The soundtrack is not built…
Twenty-five years is a geologic age in terms of pop culture. For electronic music, it’s an eon, with whole genres, subgenres and movements living and dying faster than mayflies. For an electronic label to simply exist for a quarter century is a major accomplishment, worthy of accolades and great celebration. For an electronic label to be releasing some of their best, most exciting so far along is nothing short of miraculous.
25 Years Cocoon Recordings deserves a medal and a victory lap for that reason alone, as its 15 tracks of driving, relentless, hooky techno feels entirely of-the-moment while simultaneously serving as a weathervane, offering a hint of where electronic music may be heading in the next decade.
Even though it’s ostensibly a retrospective,…
It takes a lot of time, money, and dedication, to restore anything of historical importance. And the Plaza Theatre in Palm Springs, California was just the type of venue that required these three key ingredients. Opened to the public for the first time in 1936, this classic Art Deco building was the site of many grand events over the past 100 years.
And so it was on November 11, 2022, spearheaded by Brian Ray (Sir Paul McCartney’s guitar gunslinger for the past 20+ years), a gala fundraiser was held to restore one of Palm Springs’ most treasured landmarks, the historic Plaza Theatre.
Ray and his co-musical director Spike Edney (Queen, Clapton, Elton, Aretha) put together an all-star band to back the four headliners for the evening’s show. And what headliners…
Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California 1980-1992 assembles little-known sounds from California’s metaphysical underground. Each recording is stylistically different — dream pop, guitar soli, fourth world, avant-electronic — but they are held together by a regional ethos of the “visionary.” This is music that sees through the mind’s eye and conjures new worlds.
Some people say that California is where “the nuts stop rolling” — where those too eccentric to fit in elsewhere often find themselves. What was meant pejoratively is easily reclaimed as a celebration of the free-thinking and the freely-freaking. Until the turn of the millennium, all manner of seekers rolled westward until they hit the pacific. Stationed along this edge, music was a way to…
…La-La Land Records give the expanded treatment to Hans Zimmer’s score to the 1991 hit Thelma & Louise. Directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by writer-director Callie Khouri (her first credit!), Thelma & Louise starred Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis as two midwestern friends whose road trip escape from their humdrum lives takes unexpected turns. The film, screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, earned Oscar nods for its two leads and Scott’s direction, even winning one for the script; it also featured an early supporting role for Brad Pitt, whose smoldering turn led to his rise to the top of the Hollywood A-list.
Zimmer’s score reflected the southwestern Americana locations seen onscreen, with…
Egypt’s “official” popular music throughout much of the 20th Century was a complex form of art song steeped in tradition, well-loved by the middle and upper classes, and even accommodating to certain non-Arabic influences. It was highly structured by professional musicians working an established industry centered in the capitol, Cairo.
However, far from the bustling cosmopolitan center of Cairo, north and northwest, in towns like Tanta and Alexandria and extending across the Saharan Desert to the Libyan border, dozens of fully marginalized artists were developing a raw, hybrid shaabi/al-musiqa al-shabiya style of music, supported by smaller upstart, independent labels, including the short-lived but deeply resonant Bourini Records.
…With expanded or remastered presentations of Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, Moonraker, Octopussy, Licence to Kill, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day already certifying La-La Land Records as the home of definitive presentations of Bond soundtracks, there’s another one striking hard: 1965’s Thunderball, the fourth film in the series featuring a returning Sean Connery as Ian Fleming’s thrill-a-minute secret agent. Here, Bond squares off against another agent of the terrorist organization SPECTRE – the eyepatch-sporting Emilio Largo – attempting to stop SPECTRE’s plot to set off a pair of atomic bombs they stole.
If Goldfinger further codified the formula of…
Osees have released their new live album, Live at the Broad Museum via Deathgod Records. Album captures a dynamic live performance at The Broad museum in Los Angeles. The record features extended tracks that highlight the band’s improvisational energy, including a standout 22-minute jam, “I Got a Lot.” Unlike their tightly structured studio recordings, this album explores krautrock-inspired grooves, hypnotic rhythms, and experimental soundscapes, showcasing the band’s versatility and adventurous live presence.
The album is mixed by frontman John Dwyer and mastered by JJ Golden, emphasizing the raw, immersive quality of the performance. Critics praise it as a document of Osees’ live power, capturing moments of spontaneous creativity…
Daniel Lopatin doesn’t score the Safdie brothers’ movies so much as open portals in them. In Good Time and Uncut Gems, his worship of all things kosmische created a peculiar contrast with the images on screen, drenching the brothers’ grainy tales of ’10s debauchery in the aura of an earlier time. Hospital hallways gleam with the same twilit aura of Thief; New York’s diamond district ripples with as much danger as the landscapes of Sorcerer. Lopatin isn’t recreating Blade Runner with his soundtracks as much as Risky Business, pulling us into the subconscious of the Safdies’ manic characters and submerging us in their doomed self-sabotage. When Howard Ratner hits, we don’t just resolve to a major chord — we enter the realm of the angels, with glowy flutes…
To mark the 40th anniversary of their debut album, Laibach and Mute are releasing a special Laibach 40 CD box set. Originally issued in 1985 without the band’s name – as they were banned in Slovenia and Yugoslavia at the time – this legendary first album now appears on a remastered form bearing its originally intended name for the first time.
The box also features historic recordings from Laibach’s formative years. These include the cult live album Ljubljana – Zagreb – Belgrade, capturing their first concerts in 1982 across Yugoslavia, with some tracks originating from early rehearsals held in a practice space wedged between a mortuary, a dissection room, and a madhouse.
Another highlight is M.B. December 21, 1984, documenting a semi-illegal Ljubljana concert…
November 1978. Henry Cow disbands after a decade of music that redefined the boundaries of experimental rock. November 2022. Four founding members return to the stage. Not to look back – but to improvise the present. Fred Frith (guitar, violin, electronics), Tim Hodgkinson (keyboards, saxophone, lap steel, electronics), Chris Cutler (drums, percussion), John Greaves (bass, vocals): the original core reunited under the name Henry Now. The key is in the name – as Clive Bell noted in The Wire, this is not a nostalgia project.
No scores. No prepared material. Only the instinct honed over fifty years of sonic exploration. For many, the music of Henry Cow represented a transformative listening experience…