Kuntari – multi-instrumentalist Tesla Manaf and percussionist Rio Abror – hail from West Java, Indonesia, and they call their distinctive, eclectic but hard to categorize music “primal-core” – so let’s just call it that. What is primal-core? Its most obvious characteristics are feverish percussion and the haunting, almost abstract howling sounds made by a folk instrument called a hulusi, which is made from a gourd and bamboo pipes. On the page, it doesn’t seem as if that would be especially musical, but although it’s rarely melodic, the sound that Kuntari makes is extremely flexible, and there’s something deeply affecting and human about it, too. It feels genuinely timeless, sometimes related to various forms of modern popular music, sometimes almost primordially…
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Hyperboreal Trio came by its name honestly. Danish alto saxophonist Signe Emmeluth and Norwegian bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten have both lived in the far-northern metropolis of Trondheim, Norway, and that’s where the they first convened with Argentine-born, Berlin-based drummer Axel Filip. But the music that they improvise is, in its own idiosyncratic fashion, far from chill.
While the two Scandinavians are well-known to each other from countless gigs and shared membership in bands, it was Filip who clinched this combination. Filip had met Håker Flaten and Emmeluth separately, and the trio first convened in Trondheim’s Northern Studio for the session that yielded this album. It doesn’t take long to hear why the threesome has taken on a life…
Scree’s 2023 debut, Jasmine on a Night in July, was one of the year’s most pleasant surprises: a guitar-bass-drums trio doing its best to sound like a big band, aiming for the languid quality of Duke Ellington’s most elegant suites while benefiting from the scrappy intuition honed across many nights playing Brooklyn art spaces like the Owl. On their second album, August, Scree actually are a big band, calling in a cadre of players to fill in the flourishes: strings, horns, woodwinds, even steel guitar that pushes their music toward something like slowed-down Western swing.
The core trio of guitarist Ryan El-Solh, bassist Carmen Quill, and drummer Jason Burger approach their craft less with the ferocity of a surf band than the meticulous ear for…
A previously unheard Robert Plant song titled “47 Roses” was released on the CD that accompanies Mojo Magazine’s October 2025 issue.
The cover story for the magazine’s 383rd issue is an interview with Plant published ahead of the release of his new album Saving Grace on September 26. In the interview, Plant “regales us with classic tales and forthright views”, Mojo wrote in its announcement of the new issue.
The issue’s accompanying CD, titled Higher Rock, is a compilation of tracks from Plant’s solo career. It contains “47 Roses”, which seems to have been recorded for a planned sequel to Plant’s 2010 album Band of Joy.
The magazine reports that the track was “written with Buddy Miller and Marco Giovino”,…
By the summer of 1971, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry was widely recognised as Jamaica’s most creative music-maker. Since launching his career as an independent producer in 1968, his experimentations with sound and style had resulted in some of the most exciting and popular works to see issue during reggae’s formative years. Now, primarily employing one of the island’s most accomplished band, The Now Generation as his regular session crew, the sound of Perry’s output from the latter half of 1971 contrasted strongly with the more rugged style the epitomised many of his earlier productions.
Otherwise, however, his general approach to music-making remained unaltered and during this six-month period, he released…
Bruce and the E Street Band perform a 28-song set on night one in Milan. Highlights: “Atlantic City” rotates in. 2025 additions “Rainmaker,” “House of a Thousand Guitars” (performed solo acoustic), and the show-closing cover of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” all appear.
…Little Steven Van Zandt returned to the concert stage with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on Monday, June 30, at the San Siro Stadium in Milan. Van Zandt had appendicitis surgery in San Sebastian, Spain, the rocker posted on June 23.
The E Street Band traditionally enters the stage one by one before The Boss takes the stage. In Milan, Van Zandt came out holding hands with Springsteen at the beginning of the show before the band launched into “No Surrender.”
Following the release of their sole, self-titled studio album in June 1989, Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe embarked on an extensive and well-received world tour.
With the Chris Squire-led Yes languishing in a singerless limbo in Los Angeles, the offshoot tour was the closest fans would get to the Yes live experience throughout 1989 and early 1990.
Recorded at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California on September 9, 1989, An Evening of Yes Music Plus was originally broadcast on the King Biscuit Flower Hour radio show and as a pay-per-view concert film, before being commercially released in 1993 on double CD and in 1997 on the then-new DVD format.
…An Evening of Yes Music Plus does what it…
Remastered and reissued for the first time, Piano Studies 337 is a 1962-released private-press from spiritual teacher and chemist Willem Nyland, improvised on a bizarrely tuned baby grand piano after one of his weekly lectures.
In 1924, Nyland and his wife, the Hungarian-American designer, painter and illustrator Ilonka Karasz went to see notorious Greek-Armenian philosopher, mystic and composer George Gurdjieff speak on his first trip across the Atlantic. Impressed by his teachings, the Nylands began to work with Gurdjieff, hosting a group Stateside that disseminated his weekly teachings. In the mid to late ’60s though, long after Gurdjieff had passed away, Nyland broke ties with the Foundation, forming his own independent…
Leading figure of modern ambient Florian T M Zeisig drifts in adult contemporary neo classical space for a shimmering 2nd turn with Stroom, blessed by harp and saxophone from Róisín & Cathal Berkeley and Lia Mazzarri’s cello.
Fresh from minting his Angel R project with Aaliyah Enyo, and building on a handful of cherished albums on enmossed, including the ambient soundtrack to Berghain’s cloakroom, Zeisig curves back onto Stroom with an album of effortlessly lush floatation tank/massage parlour music (delete as applicable).
The spirit of Eno and pot pourri is strong on this one as Zeisig diffuses instrumental gestures into aerosolised synth tones with a gossamer touch that’s come to be expected of his work.
In 2017, Los Angeles multi-instrumentalists Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer traveled to the Åland Islands, an archipelago of more than 6,000 islands in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. Their ostensible purpose was to help two friends rehab an old building in the tiny municipality of Kumlinge — population 320 — and convert it into a hotel. They brought more than just construction tools; they came prepared with a collection of instruments and electronics, and as they adjusted to their surroundings, they documented their time with musical improvisations and field recordings.
They found themselves profoundly moved by the experience, and they returned two years later to perform in a 14th century church on the island.
Best known as a former member of The National Reserve, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Jon LaDeau has released several collections of his own music, as well as working alongside many other artists on stage and in the studio. Originally from New Jersey, LaDeau is now resident in New York, where he recorded his fifth solo album, Chateau LaDeau, in his home studio.
All eight tracks are his own work, as is much of the instrumentation. Things took shape gradually, with each song being passed to co-producer David Butler in the form of demo recordings. LaDeau has featured on festival bills with Jeff Tweedy, Emmylou Harris, Sturgill Simpson, and Commander Cody, while Butler is a touring member of alternative rock band Guster, and both men…
Eve Adams has a soft, carrying voice, one that commands the swirl and sweep of her songs effortlessly, at a murmur. There’s a cool, unharried elegance to her delivery, a remove. Nothing surprises her in these elliptical, occasionally lurid sketches — whether of late-night carousing, a fatal love affairs or climate apocalypse. The comparisons to Julee Cruise only go so far. They fail to account for the endearing catch, the bluesy growl in the way she’ll accent a vocal line, but you can see where they come from.
This is Adams’ second full-length, following 2021’s Metal Bird, a more conventional work of dusky Americana. Here, though surrounded by the sounds and textures of twang, she establishes an urbane, unruffled presence.
Meet Hekate, a vocal trio that have already cast a spell over audiences with their chilling and thrilling brew of the powers of darkness mixed with traditional Norwegian dance tunes and songs. At the heart of their music is slåttetralling, a vocal-improvisation tradition perfect for this cauldron of Norwegian tunes infused with spine-tingling sounds from the dark edges.
It’s Hekate’s solid grounding in traditions based on foot-tapping dances such as springar and springleik, fiddle tunes and fragments of ancient psalms, together with their mesmerising vocal qualities, that makes the trio’s vocal improvisations so convincing. They lure us on to an other-worldly dancefloor powered by Hekate (the goddess) herself as she guards the moon…
Heavy rhythms rule the day on El Muki, the seventh recording by composer, arranger and trumpeter Gabriel Alegria’s Afro-Peruvian Sextet, one that marks the group’s 20th anniversary in 2025 by blending impactful elements of Peruvian, African and American jazz into a wholesome and flavorful banquet designed to whet the appetite of jazz aficionados of all persuasions.
El Muki, according to the notes, is “a mythical Andean elf, traditionally believed to protect miners in the Peruvian highlands.” He is represented here by the first of Alegria’s charming original compositions, a metric juggernaut dominated by the sextet’s heavy-duty rhythm section. Saxophonist Laura Andrea Leguia, the group’s second in command, wrote four…
…After five expanded scores to James Bond films in the last 18 months, La-La Land’s aim is steady as ever with a sixth: Michael Kamen’s score to 1989’s Licence to Kill, the second and final film featuring Timothy Dalton as Ian Fleming’s legendary literary spy. Dalton’s aim was to portray Bond more like the original books, with less of the fantastical gadgets and occasionally campy humor of previous installments. And Licence to Kill remains one of the series’ grittiest entries, finding 007 resigning from MI6 and enacting a personal mission of revenge after a drug lord maims his longtime CIA friend and associate Felix Leiter. (The character, who suffered a similar fate in Fleming’s Live and Let Die novel, appeared in several of the films and played bydifferent…
After a break and a series of deeply unfortunate events, the California trio Hunx and His Punx have returned from the brink of oblivion with Walk Out On This World, their first album in 12 years. In their early days, Hunx and His Punx were music blog staples with Seth Bogart’s (aka Hunx) NSFW antics and lyrics that provided an out, proud and loud twist on the girl group sounds and garage rock sensibilities that permeated late-‘00s indie rock. When Bogart, Shannon Shaw and Erin Emslie last collaborated on an LP, they were still bratty, gritty and righteously profane in pre-Obergefell America. Over a decade later, they’ve mellowed out a little, polished their sound a lot and mounted a comeback as tragedy-touched survivors who still wear their influences, whether they be…
If the 1970s were when power pop was invented and made into one of the more exciting styles of music around, and even occasionally very popular, the ’80s were when the style permeated the music scene as it split into multiple tendrils of guitar-based pop. Following up on their excellent collection Looking for the Magic: American Power Pop in the ’70s, Grapefruit Records delivers another brilliant set of freshly scrubbed power pop tracks on I Wanna Be a Teen Again: American Power Pop, 1980-1989. On the three-disc set, one gets to listen as the classic power pop sound of the previous decade shoots off in different directions. Its chiming guitars and swirls of sound inform the paisley underground, a slicked-up version wends its way through the new wave…
Before he released this, his second full-length as Nourished by Time, Marcus Brown had already appeared on one of the most captivating albums of 2025. Temporary, the third album from XL Recordings chief Richard Russell’s Everything Is Recorded project, ended with Brown performing a raw acoustic version of the fraught “Hell of a Ride,” first heard on the Catching Chickens EP, his 2024 XL debut. It perfectly capped the grief-themed set while demonstrating the high regard in which Russell holds him. Like Brown’s previous output, The Passionate Ones is self-produced, and consists of artful outpourings that combine highly spirited post-disco R&B, surging new wave, and an assaultive type of dream pop. The R&B element emits strong echoes of…