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Making a choice among artists who create ambient music veering into modern classical is becoming harder by the day. It is becoming hard sifting through hours of music and finding the ones that don’t end up into a musical wallpaper territory, the ones that keep up in both quality and emotional intensity.
That list is quite rarified these days, but you can easily add Southend-on-Sea visual artist and musician Adrian Lane and his latest album Their Ghosts and Ours to it.
Lane, who has been releasing music since 2013 on various independent labels, is among those who combine acoustic sources with electronic/computer-generated embellishments, something that has been done a lot these days.

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Since their founding in 2012, the vision string quartet has stood out for its genre-defying approach and fearless flexibility — performing classical repertoire from memory, composing its own works, and blurring boundaries between classical, rock, jazz, and minimalism.
In the Fields is the young quartet’s bold return — their ACT debut and first recording in five years. It’s a single, choreographed journey that fuses the spirit of folk, the pulse of dance, and the depth of classical tradition into one seamless arc.
Inspired by Béla Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet and its dramatic five-movement form, the album reimagines the string quartet as a living, breathing band — one that thrives on improvisation, rhythm, and fearless experimentation.

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Vocalist Viktoria Tolstoy and pianist/keyboard player Jacob Karlzon have worked together as close musical companions and friends for nearly three decades. So, when they choose to call their album Who We Are, it is far more than just an album title: they are making a statement.
What they are offering is a kind of musical self-portrait. They are aggregating and celebrating their shared experience and their mutual trust. Theirs is the kind of artistic language which only emerges after two people have been resonating on the same frequency for years. This duo’s journey began in the mid-1990s during one of Tolstoy’s UK tours. Since then they have performed together again and again, recorded six albums together, including Letter to Herbie (2011),…

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Betty Bryant‘s nothin’ better to do radiates the natural confidence of a seasoned club date, where the music speaks for itself. A pianist, singer, and composer whose artistry has been shaped by decades of experience rather than trends (at the impressive age of 96), Bryant brings a storyteller’s instinct and a deep respect for melody to this session. Producer Robert Kyle, himself a seasoned saxophonist and flautist, places her in a setting that is both intimate and expansive, featuring a group of top-tier Southern Californian musicians who know how to support a singer without overshadowing her.
The opener “You Are Not My First Love” sets the mood with a relaxed swing that feels both rueful and wry. Bryant performs the lyrics with…

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Tinsley Ellis has been with us for over four decades now, a career that encompassed some of the best songwriting any blues-rocker has ever put on record, mostly documented in his voluminous Alligator catalog. Shortly after the pandemic, Ellis inserted an acoustic segment into his live sets, playing the three different guitars found on Labor of Love, a follow-up to his full 2024 acoustic Naked Truth. Whether Ellis exhausted just about everything he could do in the blues-rock setting remains to be seen. Yet, he has clearly found his higher ground as an acoustic troubadour of the blues. His vocals shine in this format. One senses a newfound freedom and reinvigoration in his approach. Whether using slide or fingerpicking, Ellis is the genuine article, while…

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After over 600 gigs, London based brother-and-sister duo The Molotovs have finally released their debut album. It’s fair to say that for a band so aligned with punk, Wasted On Youth is much more of a hark back to Britpop and 2010s indie rock, but despite a slight lack of self-awareness, it is studded with promise.
Indie cursive singing is a bold move, and one that has attracted a lot of attention on social media in recent years by millennials cringing at their youth. There’s an extremely thin line between The Kooks asking the ironically iconic “do you want to go to the seaside?” and Arctic Monkeys presenting the timeless introduction “I said who’s that girl there?”, but it’s very clear which side of that line you want to be on. Unfortunately, it would…

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The Rifles have been making waves on the indie-rock scene since their debut album release in the summer of 2006, ‘No Love Lost’. Like many before them, members of the band found themselves compelled to form a band after seeing Oasis perform. This influence is noticeable throughout their previous releases without falling into the often tripped trap of Oasis-Mimicry, the group instead keeps an interest in an over-saturated genre through a healthy dose of New Romantic ideology mixed into a more classic indie high impact rhythm.
In the last 10 years since the the band shared their first release, The Rifles have honed their art and formed a dedicated fan base, and now as a gift to these fans we look at the last decades worth of material and reimagined both the hits…

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For last year’s Record Store Day Black Friday lineup, Rhino puts The Doors front and center with Live in Copenhagen, a previously unreleased 1968 performance finally pulled from the vault. Live in Copenhagen captures the band’s full early show from September 17th at the Falkoner Centret during their European tour. It’s a substantial RSD Exclusive — one that highlights The Doors at a pivotal moment, delivering a raw, unpolished document that adds real value to the band’s live catalog rather than reworking material fans already know by heart.
The set begins with “When the Music’s Over,” and the performance immediately shows a band working with precision rather than chaos. Morrison keeps his delivery steady…

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Throughout 2024, the Swedish duo Club 8 released a single a month, then gathered them up on an enchanting record titled A Year with Club 8. The idea was such a good one that they did the same thing in 2025.
This time the resulting album was titled Seasonal Echoes and it finds them walking a similar path of warmly melancholic indie pop spiced with the occasional burst of noise pop and a wistful ballad or two. This is the kind of music Johan Angergård and Karolina Komstedt were seemingly born to make, and it should heat the hearts of pop lovers both vintage and newly minted to hear them still making music this sweetly real. As always, Angergård constructs perfect pop miniatures for Komstedt’s lilting voice;…

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Syd dePalma’s Paris is dreamlike. Echoes abound, sculpting recognizable rock, folk, and pop stylings into imaginative new shapes. As he plays with light and shadow, the borders between fantasy and reality blur. The familiar soars. An eerie melancholy fills even the most straightforward of dePalma’s melodies, a desperation buried deep in the foundation of every line he sings. The lyrics are uncanny, the sounds constantly shifting. Only two years out from debut, El Lugar de Arder, Paris is a ferocious next step for dePalma, one that radiates surreal energy.
Vivid imagery abounds: of body parts, desire, tears, the sky, the ground, the city, the country. As lead singer on almost all tracks, dePalma makes for a compelling guide to his uncanny world.

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Although James Opstad first recorded on double bass at Eastcote Studios, London, in September 2006, on an album entitled Interpretations (2006) credited to a drummer named Jon Opstad, James Opstad did not release an album under his own name until Drift (2025).
In the intervening years, the bassist had played or recorded with Apartment House — for instance, he played on the title track of O, Zomer (2018) by Cassandra Miller — with saxophonist Joe Wright in the duo called duck-rabbit, and in the quartet Jack Davies’ Flea Circus.
On Drift, which was recorded by Simon Reynell in London and Birmingham from 2020 to 2024, a selection of musicians played five Opstad compositions, ranging in…

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Five years after releasing Twelve of Hearts, Daniel O’Sullivan reconvenes with Richard Youngs for another intense minimalist meditation.
On their debut collaborative album, Youngs and O’Sullivan used a single chord progression to distill various pop idioms into twelve succinct tracks. And they try something completely different on Persian Carpets, a blissful, longform experiment that’ll be more familiar to anyone who’s been keeping up with Youngs’ Black Truffle sides. Youngs plays zither here, following O’Sullivan’s trance-inducing piano repetitions that recall his collaborations with the great Charlemagne Palestine. But it’s not only repetition that drives ‘Persian Carpets I’. O’Sullivan varies his phrases by altering the dynamics as he plays, creating waves of noise…

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…2025 edition was mastered by Rashad Becker and features a new track ‘Sacrificial Code III’.
The first and only time that Kali Malone sat down for a lesson on the pipe organ, she managed about five minutes at the console before begging her teacher to take her inside the belly of the beast. That desire is borne out in her music: Listening to her expansive, slowly moving compositions, which bristle with dazzling arrays of layered waveforms, you feel like you are not just inside the organ — pressed against its pipes, vibrations coursing through your body, air whisking over your skin — but enveloped in the sound itself. The simplest interval might throb like an outboard engine, every new chord triggering wave after rippling wave of beating effects, vibrations as…

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Music from Memory presents Aquáticos, a collaboration between Los Angeles producer Eddie Ruscha (aka E Ruscha V / Secret Circuit) and Brazilian guitarist Fabiano Do Nascimento. Blending Nascimento’s expressive, Afro-samba- and choro-inflected guitar with Ruscha’s cosmic, groove-driven sound, Aquáticos marks the start of a vibrant musical partnership — an organic, free-spirited collaboration full of interplay and vitality.
Conceived during the early 2020’s, Aquáticos grew from a series of recording sessions in which the music unfolded naturally, in a state of effortless flow. Album opener ‘Nascer,’ the very first piece they recorded, captures such a moment perfectly: Nascimento’s 7- and 10-string nylon guitars weave seamlessly with Ruscha’s modular synths,…

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There is a certain freshness about the sound of New York-based singer-songwriter Jake Winstrom’s third album, RAZZMATAZZ!, his follow-up to 2020’s Circles. The former frontman of Tennessee band Tenderhooks has opted for a more spacious sound for this set, with the stripped-back structures allowing ten tightly written songs to shine.
This is nicely illustrated on the fingerstyle guitar fronted ‘This Blue Note’. A relatively new skill for this musician, Jake’s acoustic picking is neatly restrained here, with the notes sparse enough to frame a lovely little rueful number that is further enhanced by subtle keys and a minor-key second guitar part.
‘Don’t Make the Rules’ is more stadium pop, with strummed electric guitar introducing…

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The latest album from Hungarian tambura band Söndörgő isn’t triple X-rated, but it does mark their 30th anniversary. Their name may be hard to pronounce, but their music is easy to listen to.
The unusual standout track here is their arrangement of the first of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’. It’s a wonderful demonstration of the delicacy and virtuosity of the instruments and players, in this case Áron Eredics and his brother Salamon on alto tambura. It’s rather reminiscent of those beautiful Bach arrangements by Chris Thile on the mandolin, alongside Yo-Yo Ma on the cello and Edgar Meyer playing double bass. Indeed, the tambura is remarkably like the mandolin in sound and extremely nimble. The instrument is associated with the South Slav communities…

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Singer-songwriter Henry Grace is a purveyor of warmth and easy comfort, through music that sorts through a trove of personal experiences, isolating gems of learning and sharing them generously. His second album, Things Are Moving All Around Me, sets out to capture a wide-ranging chapter of his life, a period of time which involved movement and transition. Grace spent some of his formative years in California, performing solo in small city clubs and – perhaps subconsciously – soaking up those times and places. He now finds himself in London again. This movement has resulted in a fascinating blend of ingredients, which Henry adeptly uses in his songs.
Grace’s style as displayed on this album is a kind of London country folk. He has clearly been…

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If the latest offering from Bird Streets (the alter ego of John Brodeur) sounds a little paranoid and isolating, you can chalk that up to the global pandemic. Four years in the making, much of The Escape Artist, the third effort from Bird Streets, was written and recorded during the lost COVID years, where uncertainty was a running theme in everyone’s lives.
As the restrictions finally started to loosen in 2021, Brodeur met up with his longtime collaborator and producer, Jason Falkner (Jellyfish), to start recording what he had. The die is cast from the first moment of the opening song, “Bedhead,” where Brodeur sings “Another gray December morning fell upon my head” over a lonely acoustic guitar, before an even more maudlin violin…

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