Globally acclaimed music phenomenon Africa Express is back with a brand new studio album titled ‘Africa Express presents… Bahidorá’, recorded in Mexico and bringing together artists and musicians from four continents. The boundary-breaking music collective has, for over two decades, united artists across countries and genres in radically creative collaborations in which anything can, and does, happen.
With the idea of bringing together artists from different cultures, genres, and generations to perform and make music, Africa Express was founded in 2006 with a trip to Mali connecting local stars Toumani Diabaté, Bassekou Kouyaté and Amadou & Mariam with artists including co-founder Damon Albarn, Martha Wainwright and Fatboy Slim.
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At the beginning of the year, Jane Remover told Billboard they had thrown away an entire album of proper pop tracks: “If it came out,” they explained, “I was going to be, like, main pop girl. And I didn’t want that.” Even if a bit self-aggrandizing, the claim doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
They had first found a taste of fame with hyperactive pop mutilations, and even their subsequent pivots towards soupy digital shoegaze or pulverizing rage-pop-rap didn’t halt the 22-year-old’s ascent into cult stardom. Now, after their most prolific and prominent year yet, Jane Remover offers a small taste of that pop record. Full of perfect hooks and fresh dance-inspired beats, the six songs on ♡ back up Jane Remover’s claims as a master crafter of pop songs.
In countries with a bloody history, built on empire, it has long been the case that migrants, and the children of migrants, from formerly colonised countries are responsible for a disproportionate amount of cutting edge culture. In Britain, the examples are too numerous to recall; from lover’s rock and dancehall in the 80s, through to drill, grime, and… pretty much everything else.
Batida music is perhaps the most pertinent example of this in modern Portugal. The modern batida, practiced by the likes of DJ Nervoso and DJ Marfox, was born in the suburbs of Lisbon, and incorporates touches of old school African dance styles like Angolan semba and Cape Verdean funaná into visceral, percussive modern dance music. Fuelled largely by Portuguese…
Goldie has occasionally returned to early moniker Rufige Kru for his more straightforward, underground drum’n’bass releases rather than his ambitious, multi-genre albums. Malice in Wonderland and Memoirs of an Afterlife appeared on his Metalheadz label during the late 2000s, and were pretty much only heard by his most faithful followers, though both contained some excellent tracks. As Metalheadz celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2025, Rufige Kru returned with third full-length Alpha Omega, co-produced by Goldie and James Davidson (Submotive).
The same duo also works together as Subjective, but their albums explore house, downtempo, soul, and broken beat rather than strictly drum’n’bass. Alpha Omega touches on feelings…
The penultimate track on Kibrom Birhane’s Lisané Bahir, ‘AMEN’, has the voices of Ethiopian elders giving blessings over a slow swinging drum machine. A sequencer bubbles out a rubbery pattern beneath sparking keyboard flourishes, soaring pads arrive carrying a lofty vocal. The track’s origins came in a recent trip back home to Ethiopia by California-based Birhane, where he noticed he wasn’t hearing these blessings as much as he did when he was growing up there. He recorded them as a reminder for a younger generation.
Preservation is one of the motivations behind Birhane’s fourth album, continuation is another. Lisané Bahir’s title translates to ‘the sound created when earth and water meet’ in…
A pleasant and inoffensive hard bop record, Keith Oxman’s Home shows the saxophonist in fine form. But with a 70 minute plus run time, it’s also a record that overstays its welcome. It’s a good record where a little pruning and spacing out would have pushed it to a higher level.
Oxman’s a player with a resume going back decades: his first record came out about 30 years ago on Capri and in recent years he’s worked with David Liebman and keyboardist Jeff Jenkins. For Home he’s using a quintet of guitarist Clint Dadian, trumpeter Derek Banach, bassist Bill McCrossen and drummer Todd Reid. It’s a nicely balanced group: Banach’s trumpet is a nice partner to Oxman’s sax, sometimes working in tandem and sometimes playing counterpoint, while…
In 2025 Dave Matthews Band hit the road for their 34th year of bringing their infectious energy to the stage. Live Trax Vol. 72 is from the second night of the bands two night stand in Chicago and captures a spotless and emotional performance from The Stones first notes to Pigs big finish. The creative and varied setlist includes songs like the powerful What You Are and Madmans Eyes as well as Daves haunting vocal deliveries on Gravedigger and Rye Whiskey.
Night two kicked off even bigger than the first, as “The Stone” worked the crowd into a frenzy and was immediately followed by “So Right”. The band leaned more into its newer material on Saturday, but still brought plenty of staples like “What You Are”, “You Might Die Trying”, “Blackjack”…
Although they emerged from Melbourne bayside outer suburbs onto the local live scene with their fresh and spirited indie-rock update of the garage-beat sounds of The Easybeats, Kinks and early Beatles only a year or so ago, Gnome actually started out as a bedroom solo project for teenaged singer/songwriter/ guitarist Jay Millar a few years back. Jay, playing everything himself, started recording and releasing a steady succession of material – quite a few albums’ worth – on his own Goblin Records label via Bandcamp. Realizing he needed a band to start playing out, Jay approached some like minded players from Frankston’s rehearsal hub Singing Bird, and with Jay on lead vocals and lead guitar, Ned Capp on guitar, Olly Katsianis on bass, and Ethan Robins…
Fuzz, the California based trio of Ty Segall (vocals, drums), Charles Moothart (vocals, guitar), and Chad Ubovich (vocals, bass), present their latest release Fuzz’s Fourth Dream on In the Red Records. This is the band’s first release in four years and is a collection of singles, unreleased demos, and rarities.
“I lived in a four-bedroom house in San Francisco that housed anywhere from six to ten people at a time,” Moothart explains. “Friends were always crashing when they were between spots, on tour, or just couldn’t make it home. It was a chaotic space, but a space that was cherished by many. Chad frequently crashed on our couch when on tour—surrounded by ashtrays full of cigarettes and joint roaches; beer cans and spray paint cans.
For the very first time, the complete studio recordings made by the iconic conductor Carlo Maria Giulini for Columbia and HMV (plus the two for Pathé and Electrola) have been remastered in high definition from original tapes and put together in a 60-CD box. Some recordings never published before are also included in the box: a Freischütz Overture from 1969, the stereo version of ‘Spring’ and ‘Summer’ Concertos from the 4 Seasons, plus a rehearsal of ‘Winter’ (1955), and excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony (1962).
This wide-ranging collection provides a comprehensive testimony of Carlo Maria Giulini’s collaborations with London’s most distinguished orchestras, his beloved Philharmonia Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic, later recordings…
Throughout The Vertical Luminous, shimmering vignettes of celestial melodies morph into unexpected shapes without concern for the verse-chorus form. While retaining a semblance of what came before on 2017’s The Unstruck Sound Centre, Paul Wilson’s new LP as F.Ampism enters a new frontier of direct-to-ear fidelity for the Brighton-based artist’s solo work.
The listener is routed through a sonic pipeline where the boundaries between the electronic and the organic have been smeared out of sight. Synthesizers and musique concrète form a symbiotic soundscape of collage and, through Wilson’s masterful mixing, a physical proximity to the sounds become nearly palpable, adding a sublime feeling of interiority.
Witches, Templars, gargoyles — all are roll called in “Town of the Castle,” a jaunty medieval pop song that plays like an overture to John Southworth‘s marvelous 15th album. Southworth is an Englishman who for most of his career has called Canada home. Many of his poetic, surrealist records are set against North American backdrops, but on The Red Castle, Europe is his muse. After bearing witness to his father’s medically assisted death, the singer/songwriter took himself overseas for what became a kind of spiritual ramble through the Old World. With its impeccable production and orchestral adornments, The Red Castle is consistent with much of Southworth’s late-period catalog, though there is a poignancy here that bleeds through his signature abstraction.
Tristen Gaspadarek has released four albums of impeccably made, tuneful guitar pop, netting her a devoted fan base and the respect of her peers without achieving breakout success. This is the recipe of a cult artist, one whose music remains consistently individualistic, meeting the high bar of her own standards, while remaining allergic to mainstream attention. At some point you just lean into it. Tristen’s fifth album is titled Unpopular Music, and while it ought to be heard by many, it will at the very least be appreciated by those who consider her a woefully underrated singer/songwriter. Recorded at her Nashville home studio alongside husband and co-producer Buddy Hughen, Unpopular Music is warm, punchy, and abundant with the abstract lyricism…
ASMR for Suicidal Thoughts marks Varg2™ back in collaboration with Chatline, an enigmatic figure long in orbit of Northern Electronics. Recorded live to tape, the record resists comfort. Contained within are two harrowing demonstrations that drag on emptiness, anxiety, and abject pleasure. And though terse and severe, that very void becomes the vessel for its mottled meaning.
Unopen to exploration, ‘ASMR for Suicidal Thoughts’ locks the listener into its own saturated atmosphere. Stripped back and unchanging, and suffocatingly cold at the best of times, funereal melodies pepper cyclical noise so brittle it can barely repeat itself. Disturbingly intimate glints of memories are passed over out of reach, yet with the alarming immediacy of déjà vu.
Enigmatic, prolific singer/songwriter and author known for his genre-defying work and contrary personality.
Julian Cope welcomes you to the new age of the New Age with this brand new deeply sonic magical trip-out album. The three tracks invoke three different experiences: the 29-minute ’Star Garden’ emerges through the cosmic ooze like a grand ancient river gradually descending to meet its final coastal destiny; the shattered radio communications of ‘Who Put All Of This In Motion?’ perplex listeners through its veil of sonic mystery; the final epic ‘Psalm Zero’ is an incantation to the cosmos in which Cope duets with himself like some minimal avant-garde barbershop quartet. This CD is part of Head Heritage’s 2025 Ambient Autumn.
The Studio Albums 1992-2016 brings together nearly 25 years of groundbreaking music. It unites 12 of the band’s core studio works for the first time across 14CDs. The boxed set charts more than two decades of Dream Theater’s musical growth-a career that helped define the sound of modern progressive metal while selling more than 12 million albums worldwide.
It begins with the band’s gold-certified 1992 breakthrough, Images and Words, featuring the Top 10 hit “Pull Me Under,” then navigates a prolific decade as the band scaled new creative heights on albums like Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory, one of the greatest concept albums in progressive-rock history.
The band continued adding to its legacy…
On Across the Horizon, classical guitarist Nicholas Goluses assumes the role of venerable travel guide in hosting a musical odyssey that visits Argentina, Brazil, Greece, and the American Southwest, the journey long yet rewarding.
No one’s better qualified for the part than Goluses, an awarding-winning Professor of Guitar at the Eastman School of Music who’s delivered world première performances of more than 100 works and whose discography includes recordings for Naxos, BMG, Linn, and Albany.
In being a global travelogue, Across the Horizon plays like a natural extension of concert itineraries that have taken him to North and South America, Europe, Australia, and the Far East. His reputation as a new music aficionado’s…
How do you define a weird record? For most listeners, it usually means a set of sounds arranged as songs or compositions that go beyond the usual set of boundaries or musical formulas, reaching the ears as something out of the usual.
Yet, does such music sound good or bad? Well, that is an individual thing, depending on whether you take weird as being good or bad, often depending on the musical results.
And yes, Gabriel Zucker’s sixth album Confession will be by many considered as weird, as it keeps coming up with sounds that are arranged as songs or compositions that go beyond the usual set of boundaries or musical formulas. As is always the case with weird, unusual or simply unexpected, the key question remains – does it…
These unreleased 1970s sessions from legendary pianist/composer Michael Garrick, see him lead two groups of top Brit jazzers, who perform eight original compositions by Garrick that display his flair for combining emotive writing with modal jazz grooves.
The opening track initially seems straightforward. To begin “Sons of Art,” Michael Garrick runs up and down his piano keyboard. Norma Winstone adds wordless vocals which weave in and out of his sparkling arpeggios. Then, the bass arrives. Drums kick in. So do the tenor sax and trumpet. After a climax around the two-minute mark, what begins as pacific turns turbulent. The conventional has become unpredictably experimental.
To conclude the album, an extraordinary…
A psychonautic swirl of spoken-word slam poetry and echoey shoegaze reverberations, this classic collaboration between indie darlings Yo La Tengo and alternative pioneer Jad Fair is a wild ride. Originally released by Matador in 1998, the album, a series of quirky snapshots and preposterous fables, derives its inspiration from real newspaper headlines.
Yo La Tengo, one of the most prevalent indie fixtures of the last several decades, blends atmospheric harmonies and dreamy melodies with clouds of gnarly squall. The trio can excel in a staggeringly eclectic variety of modes, from post-Velvets boogie to blue-eyed soul to cryptic country, while always sounding exactly like themselves. Here, they operate in full-bore…