Preparing for the final song of his Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour on Friday (May 22) night in Cleveland, Bruce Springsteen reminded the Rocket Arena crowd that “the E Street Band was built for hard times.”
Those times have inarguably become harder during the seven-and-a-half weeks since the 20-date trek began in Minneapolis, and it was evident on Friday that it’s only made the group, 20 strong on this outing, harder and Springsteen even more focused and resolute in his mission.
Cleveland marked the 17th date of the tour — and the start of its final week — which is likely to culminate in an even more pointed and poignant reckoning on May 27 at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. The tour wraps May 30 in…
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All of modern jazz and improvised music owes a debt to Jimmy Giuffre (1921-2008). A quiet revolutionary, Giuffre helped reshape the language of jazz in ways that many musicians now take for granted. His solo recordings anticipated those of Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell, while his early experiments without a rhythm section, common practice today, were once considered radical. Even his approach to free jazz set him apart. Where contemporaries like John Coltrane and Albert Ayler explored the music’s most explosive possibilities, Giuffre pursued a more introspective path, crafting a form of free jazz that was cerebral, restrained, and deeply attentive to space. For many listeners, Free Fall (1963), recorded with pianist Paul Bley and…
Techno, noise, drone — as modern underground electronic music’s power trio, these three bodies thrive in spaces and on labels with the creative ambition to tease out their commonalities, while picking and pulling at the frayed edges of their discrepancies. There is perhaps one absolute that ties them together: darkness, the evocation of space and light that can take many forms — a smoke-filled car; the soupy, impenetrable air of the club; a bedroom; an underpass. On 
…While Madonna and Soft Cell nostalgize Danceteria as a lost Eden — a place where you could bump shoulders with David Byrne, Debi Mazar, and Jean-Michel Basquiat on any given night — 
Aussie hard rock combo 
The lineup of the oddly titled SPLAT! may only be 3/5 of the Deep Purple that gave us the iconic riffy ’70s “Smoke on the Water” hits. But considering those days are over five decades in the past, you might not know it.
…Remastered from the original tapes, this album includes four outtakes rescued from damaged session tapes.
Like Tony Allen’s drumming in Fela Kuti’s band, or Clyde Stubblefield’s beats for James Brown, there’s something essentially timeless about krautrock rhythms. Can’s Jaki Leibezeit and Neu!’s Klaus Dinger created a rhythmic language that is “motorik” in every sense – a way of delineating forward-momentum, a propulsive groove that links rock music’s physicality with the repetition of electronica. Perhaps this is why a genre of music that emerged in a West German counterculture of the early ’70s continues to represent futurism and progress, even for bands who have absolutely no contact with Germany – from Tokyo’s Minami Deutsch to Chicago’s Lifeguard; from Sao Paulo’s Bike to Bristol’s Beak; from London’s Snapped Ankles to Venice’s Squadra Omega.
Lost Tape – 1980 sounds like the half-remembered fever dream of a long-ago journey across some wild and distant country, riding in the back of a battered taxi through the desert, a tape distorting loudly on the car’s player, eating into the lower tiers of your dreams like a fungus. It’s jarring, lulling, painful, absorbing, unexpected and weird all in one go. Who was 
Pianist 
Upstate New York trio 
With No Resting Place, The Tallis Scholars devote an entire album to the music of Nico Muhly, bringing together six works written for the ensemble at the invitation of Peter Phillips. Often associated with contemporary minimalism, Muhly reveals in this program a far more intricate musical language, shaped as much by his engagement with liturgical traditions and ancient texts as by contemporary concerns surrounding memory, displacement, and cultural identity. The composer’s close affinity with early choral music is evident from Recordare, Domine, the first work he wrote for the ensemble. Without ever resorting to historical pastiche, Muhly appears instead to draw on certain contrapuntal techniques of the Renaissance masters, combining them with more unstable…
The jig is up. The act behind the most bewildering ambient techno of the past 15 years is not a shadowy syndicate or group of evil geniuses. It’s actually just Izaak Schlossman, who started the project back in Seattle as part of a crew called Aught. The proliferation of aliases, and the artist’s eventual move to San Francisco — where he started the synth-pop band Loveshadow — caused lingering confusion. No one could decide where 
The LP, released on Text, brings together an unusual solo project by Kieran Hebden that deliberately plays with the unpronounceable in the way it is presented. As the immediate follow-up release to 
By 1976, Uriah Heep was on shaky ground. Although they had scored a big success with Return to Fantasy, the group was suffering from personality conflicts (vocalist David Byron left after this album) and division over their musical direction. This tension is visibly apparent on 
Guttural screams, desperate moans and disaffected, dragged-out deliveries suffuse the Canadian quatuor’s second release. Reformulating some of their debut album’s mix of hardcore and folk (it’s aptly named Violence),