Music has power. The power to stir emotions and paint pictures in our imagination. When Pink Floyd released their high-concept double album The Wall in 1979 its listeners were left to flesh out the storyline that the music and lyrics provided with whatever visual concepts their own brains provided. Like no album before it though, […]
Geoff Downes and Chris Braide released “ Pictures Of You”, their debut album as The Downes Braide Association, in 2012 after meeting at a Buggles reunion show in 2010. Downes was already familiar to me from his work with The Buggles – I’m a big fan of their Age Of Plastic album – Yes and […]
Let’s get this straight from the outset… the él record label is absolutely nuts!!! And I love its quirkiness and bottle for putting out albums of music that otherwise would be unlikely to see the light of day. Regular readers will have read other reviews I’ve done of the label’s output and it is nothing […]
Billed as the world’s first jazz-funk mass Rochester Mass is due for release on Cherry Red on the 4th December and is essentially a catholic mass with the backdrop of The James Taylor Quartet.
Now I don’t often buy music on spec but when I heard this album playing in the local supermarket (of all places) I had to enquire what it was…I assumed given the track that was playing that it was something new from Neil Young that I’d not heard about.
Eloquence, The Complete Works’ is a compilation of ex-Kraftwerk percussionist Wolfgang Flür’s “pop” tunes from 2002 to today. “I selected the tracks on ELOQUENCE to show the width of my artistic possibilities from lyric writing, melody development, working with my voice and my being involved in collaborations with interesting international artists” says Flür, continuing “With […]
Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series of records has been going now for over ten years but still shows no signs of becoming tired or struggling for new and relevant material and artists.
This is not a new record having being released in 2009, but it is new to me and so I thought worthy of sharing it as I really enjoyed it. William Orbit will not be a new name to many with my first exposure to his music being back in a dim and distant 90s […]
Out now on Esoteric Antenna Ostinato is described as “a labour of love, built on forty years’ vision’ with Tayler commenting “I had so many ideas for music and sound running around inside my head as a teenager, and now, more than forty years on, technology has evolved to the point where I can realise […]
Hawkwind have a loyal following and you only need to look at the bust up between Nik Turner and Dave Brock and the camps fans have aligned themselves to understand that passions’ run high when it comes to this iconic space rock band. Love In Space was originally recorded in 1995 whilst the band were […]
As the daughter of The Band’s Levon Helm, Amy Helm has spent her life surrounded by music. The Band took a mix of rock and roll and traditional American music and invented the Americana genre, decades before the term became popular. A particularly impressive feat considering that 4 out of the 5 members were Canadian, […]
Is it really almost eighteen months since we last attended one of the Association Jazz Edge events? Let me put you in the picture dear reader.
I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of this CD when it landed on my doormat. The band’s name together with the cover art – kind of a cross between The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and Pink Floyd’s Relics – made me wonder if this was some sort of arch parody in the manner of XTC’s […]
Producer/Engineers Jared Sacks and Daan van Aalst have pooled their expertise in music production and recording in very high resolution audio. Their goal is to put together the best system for recording and reproducing music at the highest quality with recordings in the new DSD 256fs (quad rate DSD) format, although 8 Ensembles is available in DSD 256, 128 and 64. It’s the […]
John Scott delves into his collection and pulls out The Yes Album, the bands third album. “The Yes Album was not their biggest selling album and it may not be their best – quite often though, I think it is – but it represents a time when they were still defining their style and before […]
In 2014 Andy Bell, for it is he of Erasure fame, made an unexpected, and some would say brave career move when he launched his electro-acoustic cabaret show ‘Torsten The Bareback Saint’. Before Bell started to write the next installation of his cabaret (Torsten The Beautiful Libertine) he and songwriters Barney Ashton-Bullock and Christopher Frost […]