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It’s been four years since Taylor Rae put out her debut album Mad Twenties which got her a lot of attention and some commercial success. Since then, she has been touring extensively – over 200 shows a year – supporting a list of well-known names including Sierra Hull, The Head and The Heart and John Craigie.
For The Void she took some time off the road and went into the Pasadena studio of producer Eric Krasno (Soulive) to record its ten tracks. Krasno contributed guitar, bass and synthesisers while other musicians included Curtis Kelly (drums, percussion) and Steve Watkins (piano, organ).
“The main theme is introspection,” Rae says of the album. “The past four years have been such a trying time with constant change. Sometimes it…

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From 2007 until 2024, a mystery worthy of Columbo confounded online music lovers on Reddit, Discord, and elsewhere.
It inspired organized, long-term team investigations; multiple YouTube video series; an endless array of fruitless searches; and a whole lot of head-scratching. The thing that all of those intrepid investigators were looking for was a song by the German group Fex — they just didn’t know it. Neither did the members of Fex, who had disbanded in 1985 without ever officially releasing the track that would eventually go viral as “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet.”
At the dawn of the ‘80s, Germany’s NDW (Neue Deutsche Welle) movement was blossoming, with bands like Pyrolator, Die Krupps,…

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ProtoU returns with her seventh album of experimental ambient music, characteristically combining spaciousness with layers of sound.
The overall feel is expansive, with thick, sweeping chords undergirded by manipulated white noise, rumblings, field recordings, and even what sounds like stringed instruments.
Science-fiction themed, one can easily visualize spaceships steadily traversing a panoramic backdrop of stars.
Add to that unintelligible radio transmissions, soft sequenced rhythms, and shimmering drones. While pastoral at times, the mood is also ominous, as the machinery of the cosmos is indifferent to the fragility of its inhabitants.
A frequent collaborator, ProtoU is assisted by…

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As a co-founder of the electronic label Faktura, Artem Dultsev is a champion of left-field sounds from Russia’s Ural region. The austere press photos for his project metra.vestlud typically center on hooded figures, thickets of hardware, and gritty spaces. But his music is surprisingly bloopy, as if melded from digital raindrops falling on Jell-O. Dulstev’s new full-length, Ashes That Made the Shape of My Dreams, is meandering and humid, and arrives via bohemian California institution Not Not Fun, where it lands seamlessly alongside twinkly experimental releases from Shine Grooves, Yayoba, and Frunk29. More than anything else in the NNF catalog, Ashes feels like a spiritual companion to x.y.r.’s 2023 record Aquarealm: Both albums are wordless, somewhat…

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Boris LIVE NOISE ALIVE -Live at Daikanyama Unit- Celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Studio Album NOISE with a new Live Album Release. The live recording of the final show from the 2014 Live Noise Alive tour is being released as a limited 2LP with exclusive vinyl colors (Worldwide & Japan web store only).
The studio album “NOISE” was released in 2014. Starting with “PINK” in 2005, which was Boris’ breakthrough overseas, followed by “SMILE” in 2006, these two albums became the starting point for a full-fledged touring band with over 100 shows a year. After many experimental productions, the band released three albums in 2011: “Heavy Rocks”, “Attention Please” and “New Album”. After overcoming various situations…

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When it comes to famous names of famous bands, one always wonders: Did the band’s name always sound cool, or did it just sound cool once they hit the big time? The Corb Lund Band doesn’t really have the catchy ring of a Lynyrd Skynyrd or Aerosmith, but it’s easy to get the feeling after listening to the first couple of cuts that it soon will. The band’s modus operandi is fairly simple: three- to four-minute songs, tight country-rock arrangements, and laid-back lyrics sung by a laid-back vocalist. The fairly short song lengths on bouncy pieces like “No Roads Here” and “Apocalyptic Modified Blues” guarantee that the listener will still be paying attention when the song ends, while the taut arrangements of boogie bonanzas like “Expectation and…

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Bruce and the E Street Band perform a 29-song set in Prague.
Highlights: Tour premiere of “Summertime Blues” (last performed in 2016; written by Eddie Cochran and Jerry Capehart, and famously recorded by Cochran).
“Human Touch” returns to the set; “My Love Will Not Let You Down” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” rotate 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.
“The River” is dedicated to Ted Brych, a fan from Toms River, New Jersey, who passed away in February.

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The bands that Heavy Psych Sounds have been pushing of late tend toward the heavy side of the spectrum, including Sabbath-worshippers like Margarita Witch Cult and Orchid, as well as dark, doomy stuff like Witchcraft. In that sense, Atom Juice is something of a left-field turn.
To be sure, it still fits under the banner of heavy. When Bartek Dobry and Karol Melak let the guitars really launch off, they explode in a post-Hendrixian way that roars like the most intense moments of early Billy Corgan. Importantly, though, they aren’t stuck in this mode for the entire album. Atom Juice are a group positively brimming with ideas. They don’t want to just be a basic heavy psych rock band. They want to be a spacey prog rock band, or a progressive space rock band…

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More than 60 years ago, Victoria Spivey heard Maria Muldaur (nee D’Amato) perform as part of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and knew the young singer was extraordinary. Born in 1906, Spivey was a well-known blues singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur who had worked with the best acts of her day, including Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Clarence Williams.
Spivey was celebrated in the 1920s and ’30s for her bawdy compositions and indelicate material. Or as the Allmusic Guide puts it in their biography of the singer, she was “an energetic, talented blues singer, drawn to themes of drugs, violence, and sexual deviance”. In the early ’60s, Spivey took Muldaur under her wing (along with Bob Dylan, whose first recordings were on Spivey’s label).

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How interesting that one of the songs, “Dusk, WSQ,” on double bassist Ted Olsen‘s Violette twice references Joni Mitchell, though to be precise the style and sensibility exemplified by his music has more in common with “Paprika Plains” (Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, 1977) than “Both Sides Now” (Clouds, 1969). The kind of daring and adventurousness witnessed during that period in Joni’s career is reflected in Olsen’s own propensity for genre-blurring and risk-taking. In being issued on Shifting Paradigm, Violette might invite branding as a jazz release, but its material has as strong a connection to chamber-classical art song as anything swing- and improv-related. How telling too that among the musicians contributing to the recording are Minnesota Orchestra…

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Several fairly well-known figures came together in making this Alpha release; there are soprano Barbara Hannigan, the piano duo of Katia & Marielle Labèque, and the composers Bryce Dessner (of the rock band The National, but these days more concerned with avant-garde composition) and David Chalmin. All of them were pushed, in a good way, into new kinds of collaboration by Electric Fields, which combines music or, in some cases, text by Hildegard of Bingen, Barbara Strozzi, and Francesca Caccini and combines them with electronic sound. Looked at one way, the music picks up often shadowy female voices from the past and propels them into a present marked by unsettling electronics, but there’s more. One might point to the Labèque sisters, who are…

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For Berlin-based, Syrian musician Khaled Kurbeh, the vast tapestry of everyday life, with all of its chaos, routines, bureaucracy, and (mis)fortune, can be experienced through the application of predictable and unpredictable rhythms.
Rhythms that often emerge from some of the least likely places.
On Kurbeh’s first album in seven years, Likulli Fadāin Eqāéh [To Each Space its Own Rhythm], stagnation is not an issue. A matter reinforced by the track titles, with their allusions to journeys and explorations, and by the perpetually moving sounds throughout. They never stand still, even when reduced to quietly looming ambience. The subdued notes of ‘Sunūnū al-Manara [Swallow of the Lighthouse]’, for example, slide by…

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When For Against singer/songwriter/bassist/guitarist Jeffrey Runnings died of an advanced form of cancer last year, he didn’t just leave behind an impossibly sterling catalog of such consistency it should make bigger, lesser bands jealous. He also contributed to his legacy one last time, completing his second solo album before he passed. Home recorded on an eight-track cassette machine, the (mostly) instrumental Piqued rolls out like a catalog of the Nebraskan’s influences: the Chameleons, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Gary Numan, Talk Talk, the Smiths, the Sound. That’s not to say Runnings simply displays his record collection in song, however – outside of his skill at writing beautifully melodic tunes and acerbically romantic lyrics, his most singular ability is in filtering…

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1. The Heartbreakers – Chinese Rocks
2. Mudhoney – Revolution
3. The Gamblers – LSD-25
4. Otis Redding – Day Tripper
5. Charlie Parker – Moose the Mooche
6. The Orb – Little Fluffy Clouds…
7. Barrington Levy – Sensimelea
8. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Catching Smoke
9. The Fall – Mr. Pharmacist
10. Lil Green – Knockin’ Myself Out
11. John Prine – Sam Stone
12. Bert Jansch – Needle of Death
13. The Purple Gang – Granny Takes a Trip
14. The 13th Floor Elevators – Roller Coaster
15. Love – Signed D.C.

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…The record has been lovingly remastered and cut from the original tapes by John Baldwin at Infrasonic Sound in Nashville, TN.
After recording the material that would later comprise the bulk of Invisible Hits, The Soft Boys recorded their masterpiece, the shimmering neo-psychedelic Underwater Moonlight.
Essentially, the band didn’t change their style for the record — they merely perfected it. The Soft Boys don’t hide their influences — whether its the ringing guitars of the Beatles and Byrds or the surreal humor of John Lennon and Syd Barrett — but they assimilate them, resulting in a fresh, edgy take on ’60s guitar pop. Robyn Hitchcock‘s subject matter tends to be more explicitly weird and absurdist than his influences, as titles…

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Bruce and the E Street Band perform a 27-song set on night one in San Sebastian.
Highlights: “Darkness on the Edge of Town” 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.
Bruce Springsteen – Lead vocal, electric/acoustic guitars, harmonica; Roy Bittan – piano, keyboards; Nils Lofgren – electric/acoustic guitars, backing vocal; Garry Tallent – bass, backing vocal; Stevie Van Zandt – electric/ acoustic guitars, mandolin, backing vocal; Max Weinberg – drums; Jake Clemons – tenor saxophone, percussion; Charlie Giordano – organ, keyboards, accordion; Soozie Tyrell – violin, acoustic guitar, percussion

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In 1988, Bruce Springsteen performed in what was then East Berlin. Invited by the FDJ, the East German youth organisation, he took to the stage at the Weißensee cycling track in front of an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people — far more than the 160,000 tickets originally issued. It was billed as a concert in solidarity with Nicaragua, but Bruce was careful to remain apolitical. Speaking in German, he told the crowd: “I’m not here to represent or support any government. I’ve come to play rock and roll in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.”
Roll forward to 2025, and Bruce is back in Berlin — but this time, it’s political. Since the opening nights of this European leg in Manchester, Springsteen has been vocal about his…

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Rebecca Schiffman is an indie-pop songwriter who’s been on the scene for a couple decades already, making noise in New York in the early 2000s. But she gets deep into grown-up problems with her fantastic fourth album Before the Future. It’s a sly, candid sleeper of an album, where Schiffman sets out her life like a box of snapshots, while narrating the details in her dry, matter-of-fact deadpan voice.
A native Manhattan hipster kid relocated to L.A., she sings anxious vignettes about everyday life, whether it’s grief, romance, or parenting. But it all adds up to a charmer about careening through adulthood with a head full of memories that give you no peace — so your only option is to translate them into songs, to give them some…

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