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For those interested in a world of true fusion and synthesis, a Montreal-based multi-instrumentalist (she plays seven, to be exact) by the name of Ourielle Auvé offers another enveloping ambient anthology.
In the four years since her last full-length solo album Frame of a Fauna was released, Ouri has been playing international festivals from MUTEK Mexico to Prague’s Lunchmeat, hosting a monthly radio show on NTS, and, most recently, modelling for Versace. With her sophomore album Daisy Cutter, the classically-trained electroacoustic composer continues to develop the fluid, instinctual sonic world she’s built over the course of her nearly decade-long career.
While it’s become a bit cliché to describe…

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In every permutation, Bad Company were a rollicking good-time band, but it’s fair to say that the six albums Paul Rodgers fronted remain the most beloved by the fan base. Much like Black Sabbath, it was the Ozzy Osbourne years that have stood the test of time, demonstrating the importance of a lead singer to a group. On this tribute album, Can’t Get Enough: A Tribute to Bad Company, Rodgers guests on three different tracks, gently guiding younger artists in their efforts to find truth in his work.
Drummer Simon Kirke, like Rodgers, appears on “Seagull”, which boasts Def Leppard songwriters Joe Elliott and Phil Collen as well. In this stripped-down fashion, this arrangement recalls Elliott’s yearning “Two Steps Behind”. A vocal spar…

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When Dimitri Giannopoulos was a teenager, he thought he might be living in a dream. Alienated, anxious, and unsettled, he tried his hardest to process a world that he felt disconnected from. “I refused to believe anything I was seeing was happening to me or even happening at all,” he told Allston Pudding in 2016. “I was just freaked out by everything.” He says that he’s since outgrown his existential angst, but similar feelings have clearly found a home in the slow-moving gloom of the songs he makes in Horse Jumper of Love.
The forms of those songs have shifted occasionally over the years — from hushed, stripped-down recordings that recall Phil Elverum’s sky-gazing folk songs to distressed lo-fi experiments in the mold of Bedhead’s desperate slowcore to…

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The striking cover image of an abandoned swing illuminated against a field of glittering stars makes a compelling visual metaphor for the music on Close. “Music is a twilight language,” Steve Tibbetts confirms. “The job is to translate some shadow into sound.”
On his 11th ECM release the Minnesotan guitarist resumes the quest, slowly developing his yearning improvised melodies over layered loops and drones and darkly rumbling percussion. If the sound colours, including distorted electric guitar and sparkling 12 string acoustic, make this music of the west, its gradual, almost hypnotic unfolding continues to suggest eastern affinities.
“I am still reaching for the evocative sound of Sultan Khan,” says Tibbetts, speaking of…

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…An expanded reissue of their stellar “Acoustic Junk” (2009) record, this album features five new acoustic recordings alongside five tracks from the original album — three of which have been remixed for this compilation.
Known for their haunting melodies and introspective songwriting, the band’s acoustic arrangements on this collection showcase the raw beauty and emotional depth that have been at the centre of their individual sound since their inception. The band comprises Margo Timmins (vocals), Michael Timmins (guitar), Jeff Bird (mandolin, harmonica, bass, percussion), Andy Maize (backup vocals), Josh Finlayson (banjo), and Jaro Czerwinec (accordion). The album was produced, partially recorded, and…

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After seven years of unprecedented success following 2018’s By the Way, I Forgive You, 2021’s In These Silent Days, her recent collaborations with Elton John, Joni Mitchell and increasing mainstream recognition — Brandi Carlile draws a line in the sand, returning with an album that feels like an extended conversation with mortality, love, and the fundamental human need for connection.
Returning to Myself finds the singer-songwriter at her most philosophically engaged, wrestling with the finite nature of existence while celebrating the messy beauty of interdependence. The title track establishes the album’s central paradox immediately. Despite its name suggesting solitary introspection, Carlile hints at co-dependency and togetherness.

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Recorded in Lisbon in 2023, ‘Cornucopia Live’ documents Björk’s expansive tour, presenting high-quality live versions of the album’s best tracks alongside updated fan favorites like ‘Isobel’ and ‘Pagan Poetry’.
Björk has always gone all-out on her live productions, and ‘Cornucopia’ was her most monumental tour yet, billed as an attempt to unite her various interests – nature, technology and sound. She directed the ambitious event herself of course, but brought in help from James Merry, and had Andrew Thomas Huang, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Pierre-Alain Giraud, Nick Knight, Tobias Gremmler and Warren Du Preez & Nick Thornton-Jones along for the ride. There’s a filmed version recorded beautifully by cinematographer…

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The four-CD Deluxe Edition of the set includes a remastered version of the original album, discs of rarities and previously unreleased songs, and a live show recorded just weeks after the album’s release in October 1975.
…Though The Last Record Album was not Little Feat’s final effort, it did mark a significant change in the band’s process. Frontman, producer and songwriter Lowell George ceded some compositional ground to keyboardist Bill Payne and guitarist Paul Barrere. Their growing interest in jazz fusion would push the band away from the southern-inspired boogie rock George favored. (He sang lead on five of the album’s nine tracks, and wrote or co-wrote only three.) Despite this increasingly fractious arrangement,…

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In the 2020s, Elton John started offering 50th anniversary deluxe editions of classic albums in his catalogue that hadn’t been expanded to multi-disc sets yet. After Madman Across the Water and Honky Château, expansions of Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player and Caribou were only made available as vinyl expansions for Record Store Day activations. That changes with a new general retail expansion of Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirt Cowboy arriving this fall with a bonus disc of unreleased material.
Due October 24, the album (remastered in 2016) will be paired with a second disc featuring unreleased session demo versions of five songs from the original LP (including two takes on the title track) as well as a near-full…

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…The album’s original 12-tracks return in freshly remastered form, while the total number of rarities spread across CD and digital versions totals 23 tracks, including early demos, remixes and B-sides including four previously unreleased.
As Super Furry Animals settle into their second decade of recording and with it their status as veteran rockers, they’re inevitably less surprising than they were at the outset of their career, when their music not only had an exhilarating rush, but there was a sense of impish glee, the sense that they were getting away with something that they shouldn’t. That naturally has declined with the passage of time, yet with their seventh album, 2005’s Love Kraft, SFA show signs of settling comfortably into their status as…

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5-CD Super Deluxe Edition that features Zappa’s entire October 31, 1978, performance as well as a bonus gig from earlier in the Palladium residency on October 27.
…Zappa’s annual Halloween shows took root at New Jersey’s (also sadly demolished) Capitol Theatre in 1972 before moving to Chicago in 1973 and then, finally, New York City in 1974. Zappa knew how special these yearly events were, even filming Baby Snakes: The Movie at the 1977 shows. Sadly, the tradition was short-lived, taking a break in 1979 and 1980 (the latter year for health reasons) before returning in 1981 with two shows taped for broadcast on MTV and therefore designed as much for the at-home viewing audience as those in the Palladium’s seats.

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Nebraska occupies a pivotal place in Bruce Springsteen’s catalogue, but for some that has never been enough. Ever since the legend of Electric Nebraska – Nebraska’s band-recorded alter ego – emerged, fans have wanted to unpick the knotty relationship between Nebraska and Born in the USA and hear electrified E Street versions of this sombre acoustic album.
As recently as June 2025, Springsteen was denying Electric Nebraska even existed – and nothing appeared on the recent, epic Tracks II set – but the mythical album is finally here, thanks to the deus ex machina of Deliver Me From Nowhere, a Bruce biopic that focuses on his angsty wrestling match between artistry and commerce (spoiler alert: he could have both).

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Hannah Jadagu’s debut album seemed to come a bit out of nowhere. After her debut EP What Is Going On (entirely recorded on an iPhone using GarageBand) attracted the attention of the legendary Sub Pop label, which led to Aperture, a remarkably assured debut collection.
Two years later we have the follow-up, Describe, and it sounds like a natural evolution of Jadagu’s sound, while adding some extra flourishes. The overall sound remains the same – dreamy, languid indie-pop, with Jadagu’s voice not too over-treated by vocoder. This time around though, there’s a move towards a more rounded sound, rather than the guitar-based songs of Aperture, with new producer Sora Lopez coming on board to join Jadagu’s regular collaborator…

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August 13, 2025. An Evan Dando in-store appearance at Rough Trade Records, East London. The evening is a mix of old originals (‘Confetti’, ‘My Drug Buddy’) and covers plus anecdotes about Jackson Pollock and a word-perfect rendition of Peter Cook’s Coal Miner sketch (“I didn’t have the Latin”). Looking simultaneously bedraggled and regal, like a lion surprised by a sudden rain shower, Dando is scrappy, vulnerable, heartfelt, and enervated. You sense he feels uncomfortable singing his own songs. In fact, the only Dando composition delivered with complete ease and self-belief is a new one, ‘In the Margin’. Written with Massachusetts friend and collaborator, Marciana Jones, it’s an eviscerating break-up song (“If periphery is what you give…

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Rian Treanor’s style of electronic music is daunting. The sounds are microscopic and synthetic, either glowing like LEDs or gleaming like cold steel, but they leave sizzling craters on impact. Melody and rhythm merge into a rapid-fire spray that makes a mockery of musical modes and scales even while he works within them, thanks to Max/MSP devices that the English artist designs himself. It can feel solitary, almost maddening — the work of an artist obsessively trying to one-up himself. Which makes it surprising that his collaborations are actually some of his best work, whether he’s playing with a Ugandan fiddle player or his father, experimental electronic luminary Mark Fell. It’s hard to imagine another artist entering his impenetrable world, but those pairings push…

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…A quick look at the titles on Oneiric – and, indeed, the album cover and title – indicates that Arne Kjelsrud Mathisen, aka Rural Tapes, has fashioned his new record around dreaming.
What is perhaps surprising is that Rural Tapes has been dreaming of the mid-’90s Birmingham music scene. This is not a complaint, just an observation. After a brief intro, “Flower Lab” comes barrelling in, very much like an instrumental Broadcast track. “Fantasia” could be an outtake from Plone’s debut album, possibly rejected because it’s too tuneful. “Flower Lab” feels a little bit busy in comparison to the softer, more electronic fare found further in, but it certainly grabs the attention.
There are a couple of dream collaborations on Oneiric as well. Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor…

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Two naked, moustachioed beefcakes sit back to back, eyes averted, linked by wires, resistors, and switches, as if plugged into the same circuit board. Connection, sex, loneliness, and electricity all smashed together — has there ever been a better pictorial representation of Patrick Cowley‘s music? I’m referring here to the sleeve of Cowley’s not-new new album Hard Ware, the latest in a series of releases by California record label Dark Entries that has turned up all manner of wonders from the archive of the pioneering disco producer, who died in 1982 of AIDS.
Cowley lifers will know by now, more or less, what to expect from Hard Ware. Glistening synthesizers and squelchy basslines do battle over drum machines, while vocalists pop up here…

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Son of renowned Brazilian percussionist Bosco de Oliveira, Fabio de Oliveira, aka Babo Moreno, grew up in London, making his name with folk pop star George Ezra before becoming a key player in the capital’s jazz scene.
This cultural duality shapes much of the drummer’s self-titled debut. Brazilian percussion and atmospherics colour his approach to London’s assorted instrumental jazz strains.
Samba rhythms, ambient synths and birdsong add a tropical feel to the languid rhythms of ‘Bicho Preguiça (The Sloth)’, a track tailor-made for balmy summer days.
Elsewhere, the superb ‘Rei Da Pesca’ pairs punchy, Lincoln Olivetti-style horns with berimbau strum, while Latin-jazz funker…

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