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There are few more distinctive artists in contemporary music than Kali Malone. She is a conservatoire-trained composer whose work pushes the edges of electroacoustics, drone, and minimalism — the kind of music that feels most naturally at home in the lofty institutions of high culture. And yet she has achieved a type of crossover success that few art music figures have managed in the 21st century, winning fans among the indie and experimental rock communities on top of the more traditional constituencies of such uncompromising composition.
This diverse audience has not been attracted by film soundtracks, media placements, or glitzy celebrity commissions, the familiar routes to wider exposure for many contemporary…

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Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica ensemble continue the longstanding relationship with ECM’s New Series on Pages of a Biography, bringing together music by Georgs Pelēcis, Andrius Žlabys and Arvo Pärt.
Pärt’s ‘Passacaglia’, written for Kremer’s 70th birthday, and ‘Darf ich…’ frame Žlabys’s ‘Kaleidoscope of Lost Time’, dedicated to Kremer and Kremerata Baltica, and Pelēcis’s title concerto, written for Kremer and drawing on memories of their youth together in Riga. The programme continues a musical relationship with the Baltic region that has been central to Kremer’s work with ECM since Tabula Rasa, the recording that inaugurated the New Series. Here, personal history and musical memory meet in…

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The templates and aesthetic he draws from on his third album are about as old as the concept of popular music itself, channelling the canyons around Los Angeles, top pickers in 1960s Nashville studios, and smoke-filled Greenwich Village folk clubs. Assisted on some tracks by co-producer Jonathan Wilson, who knows a thing or two himself about reviving the glory days of West Coast swoon, the LA-based Palestinian–American musician reaches for new levels of emotional resonance with an authority that instantly shuts down claims of derivative recycling.
Granted, we’ve been here before: Burton’s deceptively simple songs are ultimately folk songs, occasionally tinged with country, at times channelled through classic rock…

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The year is 2008. Steve Gunn was experiencing the itch to start working on material under his own name after having spent the last several years playing in and around Philadelphia and Brooklyn in collaborative projects such as GHQ. He had recorded some experimental CDRs on his own under the moniker Moongang before branching out in 2007 to placing the name “Steve Gunn” on titles for the first time. The first couple of releases displayed an immediate leap in his songwriting and confidence. His growth as a solo artist seemed to meet the use of his name head on with a burst of creativity. Nowhere was this growth more visible than with the 2008 title “Sundowner”. The album’s first iteration was released on CD by Digitalis Recordings.

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The Monkees celebrate the 60th anniversary of their self-titled debut album with a new deluxe edition through Rhino. The 1LP/3CD collection expands the 1966 album with its original stereo and mono mixes alongside rare recordings from the sessions and the television series that established Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork as international stars. The collection has been produced by Monkees historian Andrew Sandoval, with new liner notes from Dolenz. The release documents an album that became central to the unusual relationship between television and recorded music in the 1960s. The Monkees was created alongside the NBC television series of the same name, with the music assembled through a combination of the four performers…

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Phil Lynott is best known to most as the frontman of Irish rockers Thin Lizzy, but now, 40 years after his death, his solo work is being celebrated with an 8CD box set called The Story Of My Life.
The box set features both of Lynott’s solo albums – 1980’s Solo in Soho and 1982’s The Phil Lynott Album – alongside remixes, rare demos, alternate versions and archive recordings, many available officially for the first time.
The box set is also home to an unreleased album called Fatalistic Attitude. This was effectively an early version of The Phil Lynott Album. It was prepared for release in January 1982 but was considered “too dark” for release and reworked and released eight months later. Using Philip Lynott’s personal acetate copy…

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…Remastered from the original master tapes by longtime Sparks engineer Bill Inglot, expanded edition includes the 9 original tracks alongside 17 bonus tracks featuring rare remixes, alternate versions, and previously unreleased demos.
The third and mercifully last of Sparks’ mid-’80s dance pop albums, the frankly disappointing Music That You Can Dance To delivered just two standouts: a remake of Russell Mael’s European “Modesty Blaise” 45 and the epic 1985 single “Change” (replaced on British pressings by “Armies of the Night”). Indeed, “Change” isn’t merely the album’s most provocative number; it ranks among the duo’s finest performances of all time, a shifting soundscape of sonics and moods through which Russell Mael’s ruminations on…

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The first indication that DIIV were moving into more political territory came as they rolled out their last record, 2024’s Frog in Boiling Water.
The album’s release was marked by a hoax appearance on Saturday Night Live where they were introduced by Fred Durst, a chaotic website replete with conspiracy theories, and a live show punctuated by spoof announcements suggesting that the band had entered into a “creative partnership” with ExxonMobil. It was a tongue-in-cheek campaign that concealed broiling anti-capitalist anger beneath the surface, and that offset the murky, lyrically opaque set of songs they were promoting.
The Los Angeles four-piece have carried this approach into their fifth album, ZIRP!,…

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GarciaLive Volume 23: August 14th, 1993 presents the Jerry Garcia Band’s final performance at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, CA. The two sets that the group performed that night were originally recorded to two-track digital audio tape straight from the soundboard by John Cutler. All told, Garcia played Shoreline 39 times with the Grateful Dead and on three occasions with the Jerry Garcia Band. This show took place seven years after the opening of the venue. The Grateful Dead were slated to perform the initial gig at the facility but it was cancelled due to Garcia’s health complications. Indeed, as the label notes, “Although JGB was conceived as a low-key respite — a chance for Garcia to relax and cut loose in small clubs away from the stadium circus…

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…May 1975 found Pete Townshend turning 30 and troubled by thoughts of the future. What would it hold for The Who, the music business, and rock and roll itself? He poured his anxieties and emotions into The Who by Numbers, the October ’75 release of which would become the band’s seventh studio album. On October 30, Polydor and UMe celebrates 51 years of The Who by Numbers with a new 5CD/1Blu-ray Super Deluxe Edition.
Sessions for the album began in April 1975 and continued through early June, with producer Glyn Johns (Who’s Next) at the helm. Though Townshend recalled being detached from the sessions with his bandmates in various states of distraction, the resulting album became one of the band’s most distinctive. Underneath a drawing…

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For many of us who have a faint aversion to heavy rock, Queens of the Stone Age have long occupied a strange loophole. On paper, they ought to repel: the bulldozing riffs, the desert-rock machismo, the leather-jacketed sneer. And yet the songs slip past the defences. Beneath the fuzz and menace, Josh Homme has always had the instincts of a classic pop craftsman making MOR in disguise – decisive chord changes, gleaming hooks, tight structures, middle-eight pay-offs – dragged through a heavy-rock filter and left out in the sun to warp.
It’s true of their biggest songs. “No One Knows” has the melodic snap of vintage radio rock; “Go with the Flow” turns motoric velocity into power-pop; “Make It Wit Chu”, for all its leer, is essentially a soft-rock seduction ballad.

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Best known for his film scores, particularly those associated with Studio Ghibli, Joe Hisaishi has continued to pursue a career as both a composer and conductor, revealing a more abstract side of his musical language. Released in 2026, Symphony No. 3 (“Metaphysica”) & Harp Concerto brings together two orchestral works that shed light on this lesser-known aspect of his writing. Conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Hisaishi is joined by harpist Emmanuel Ceysson for the world-premiere recording of the Harp Concerto, composed specifically for him.
Created in 2021 to mark the 50th anniversary of the New Japan Philharmonic, Symphony No. 3 is a large-scale work in three movements (“Existence,” “Where Are We Going?,” and “Substance”)…

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Prolific musical collaborator and tireless rhythm generator Valentina Magaletti rarely seems to rest. But, even for her, this has been a particularly busy month. No doubt as much due to the logistical necessities of release schedules as the movement of the stars or artistic intention, October has already seen new albums from two of Magaletti’s other projects: Vanishing Twin (Archives) and Holy Tongue (Basilikum). Hard on their heels Parallel Commutator is the latest from CZN, a team-up with Portuguese percussionist, sculptor and gong-maker João Pais Filipe.
Potentially this release could be a little over- shadowed by the others. In their individual ways Holy Tongue and Vanishing Twin both head outwards into their soundworlds from roots…

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By the early 1980s, the electric organ had started to infiltrate the iconic hotel bands that defined the Addis Ababa music scene of the previous decade. And so keys player, arranger and producer Teodros Makonnen took the leap. Using nothing but a double-manual Yamaha (with a built-in drum sequencer), he made this album of instrumental versions of classic Ethiopian songs.
Originally released on cassettes in the ’80s, it was all recorded in a single take under the shadow of curfews – and, in doing so, mapped out his version of the future of Ethiopian music. It’s a vibe: pop melodies with deep roots in Ethiopian folk music, dreamy runs doused in hazy reverb, and minimalist waltz rhythms shuffling from the tinny drum machine. Some tracks are…

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Josh Johnson changes lanes with the élan of a casino dealer shuffling cards. A saxophonist and a synthesist mentored by Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, Johnson’s pop candy associations include Harry Styles and Miley Cyrus; he also spent four years as musical director for Leon Bridges. His lead production credits are spangled with such idiosyncratic gems as Flea’s Honora and Meshell Ndegocello’s Grammy-winning The Omnichord Real Book. He’s currently blowing his horns and concocting conceptual loops and effects as a working member in a variety of versatile, cutting-edge ensembles in both L.A. and Chicago.
Animative, Johnson’s third album after his 2020 debut and his purely solo record Unusual Object in 2024, is, like his career, a stylistically…

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It’s Lyal Strickland’s unpolished voice that makes the first impression. Immediately, it’s clear he is not your dressed-up singer-songwriter making a slick record. His songs come from the soil that he tills as a part-time farmer, from the babble of small-town drinking holes, from the sweat and pain of hard work, life’s defeats, and hard-earned small victories. His gutsy songs earn him the title Shooter of Truth, and this is Strickland’s return to recording after a ten-year absence.
Strickland pulls no punches, admitting he has inseparable relationships with depression and alcohol. Yet, he’s affectionate to loved ones, putting their importance above all else. His priorities are ultimately in the right place; he just takes plenty of detours to cope with farming and…

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South London-based multidisciplinary artist Clara Mann whispers the secrets of the universe through fey folk songs. You’ll hear and envision: the stirrings of ghosts, will-o’-the-wisps, shadows dancing, and eternity beckoning. These bewitching and weightless songs are prayers sculpted by the wind, which you can walk through like a door. Lyrically, Mann sings as if delivering a sentence to a friend to see their reaction. Yet the words are also for her to assimilate, to feel, to mold, as if listening to someone speak with her voice. Within these folk idioms reside heaven and hell, pulling Mann in opposite directions to truth.
Along with Kiki Cavazos, Natalie Wildgoose, Daisy Rickman, and Juni Habel, Mann is one of the most arresting contemporary folk musicians.

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Both an example and an explanation of a blending of two words, the fact that the name of Tommy Lefroy‘s long-awaited debut album is a portmanteau seems fitting.
While labour economist Guy Standing coined the term The Precariat takes its title from (referring to the precarious social class that began emerging in Europe at the beginning of the 21st century), almost everything about the project of Wynter Bethel and Tessa Mouzourakis exists in a perpetual state of “and,” not “or.”
Respectively from northern Michigan and Vancouver, BC, the singer-songwriters met in Nashville, but their project really got underway when both moved to the UK (“I had nothing, then I found you / Built an empire in…

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