Kristina Stykos is a songwriter, musician, recording engineer and producer who has been a torchbearer for the music of the Green Mountain State since the ’80s. Her Pepperbox Studio is tucked away off-grid and off the beaten track at the base of Mount Abraham in Lincoln, Vermont. Stykos has released six albums under her own name, along with a collaboration with the recently deceased Montanan pianist and composer Philip Aaberg. Her Thunder Ridge Records roster, whilst not full of household names, has showcased the skills of many talented Vermonters. Stykos is also one half of The Cousins Project, the other being Steve Mayone. Up until twenty years ago, they were unaware of each other’s existence. All that changed when Stykos attended a Bow Thayer and…
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This Is My Blood finds Jozef van Wissem deepening his long project of dragging the lute out of its historical frame and into the present, this time with a gaze fixed on deserted, contemporary landscapes. The album is literally framed by two “cinematic hypnotist slide lute” pieces, improvised for Maquina, a psychedelic road‑movie shot in the Colorado desert by filmmaker Joaquim Pujol.
Rather than moving through tidy song forms, these bookending tracks feel like mirages: scorched, hallucinatory reveries that “seem to shimmer in the heat of abandoned horizons rather than unfold in time,” as the press material puts it. Long, bent notes, slowly evolving figures and smeared overtones turn the slide‑treated lute into a kind of broken lap‑steel choir; the music…
Back in the mid-’60s, when Vanguard Records were all the rage on the folk scene, it was practically an honour to get a chance to record a solo folk/singer-songwriter album where it was just the artist, her/his voice, songs and a single instrument or two.
These days such albums have become a sort of rare occasion, with the artist being too courageous or truly able with something to say to attempt something like that. Essentially, you would really have to be a good musical storyteller to pull it off and come up with a consistent, substantial album of pure solo music.
After 10 years of complete silence, folk artist Shannon Jae Ridout is attempting something like that with her new album Two Busted…
Normally found fronting his trio, leading Spanish pianist Daniel Garcia moves to a solo format for The Hero’s Journey. Composed during a period of family illness and bereavement, it is perhaps surprising that the album is not dark in any way.
Instead Garcia maintains focus on the concept of the hero, as he explains: “For a long time I have been attracted by the hero figure — I’m not thinking at all about some invincible movie superhero, but rather the idea of a person constantly facing new challenges who needs to overcome them.”
The Hero’s Journey consists of 13 original compositions conceived as a single continuous experience, guiding the listener through a shifting landscape of moods and atmospheres.
Little North have built a distinct voice with their blend of Nordic lyricism, cinematic depth, and vibrant energy. Crossing Currents marks a pivotal chapter in their journey. In November 2023, the trio traveled to New York, bringing new compositions and their Nordic sound, and they recorded the album with two outstanding voices of today’s jazz scene: vibraphonist Joel Ross and saxophonist Hannes Bennich.
The result is a compelling meeting of musical worlds, where Copenhagen, Malmö and New York merge into one fluid, expressive language. Expanding on the trio’s signature interplay and collective storytelling, the album unfolds with openness, energy and a strong sense of transatlantic dialogue.
Most labels find their artists in the most banal ways — at showcase festivals, on TikTok, through friends, etc. Juergen Vonbank travelled halfway around the world to discover an artist who lived on yet another side of the world: During a tour stop in Ecuador, the DJ and Night Defined owner was introduced to the music of Mongolian artist Ts Bayandalai, and immediately fell in love. It took a while to overcome geographic borders and language barriers, but now Wind of Oirat underscores that all the effort was worth it: Following up on 2020’s Kimel EP, the artist’s first album is a fully-formed statement of intent.
Bayandalai takes some cues from Mongolian folklore, but as track titles such as ‘404 Not Found’ and ‘Bedwetting’ prove, he doesn’t…
There had been rumors for years that James Grigsby was in possession of a number of live recordings from the legendary LA-based U Totem. A supergroup of sorts that resulted from the merging of two other bands – 5uus and Motor Totemist Guild, led respectively by Dave Kerman and Grigsby – U Totem was ultimately in existence for maybe six years. During that period of time they recorded two rather stunning albums, including a self-titled debut that inspired an academic publication. Throughout its course, the band played music festivals, smaller venues, and dive bars, often without PR or fanfare.
…Grigsby finally released one set of these recordings, aptly titled Set. The album combines two U Totem performances, a six-track…
The accordion emerges as a central instrument across three substantial concertante works exploring contemporary classical expression within Baltic music tradition. The program centers on Erkki-Sven Tüür’s 2007 Prophecy, a single-movement concerto examining the figure of the Seer, one who perceives future events yet faces societal rejection for this gift. The work unfolds across a substantial duration, maintaining musical momentum despite the absence of traditional movement divisions. Tüür’s opening establishes an orchestral foundation through soft, sustained sonority, gradually building in volume. The accordion enters almost imperceptibly embedded within orchestral texture, emerging gradually from accompaniment toward solo…
Dewa Alit, master of radical Balinese gamelan, returns to Black Truffle with Baur Bentur. Genetic (2020) introduced international listeners to the magical sound-world of Alit’s Gamelan Salukat, who perform on instruments tuned to a unique scale derived from modified versions of two traditional Balinese scales. The two pieces heard on Chasing the Phantom (2022) further demonstrated his radical fusion of tradition and experimentation, with passages where unorthodox techniques make the acoustic ensemble resemble glitching electronics. Baur Bentur now highlights another aspect of Alit’s work, presenting pieces composed in 2024 and 2025 where Gamelan Salukat performs alongside virtuoso pianist Sri Hanuraga. Alit’s music is grounded in deep…
Much is made in current dance culture about electronic music as an outlet for queer joy. Earlier this year, for example, when Charli XCX declared that “the dancefloor is dead” in her latest news-cycle-consuming PR stunt, it provoked worldwide outcry from DJs and producers who argued that denying dance music’s modern ubiquity robs Black and queer communities of the ecstatic temples that they built, across decades, as an antidote to adversity. And while that retort isn’t inaccurate, it can be a little unintentionally reductivist. What about queer pain, queer sorrow, queer fear, queer anxiety? These emotions are just as central to the Black queer experience as joy, and some of the most interesting electronic music — Lotic’s eerie experimental R&B noise,…
After four years, North London’s For Breakfast return with Longer Than Spring, an LP trading the murky, sprawling friction of the seven-piece band’s roots for a leaner, solo-led architecture. It’s a sophisticated if occasionally sanitised evolution; while the band’s signature virtuosity remains, it is now tethered to the singular narrative of vocalist and keys player Maya Harrison.
This shift is catalysed by Harrison’s decade-long recovery from illness, framing the record’s elastic pacing as a non-linear map of healing built around lyrics the band used as a centering force for their arrangements. Longer Than Spring also reckons with the external: the relentless broadcast of global suffering ubiquitous across digital feeds. This intersection of private trauma and…
Sister Gemini is one Remy Jean, supported on her debut album Screaming Crying Laughing Sighing by a quite select collaborative crew, with musicians and producers that have worked with the list of likes that reads as a sort of ‘who’s who’ list of currently hip artists, from Father John Misty to Phoebe Bridgers, to Blake Mills, among others. So why would such a hip list enlist their services for a relatively new artist’s debut? Well, Remy Jean has got that, as French would say je ne sais quoi that covers an intriguing ground as if Camera Obscure was covering Liz Phair and Throwing Muses at the same time.
It all comes down that Remy Jean is coming out with her debut album with a fully formed, personal sound that was shaped by her…
Tenor saxophonist and vocalist Greg Piccolo has been leading his own band, Heavy Juice, since 1994, yet longtime blues lovers likely mostly associate him with the frontman of Roomful of Blues, a role he held for 25 years. This new effort, Who Knows What the Future Holds, may surprise those same people. This is a singer-songwriter record, consisting of unpublished tunes that Piccolo has written over the years.
Piccolo teamed with producer and engineer Terry Manning, whose resume extends from Stax and Ardent studios in Memphis to mixing Led Zeppelin III to The Fabulous Thunderbirds, ZZ Top, and Shania Twain. Piccolo and Heavy Juice traveled to the famed Sonic Ranch, outside of El Paso, TX, to record. Unfortunately, Manning…
Claudia Quintet’s founder, John Hollenbeck, a fierce, focused, and highly innovative drummer who often seems a step ahead of jazz’s vanguard, returns with his second album from the ensemble George — named after George Floyd — Looking for Consonance. The electro-acoustic group features synth players and vocalists Sarah Rossy and Chiquita Magic, alongside the exceptional saxophonist and flutist Anna Webber.
Difficult to categorize, the music traverses a postmodern landscape shaped by elements of synth-pop, electronica, idiosyncratic rhythmic designs, and open improvisation. “Bounce” is a striking ride that lands somewhere between eerie prog-metal and hallucinatory rave textures. Synchronized vocal lines,…
Pianist Jason Moran, sound sculpture BlankFor.Ms, and drummer Marcus Gilmore reunite for their second album of boundary pushing live and electronically processed music with 2026’s Shards. The follow-up to 2023’s Refract, the album once again finds the trio crafting textural soundscapes that straddle the line between modal post-bop and spacey experimental electronic music. While blending jazz improvisation with electronic production is by no means a novel idea, with a tradition going at least as far back as Miles Davis’ 1969 album In a Silent Way, Moran and company bring a live, in-the-moment approach to their work that stands out. Rather than reworking Moran and Gilmore’s playing in post-production, Tyler Gilmore (aka BlankFor.Ms) instead…
Himba Hymn: Ghosts of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast plunges listeners in the midst of tribal traditions in northern Namibia’s mostly arid Skeleton Coast, on the border with Angola. The only instruments heard are unnamed strings (a sort of lyre?) and the Cattle Gun, a mud-coated Onyx horn blown to produce a raspy rattle, while the voices produce a remarkable range, from frankly unimaginable, growled invocations, to chants and one piece of soul-slapping bloozy holler that unmistakably highlights historic Black Atlantic links. For us pasty UK office dwellers it’s astonishing, life-affirming stuff: plunging into timeless traditions on ‘Lion Attack, Cattle Massacre’ with a range of extended vocal tekkerz that give Phil Minton a run for his pennies, thru an air-horn strewn, multi-tracked,…
Jóhann Jóhannsson: Piano Works brings together pianist Alice Sara Ott and the repertoire of the Icelandic composer, who passed away in 2018, in a series of solo piano transcriptions released by Deutsche Grammophon. The project is based on arrangements published by Faber Music, drawing from works originally written for film scores (The Theory of Everything, Copenhagen Dreams, Arrival, and Personal Effects) as well as albums such as Englabörn and Orphée. The album follows two preparatory EPs released in 2025, ahead of the full release in 2026. The choice of solo piano significantly reshapes the perception of this music. While Jóhannsson was known for layering orchestral and electronic textures, these versions refocus the writing on melodic lines, harmonic…
…unreleased music from the ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ sessions, plus revelatory live versions of ‘And a Bang On the Ear’ and Dylan’s ‘New Morning’.
There are rare, magical times in a musician’s life when the songs will not stop coming. Few, though, have experienced streaks quite so abundant as the one enjoyed by Mike Scott and The Waterboys in the second half of the 1980s. “We used to play live in the studio, vocals included, and could lay down as many as eight or 10 songs in a day,” Scott tells MOJO. “The stack of tracks built up until there were over a hundred, though at the time I wasn’t counting.”
The climax of it all came with 1988’s Fisherman’s Blues, a classic album of buccaneering folk rock – but one which, at 13 tracks,…
There’s something delightfully uncomplicated about the music of Unwed Sailor.
Founding member and bassist Johnathon Ford (Pedro the Lion, Roadside Monument) infuses the instrumental tracks with his distinct, melodic bass lines while drummer Matt Putman and guitarist David Swatzell fill in the blanks with a sound that embraces the basic framework of so many different styles: new wave, post-rock, krautrock, you name it. Floating above it all is a sense of nostalgia that’s bittersweet and somehow never condescending or derivative.
Their latest album, High Remembrance, follows last year’s Cruel Entertainment and continues a prolific streak that began in 2019 after a decade-long hiatus. This album, their 11th,…
The second act of one of Europe’s most fearless experimental rocks bands of the 70s and early 80s continues, now running much longer than Act One. OM was the band who set out in 1972 to bypass all the dauntless bands dabbling in jazz-rock fusion by bringing rock straight into the free improvisation realm. Now in their seventies, the members of OM seem just as determined as ever to keep making this challenging but ultimately rewarding music.
Südpol (Intakt Records) marks the fourth new album by the group since reconvening in 2000 after an eighteen-year hiatus and releasing fresh recordings starting in 2010. Recorded live at a December 2024 concert in Südpol, Switzerland, this is also their first album with a deviation from their original lineup of Urs Leimgruber…