Three years ago, saxophonist Jeff Lederer issued Schoenberg on the Beach, an audacious jazz song cycle based on music of the Second Viennese School and performed by Lederer and his partner, vocalist Mary LaRose, alongside jazz artists Hank Roberts, Patricia Brennan, Michael Formanek, and Matt Wilson. It would appear that blurring the lines between jazz and classical comes naturally to Lederer as his latest project There’s a Yearnin’ does something similar, if from the opposite direction. This time, pieces by jazz alto saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and Oliver Nelson are delivered in a chamber-like manner, with Lederer (on clarinet and alto saxophone) and LaRose now augmented by the Brooklyn-based Wildebeest Wind Quintet: flutist Michel Gentile,…
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1925 was a landmark year for US recording studios, marking the introduction of electronic microphones to replace the huge gramophone horns previously used to harvest the sound of singers and musicians. This brought about a dramatic leap in sound quality and established 1925 as an effective year zero for modern compilations.
The 32 tracks selected here by the author and musicologist Dick Spottswood draw on 1925 releases from Paramount, Columbia and Vocalion – then the industry’s three giants – but also from smaller and more adventurous labels, such as OKEH and Gennet.
Spottswood’s choices provide us with a rich and thoroughly enjoyable mixed bag of light-hearted trad jazz (including one of…
…The album was recorded in situ by Grammy Award winning producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ustad Saami, The Good Ones).
In Oman, descendants of the “other” African slave trade continue to live in the Ash-Sharqiyah region that hosted the main port.
Centuries on, Al-Mudema (“sailor songs”) musicians continue to sing mostly in Swahili and feature music mixing African rhythms and bagpipes. These descendants are referred to as the Zanzabari (or sometimes locally as Khal people). And they sing the songs of those who were brought forcibly by ship centuries before.
Rather than bagpipes (qurbah) being appropriated from Scotland or introduced by the British colonizers as is commonly claimed,…
It is true that the number of artists covering that currently popular ground between Americana and pop/rock. Yet the key there is how distinctive their music is – whether they separate themselves from the rest and whether they come up with enough individual elements to separate themselves from the rest. A hard task that gets even harder if you go the independent (self-releasing) way.
Singer songwriter Amelia Day can easily paste her photo along with everything that is described above – her music is right in the center of that now ever-popular sub-genre, and she is doing it all by herself with her latest 7-song EP, Ego Trip.
She knows best what the title relates to, but on the evidence of her songs here, there’s no ego trip involved on her part here – she can…
Lynn Blakey was not a name that gained a great deal of traction commercially but she was an influential figure in the indie rock and alt-country scene in her home state of North Carolina where she DJ’d on college radio in the early ’80s; this was before forming Oh Ok in Athens Georgia with Michel Stipe’s sister Lynda (driven by the inspiration of seeing REM at a small local gig). She collaborated with others such as guitarist Mitch Easter in The Royal Opposition and guitarist Michael Chumbris in Glory Fountain, but her most well-known group experience was with Tres Chicas, a band formed in the late ’90s in Raleigh, NC, with Blakey, Caitlin Cary (from Whiskeytown) and Tonya Lamm (from Hazeldine). The group sang together for a few years before releasing Sweetwater in…
Incredible live concert from Rainbow’s debut world tour and documenting one of the band’s first ever shows in Europe, at Düsseldorf Philipshalle on 27th September 1976.
When Rainbow finally landed in Europe for their debut live shows there, it was on the back of both the albums ‘Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow’ and ‘Rainbow Rising’ having charted, so the band were playing sold out venues, and what a band… with the line up consisting of Ritchie Blackmore, Ronnie James, Cozy Powell, Jimmy Bain and Tony Carey. As one of the cornerstones of British Rock, Rainbow, led by the never-predictable but ever-astonishing guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, became synonymous with some of the most well regarded and popular charting Rock songs of the seventies and eighties.
Take a look at Thames & Hudson’s magnificently illustrated coffee table tome Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco, and among the phantasmagorical, hallucinogenic artwork promoting nights at venues such as the Fillmore, Winterland, Carousel and Avalon ballrooms, three names trailing clouds of lysergic glory occur more than any others – the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Yet although the Dead and the Airplane have become the stuff of legend, the other corner of the original San Fran acid-rock trinity has been rather forgotten. This 79-track boxset chronicling Quicksilver’s protean iterations over seven albums in the space of five tumultuous years – along with a generous helping of bonus tracks…
Fire Man’s Caio Brentar has a warbly, emotion wracked tenor, a way with melody and an affinity for loud, distorted guitar. His first full-length (following three cassette EPs) explores the same nervy, amplified but vulnerable and ultra-anthemic/romantic neighborhood inhabited by Cloud Nothings and the Japandroids. He works here with just one other musician, drummer and producer Kiyoshi Chinzei, alternating between naked confessional simplicity and blaring garage rock, sometimes within the space of one song.
“Marry Me,” for instance, fluctuates from clanky, post-punk bass and drums to fey, indie pop verse to an exhilarating blast of guitar riffage. The verse extolling the loved one’s virtues is quiet, but the storm of angst and hormones she…
With time and experience always comes a sense of knowing, and CASTLEBEAT built his new album around this idea. After releasing his debut album, CASTLEBEAT has spent the last decade working on his record label, spirit goth. CASTLEBEAT II feels like a landmark project he’s been leading up to, revisiting sketches of songs from his debut, and giving them a second life.
CASTLEBEAT, a.k.a. Josh Hwang, returns to his roots on this new record, but expands it further. The indie dream pop artist stays firmly rooted within the genre, with guitar riffs in “This Takes Time” feeling unmistakably 2016, while tracks like ‘Table and Chair’ add elements of electronic drums and layered production that bend far beyond the constraints of genre.
10 years ago, Madrid native Juana Everett decided it was time for her to make a big change, and so, she bravely crossed the Atlantic to the US, and in 2021, she realised her dream of releasing the debut solo album she had made there, the aptly titled Move On. Now she’s back with her follow-up, Past Lives in California, this time charting the years she has spent in the state and the ups and the downs she experienced along the way.
The album unfolds much like the decade-long physical and emotional journey Everett found herself taking throughout the Golden State, trying to find the place where she felt she belonged. The opener, the smooth ‘Bring Me Back’, finds her longing for a place in time more than a location itself as she wistfully remembers…
Fans of experimental solo guitar records have been having a good year. The spring brought a new record by avant-jazz/power ambient guru David Torn and a career-spanning comp of madcap inventor Hans Reichel’s work. Now, Bill Orcutt’s Palilalia label gives us two LPs’ worth of gnarled fission and warped disputation from German provocateur Olaf Rupp. Rupp released a tribute to Reichel in 2020, NOBEACH, in which he captured his countryman’s pastoral eccentricities and bizarre tonal menagerie exactly. On collaborative albums like 2010’s The Specter of Genius with drummer Michael Wertmuller, Rupp plays with a whiplike velocity, echoing the thorny barrage of avant-guitar saint Derek Bailey. On Fuzzy Logic, he’s operating in a slower, more viscous mode,…
James Brandon Lewis is on a remarkable run.
Deface the Currency (2026), his second collaborative album with the Messthetics, placed him at the cutting edge of the fiery fusion of punk and jazz. While that record proved he could invoke the power and fury of ’60s Detroit band MC5’s rock-and-roll testimonial Are You Ready to TESTIFY! (2007), on Omni, he is invoking a different kind of testimonial, one grounded in his upbringing as the son of a minister. Lewis and his long-running quartet, pianist Aruán Ortiz, bassist Brad Jones, and drummer Chad Taylor expand on Lewis’ “Molecular Systematic Music” and construct a sonic temple where they deliver a twelve-tone gospel from the pulpit.
Lewis has carefully structured the album around…
Pascal Bideau’s second album as Akusmi is infused with feelings of wonder and delight, and dashed with fleeting touches of humour and charm. The record is at the same time energetic but pensive, exciting but foreboding, taking the listener through a narrative arc of marvel and adventure.
Opening track ‘A Waking Dream’ starts with ethereal and dream-like piano, harp and sax passages, reminiscent of a flowing river; aquatic and sparkly, with some slightly murky elements in the lower ends. Once the rhythmical percussion and wind instruments kick in, however, the listener is transported with a sense of forward movement, making it the perfect opener for what appears to be a riveting musical journey. This leads into subsequent track ‘Anima’, an invigorating…
Patrick Gräser, AKA Answer Code Request, was one of the defining producers of Berghain’s second generation. First emerging in the early 2010s, Gräser was producing industrial-strength techno influenced by the hardcore continuum, serving Berlin techno with a twist of UK rave and ’90s IDM. As a resident of the Berlin club, he was an heir apparent to mentor Marcel Dettmann — only instead of Dettmann’s penchant for EBM and new wave, it sounded like Gräser had spent formative years clubbing on Fridays during the Sub:stance heydays. The pair of records he released during that period — 2014’s Code and 2018’s Gens — remain high watermarks of the Ostgut Ton catalogue.
New LP Halo picks up where Gens left off.
The lines have been blurred everywhere in music, so why not in what goes by the name of field recordings? What once was solely the concept of actually going outside and recording sounds you hear and then (but not necessarily) combining them with music itself, has become something a bit different.
These days it includes recording on tour, in hotel rooms, Airbnbs, and small studios, often across multiple countries. It could be because of the spur-of-the-moment, when a song idea pops up, or getting a certain feeling from the location you find yourself in. Or, it could be all of those.
It seems that singer songwriter (another term that is gathering new meanings along the way) Melanie Radford had all of those things in…
Jolene Marie is not an artist comfortable in the spotlight. With a generally private and reserved persona, she openly admits to not liking people looking at her, one of the reasons that led to her not performing her music on stage until she was in her late twenties. However, the release of her five-track EP Honey in 2023 revealed a singer-songwriter of immense promise, creating a steady groundswell of interest amongst both critics and the americana music community. Now, having teamed up with producer Brock Geiger, Marie has released Sun Creek, her debut album written over four months of diligent songcraft.
The opening track ‘Two Hands Together’ quickly sets the musical landscape, minimalistic and intimate, with subtle splashes of…
It is almost 10 years that the trio of Adrian Blake Enscoe, Sydney Shepherd, and Regina Strayhorn, known to those that have already caught up with them as Bandits On the Run, have been operating, with a slew of independent releases.
Judging by the sound of those the New York trio should have already made quite a name for themselves, and maybe Rough Magic, will do that for them.
Not only is their take on the folk pop/rock combination one of the more inventive at the moment, but their concept of rotating lead vocals and rotating instruments is not a gimmick but serves the full purpose of their music and has both sense and purpose.
You can hear vast musical knowledge oozing…
Dead Pioneers’ Wagon Burner arrives just in time for the United States’ 250th birthday, and it is the gift the country deserves and needs right now: An indigenous voice of reason taking the actual history of the country to task and rallying those of us who aren’t licking boots to unite and fight back. The band’s spiritual peers include timeless groups like Minutemen, Suicidal Tendencies, Public Enemy, and Dead Kennedys, bands that functioned as the alternative CNN of their time.
As a punk rock record, it’s a blast, an anthemic, catchy collection of tracks that shows Dead Pioneers gelling. Throughout, Deal and guests weave spoken word pieces into their incendiary tour of the many shades of punk, and its 12 songs are barbed with humor and an invitation…
Emerging from the gentle coastal terrain of South Cornwall, England, The Heavenly Bodes’ debut LP, The Green Hills, is, at times, a reflection of its surroundings. The album’s opener, “De Gruene Heuvels” (the album’s title in Dutch), and its closer, “The Heavenly Bode,” both have a jangly late-’60s country-rock vibe reminiscent of The Byrds and Mike Nesmith’s solo output. “De Gruene Heuvels” bears a resemblance to The Monkees’ tune “Circle Sky” from the cult classic film Head, with its freaked-out fuzz guitar lines layered over jangly rhythm guitar. “The Heavenly Bode” uses a similar formula but adds shimmering guitar work and fiery fuzz leads to propel it along. Both songs possess a down-home style filtered through a kaleidoscopic haze.
This lengthy album covers multiple phases of Feldman’s musical thinking from 1950 to 1972. Meaningfully, he wrote many of these compositions to play with friends such as John Cage and David Tudor. These challenging pieces, in which Feldman wanted to wash away compositional rhetoric and allow sounds to be heard on their own terms, function as aural palate cleansers. To realize Feldman’s scores, with their indeterminate elements, the pianists must play an active role in the compositional process and coordinate very closely. These musicians do so seamlessly and intuitively, never losing the required concentration, while the recording engineers do incredible work in miking and blending up to five pianos at once. The earliest pieces, such as…