When electronic-ambient-new age pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre was working on 1976’s Oxygene, in his makeshift home studio, he often had to tape down two preset buttons of his Korg drum machine to achieve the effect he wanted. Thanks to the breakout success of that record and its winning blend of bright keyboard melodies and warped analog synths, Jarre didn’t have to resort to such ad-hoc methods for long. Live in Bratislava, taped last year in front of more than 100,000 enthusiastic Slovakians, shows us how far Jarre has come from his old workspace. The spectacle can be experienced in numerous editions, from a concert film to a two-CD-set to a collector’s edition that includes a coffee table book.
And yet the bombast never overwhelms…
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Anemoia, as the album’s opening section helpfully informs us, is “the ache of nostalgia for a time you’ve never known”. Given the back-catalogue of SG Lewis and his penchant for classic house/disco vibes one has to wonder whether the title of his third record is a concept or an excuse, but either way there are some great instrumentals and guest performances here.
The trio 
In just five years, Guatemalan cellist 
For their fourth 
What if the trip to Everest were not about the summit? Two springs ago, composer Patrik Berg Almkvisth journeyed through Nepal to the famed mountain, stopping at base camp. The journey was not what he expected; it began with a local funeral and ended with the sight of the sun rising over Everest. In the middle arrive intervals of wonder and joy, but also anger and disappointment. Despite the efforts of locals over time, trash litters the vast trail, a travesty transformed into sculpture by Leslie Leong, shown on the cover. Bodies remain unrecovered. Once-proud glaciers have receded. Might there still be room for revelation?
There’s a clever brilliance to the title and cover art of 
While visiting a Pasadena, CA art museum a few years ago, 
Although they haven’t had a hit single in almost 20 years, Faithless remain a potent commercial force, continuing to rack up festival headline sets and big-selling albums. Longterm member Maxi Jazz left the band in 2016 but Champion Sound is the first album by remaining duo Rollo and Sister Bliss since his death in 2022.
Five years after bidding a too-early farewell to one of pop’s most stalwart songwriters, a new album from his second-best remembered (but first major) band is coming, built off contributions he left behind. Traces of You is the first new album in a dozen years from alternative pop band 
From El Boraro, the vampiric demon on 2018’s 
There’s not enough time to break down the cognitive dissonance of younger audiences discovering 
While 
For as long as it has existed, it seems as if the piano has been subject to opinions and experiments of various types. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the player piano was a popular self-playing piano with a mechanism that operated the piano action using perforated paper or metallic rolls to play popular tunes.
“Anyone can be an artist,” croaks the voice of an old woman whose English accent sounds like it’s been ground down by time. She goes on to recount the simplicity of art; you draw something, and someone else likes it and they buy it. Woven into this discussion is another, with a sound quality that suggests it was taken from a pre-digital age film, in which a man’s voice ponders suicide. The first voice is