Within Haruomi Hosono’s decades-spanning career, 2006’s “Walking Vibration” isn’t particularly notable. The celebrated Japanese musician made this flute-accented instrumental for a TV show aired that same year about people seeking clarity in life via a famous pilgrimage around the country’s Shikoku region. It’s a minor entry in a sprawling songbook that changed the course of his home country’s music scene and influenced creators around the world, preserved only on a 2008 “archive” collection.
Yet on his treasure box of an album Yours Sincerely, the 79-year-old Hosono revisits what was once just background music for a four-episode drama. He keeps the traditional percussive touches of the original intact but adds…
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“We shall ask you to forget our former pranks and playfulness. We ask you, in the name of dignity and art, to put yourselves in a receptive frame of mind.” That sampled dialogue appears at the midpoint of Zeds Dead’s recently released third album, Return to the Return (of the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness), but it stands out as its core message. For 15 years, the Toronto-bred electronic music duo has been branded a bass act, known for lush production and explosive headbanger drops, but it’s never been truly fair to categorize Zeds Dead by any one genre.
Within the somewhat unusual confluence of synthesizers and a small orchestral ensemble, Canadian artist 
Thirty-plus years later, the last two albums by the original Pixies lineup, Bossanova and Trompe le Monde, occupy a strange place in the band’s canon, more highly regarded than their later releases but rarely seen as the equal of their earlier work. These new remasters are available on CD and in a limited-edition vinyl with a bonus 7” of previously unreleased songs and offer an ideal opportunity to reevaluate the albums on their own merits; short version, they stand up pretty well.
…Sourced from the original analog tapes and mastered by engineer Rob LoVerde.
The boldly colored cover of Fantastic Thoughts features a sinewy band of horses heroically galloping out of the clouds above and into the foreground. Believe it or not, even that image might still be a little understated for the mood of the music.
Strut presents 
01. Joy Division – Transmission (Live The Factory Manchester 13th July 1979)
A record inspired by the desolate brutalism of their native Manchester, art pop/new wave trio, 
Heptaméron is an unusually assured debut, one that embraces the vocabulary of progressive rock while refusing to remain within its boundaries. Built around a fantasy narrative structured by the symbolic recurrence of the number seven, the album unfolds like a journey across an imagined landscape of dungeons, mansions, abysses and forgotten kingdoms, each track functioning as a distinct location within a larger world. Rather than simply borrowing fantasy imagery, 
In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2021 film Memoria, Tilda Swinton’s protagonist awakens in the middle of the night to a loud, startling sound with no clear source. The sound seems to follow her around in the days after, repeating at random intervals, but only she can hear it — a mystery that sends her on a journey deep into the Colombian jungle for answers. What she hears, a single note, is jarring and strangely physical, a sort of sonorous thud. It’s also a little musical, like industrial equipment accidentally clanking out a chord, shaking everything around it at a resonant frequency that’s more intriguing than terrifying. Similarly disruptive bass notes are all over 
The record starts with a kick drum, before a looped bass enters, slowly lulling the listener into serenity before BANG! Guitars explode all across the microphone, electrical debris falling beneath the weight of towering riffs. Opening number “Loungeside” exposes a rock band as they mean to go on: without mercy, without manners, without restraint. Some of the guitar arpeggios resurrect the spirits of shoegazers Ride for a hurrah stuffed with reverb-oriented gusto.
More than 25 years after the start of collaboration with 
Since 2012, Sam Sodomsky has quietly released lyrically elegant, musically sophisticated albums under the moniker 
The hermetic boxes that tend to get erected around traditional music can become suffocating for the people inside, and at least since Bob Dylan’s “Judas!” moment, that friction has yielded a lot of gold. 