Tucked into the Caribbean Sea are the islands of Guadeloupe, Dominica, and Saint Lucia. Guadeloupe is an overseas department of France, while Dominica and Saint Lucia are independent nations. All three boast volcanic beaches, high mountain peaks, and lush tropical landscapes — coral reefs, palm trees, and sapphire blue waves make them instantly mesmerizing. The island’s cultural histories, shaped by the displacement of native Arawak peoples, centuries of colonial conflict between Spain, France, and Britain, and the enslavement of West Africans, continue to shape their musical output. Today, modern mixtapes (largely circulating on YouTube) pulse with intercontinental influences such as Angolan kuduro, Portugal’s batida, and trap, to name a few.
Tag Archive: Various Artists
…Tsapiky! is named for a musical style that’s been popular in recent decades in the Africa-facing southern corner of Madagascar, an island in the Indian Ocean. It’s the preferred soundtrack for extended celebrations that people there throw around transitional events.
If you’re getting married or buried, it’s common to have a band hoist some loudspeakers onto the roof of your truck and get the outdoor party rolling. Heard for the first time, it sounds a bit like Congolese soukous being played through a megaphone. It has that style’s open-ended dance grooves and sprightly melodies, but it’s decidedly lower budget. A typical tsapiky band will have a drum kit, a bassist laying down bulbous, intermittent pulses and an electric…
Omnivore Recordings and The International Pop Overthrow Music Festival are proud to present International Pop Overthrow: Vol. 26, a three-disc compilation featuring 66 tracks by artists from all over the world who have played the International Pop Overthrow (IPO) festival, along with some who haven’t — at least, not yet! The IPO compilations go back as far as the festival, to 1998 when Vol. 1 was a single disc. Since then, the collection expanded to two discs the following year, and then three discs in 2002 for Vol. 5, and it has remained a three-a set since. International Pop Overthrow: Vol. 26 showcases artists from across the globe, doing just about every sub-genre of pop music, including power pop, pop/rock, folk/pop, psychedelic pop, garage, indie-rock, modern…
The sticker on the front cover says “The heaviest proto-metal compilation ever released.” And considering the label behind Yeah Man, It’s Bloody Heavy is Rise Above, founded by former Napalm Death and Cathedral frontman Lee Dorrian, this is not idle hubris.
Yeah Man, It’s Bloody Heavy collects 10 tracks which were not originally released. The first band heard are Birmingham’s Heavyboots. They are followed by Band Of Mental Breakdown (also known as B.O.M.B.), Macbeth Periscope, Agatha’s Moment, Jessica’s Theme, Greenfly, Clemen Pull, Living Dead, Crimson Earth and Zacariah.
Heavyboots’ “Who Knows, Who Cares,” which kicks-off Yeah Man…, is primitively recorded but packs so much punch it transcends any…
The blues have been around nearly as long as America has had music to call its own, but it was when the music went electric in the wake of World War II that it began to attract a real audience outside of the Black community, albeit through a circuitous route. By the ’50s, every major American city had clubs where blues artists played for eager audiences, and small record companies made their music available to take home. It was the twin phenomena of rock & roll (initially a new name for blues and R&B tunes good for dancing that were sold to teenagers by radio hosts like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips) and the obsessive British blues fans who collected the records and formed bands to replicate their sounds that gradually took the blues to a younger pop audience.
Across the world, cassette tapes have often carried far more than music, serving as tools of defiance, memory, and belonging. In Somalia and Somaliland, songs recorded on battered tapes crossed seas and borders, keeping scattered communities connected through poetry and melody. In Palestine, revolutionary anthems slipped through checkpoints and broadcast the sound of resistance where radio could not reach. In Afghanistan, banned voices lived on in bootleg cassettes passed hand to hand, their melodies vehemently resisting the silence imposed upon them.
In Iran, too, the cassette has been used as both a weapon and a refuge: First used by Khomeini to spread his revolutionary sermons, it was reclaimed by Iranian pop artists fighting to…
When Eraserhead premiered in 1977, it didn’t just mark the beginning of David Lynch’s singular career — it rewired the language of underground cinema. A nightmarish journey through industrial decay, existential dread, and fractured identity, the film remains one of the most haunting works ever committed to celluloid. Shot in stark black and white, Eraserhead unfolds like a fever dream — where sound, space, and emotion bleed into one another in an uncanny, hypnotic dance. But what truly sets Eraserhead apart, even beyond its disquieting visuals, is its sound. David Lynch, working closely with sound designer and technician Alan Splet, constructed an aural landscape as vital and disturbing as any of the film’s images. The soundtrack is not built…
Twenty-five years is a geologic age in terms of pop culture. For electronic music, it’s an eon, with whole genres, subgenres and movements living and dying faster than mayflies. For an electronic label to simply exist for a quarter century is a major accomplishment, worthy of accolades and great celebration. For an electronic label to be releasing some of their best, most exciting so far along is nothing short of miraculous.
25 Years Cocoon Recordings deserves a medal and a victory lap for that reason alone, as its 15 tracks of driving, relentless, hooky techno feels entirely of-the-moment while simultaneously serving as a weathervane, offering a hint of where electronic music may be heading in the next decade.
Even though it’s ostensibly a retrospective,…
It takes a lot of time, money, and dedication, to restore anything of historical importance. And the Plaza Theatre in Palm Springs, California was just the type of venue that required these three key ingredients. Opened to the public for the first time in 1936, this classic Art Deco building was the site of many grand events over the past 100 years.
And so it was on November 11, 2022, spearheaded by Brian Ray (Sir Paul McCartney’s guitar gunslinger for the past 20+ years), a gala fundraiser was held to restore one of Palm Springs’ most treasured landmarks, the historic Plaza Theatre.
Ray and his co-musical director Spike Edney (Queen, Clapton, Elton, Aretha) put together an all-star band to back the four headliners for the evening’s show. And what headliners…
Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California 1980-1992 assembles little-known sounds from California’s metaphysical underground. Each recording is stylistically different — dream pop, guitar soli, fourth world, avant-electronic — but they are held together by a regional ethos of the “visionary.” This is music that sees through the mind’s eye and conjures new worlds.
Some people say that California is where “the nuts stop rolling” — where those too eccentric to fit in elsewhere often find themselves. What was meant pejoratively is easily reclaimed as a celebration of the free-thinking and the freely-freaking. Until the turn of the millennium, all manner of seekers rolled westward until they hit the pacific. Stationed along this edge, music was a way to…
Egypt’s “official” popular music throughout much of the 20th Century was a complex form of art song steeped in tradition, well-loved by the middle and upper classes, and even accommodating to certain non-Arabic influences. It was highly structured by professional musicians working an established industry centered in the capitol, Cairo.
However, far from the bustling cosmopolitan center of Cairo, north and northwest, in towns like Tanta and Alexandria and extending across the Saharan Desert to the Libyan border, dozens of fully marginalized artists were developing a raw, hybrid shaabi/al-musiqa al-shabiya style of music, supported by smaller upstart, independent labels, including the short-lived but deeply resonant Bourini Records.
1. Tobacco City – Buffalo
2. Florist – Have Heaven
3. Nico Georis – Geological Observations
4. Dean Wareham – Yesterday’s Hero
5. Eiko Ishibashi – October
6. Brown Horse – Dog Rose
7. Black Country, New Road – Besties
8. The Waterboys – Hopper’s On Top (Genius)
9. Songs Of Green Pheasant – Dark
10. Valerie June – Sweet Things Just for You
11. Index For Working Musik – Sister
12. Jason Isbell – Foxes in the Snow
13. Sam Akpro – Evenfall
14. Snapped Ankles – Pay the Rent
15. Butler, Blake & Grant – Bring an End
The descending refrain opening the song isn’t unusual but attention is instantly attracted as it’s played on a harpsichord. Equally instantly, an elegiac atmosphere is set. The voice, coming in just-short of the 10-second mark, is similarly yearning in tone. The song’s opening lyrics convey dislocation: “You and I travel to the beat of a different drum.”
“Different Drum,” the September 1967 single by an outfit dubbed Stone Poneys Featuring Linda Ronstadt, was immediate, had a country edge and was written by Mike Nesmith – then best known as a member of The Monkees. The band had already issued a couple of folk-pop singles simply credited as Stone Poneys, neither of which had clicked with record buyers. Third time out on 45,…
Get Ready for the Countdown: Mod, Brit Soul, R&B & Freakbeat Nuggets includes exactly what it says on the box and does it in exciting fashion. Trawling through the dozens of tracks on offer is likely to give even the most hardcore devotees of the sounds of mid- to late British pop enough thrills to make the nominal entrance fee well worth it. Apart from a few tracks by big names of the era like the Small Faces, the Moody Blues and the Pretty Things, and oft-compiled bands like the Action, John’s Children, and the Creation, the bulk of the collection is populated by off-the-main tracks, artists, and songs. Most of the bands are familiar to the members of that group and a handful of trainspotters, though judging by how good most of their tracks sound, they should have…
The grunge explosion that took over the world in the early ’90s exists in iceberg form, with ubiquitously popular bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam as the most visible examples of the sound. As with any iceberg, these bands are just what’s most apparent sitting atop a mass of other active and influential but less immediately traceable players. You’re No Big Deal explores the grunge iceberg extensively, collecting over 80 tracks of heavy, ragged, and righteous noise recorded between 1984 and 1994 by some of the most- and least-known acts in and around the grunge movement. The tracks here were curated with help from Mark Arm, whose late-‘80s band Green River starts things off with the crude and metallic “Come On Down.”
Germany’s Bear Family Records deserves plaudits for compiling and releasing exhaustive box sets from some of the best-known figures in early country and rock music. But the reissue label warrants at least as much praise for unearthing and taking a chance on superlative material that most listeners have never even heard of, much less heard.
A perfect example of this is the new Rich-R-Tone Folk Star Story, which fills 12 CDs and has a playing time of more than 14 hours. It collects records released between 1946 and 1954 by Rich-R-Tone, a small, independent Johnson City, Tennessee, label, and its Folk Star subsidiary. The box comes with a coffee table–sized, 144-page hardcover…
Active as a professional DJ in Japan since the late eighties, DJ Yoshizawa Dynamite is also a renowned remixer, compiler and producer. An avid record collector and an expert of Wamono music, Yoshizawa has published in 2015 the now-classic Wamono A to Z records guide book, which instantly sold-out. The book unveiled a myriad of beautiful and rare records from a highly prolific, but still then unknown, Japanese groove scene. He has also selected a large part of the music in our highly acclaimed Wamono compilations.
For this brand new chapter in the series, Yoshizawa explores King Records’ legendary catalog and unearths exceptional, rare and unknown musical gems. King Records has been releasing music since 1931 and is one of the most prestigious labels…
There are many nighttime scenarios that can prompt a click of the play button: Stumbling through the door and into a recliner after an arduous day at the office; getting behind the wheel for a head-clearing cruise on nearly deserted streets; inviting friends old and new home from the first party to start the second party. To celebrate 15 years of smooth, velvety beats, L.A.-based dance label 100% Silk has honored such moonlit scenes with the new compilation Late Shift Silk.
Any one of the 11 cuts on Late Shift Silk could work for activities best suited to the cover of darkness. “To the Window” by Florida’s El Nalgón channels the feeling of late hours starting to loosen sensory perception, the last few moments before the mind welcomes much-needed slumber.