(fr3) Collaborations (2014)

Cerrone is an original master of Euro Disco. This double CD cleverly showcases his biggest hits and collaborations in heavily edited but still gloriously enjoyable form. There are 38 tracks on two CD. A few are remixes - the original 7 inch edit of Love in C Minor, plus its stunning Dimitri remix, for example - but they complement rather than irritate, thankfully. Highlights are Supernature, the aforementioned Love in C Minor, Take Me, Got to Have Loving, You Are the One (with Jocelyn Brown on vocals), Standing in the Rain, Give Me Love, Look for Love, and Music of Life. This excellent collection should be seen as a happy sample of Cerrone's original, much longer club cuts, which are available elsewhere.

Inspired by the artwork of Roger Dean and the writings of Ver Stanley Alder, Jon Anderson developed an entire story around the idea of an interstellar exodus from Sunhillow, writing this album around the narrative (named for the spaceship's architect, Olias). The idea may seem overly ambitious, but Anderson fills the record with enough magical moments to delight fans of Yes' mystic side. The music is written and performed almost entirely by Anderson, who dubs vocals, plays guitar and harp, and adds percussion and the occasional synthesizer to flesh out his ideas so that at no point does the music lose its spellbinding effect for lack of sonic detail…

Experimental ethnic fusion outfit based around the duo of Jean-François Gaël, Pierre Buffenoir, initially with Arcane V members: Philippe Gumplowicz and Youval Micenmacher, and others. Sonorhc (Chronos backwards) played a wide-ranging mixture of styles, covering all sorts of ancient and modern cultural elements, medieval, baroque, oriental, you name it, they mixed and matched, fused and collided, making unusual and original concoctions, resulting in three very different albums, and also Jean-François Gaël et Pierre Buffenoir - Portes D'Orient which was essentially Sonorhc although it didn't bear their name.

Halifax-native Ryan Hemsworth has thrived in the disbanding of genre divides, enabled by the digital era, from producing songs for Southern hip-hop artists, and pushing ‘90s-style R&B back on trend, to experimenting with downtempo bedroom electronica, and remixing chart-topping pop songs. His sophomore solo album, Alone For The First Time, however, marks a step toward honing a completely idiosyncratic sound. Despite its name, Alone For The First Time, is replete with collaborations cultivated from a community of bedroom producers including little cloud, Lontalius and Dawn Golden. The album combines Hemsworth’s manifold sonic influences with his fascination with early video game soundtracks to make a unique aesthetic statement…

Theo Croker's third full-length album, the Dee Dee Bridgewater-produced Afro Physicist, is an ambitious, stylistically wide-ranging album that showcases the jazz trumpeter's soulful post-bop chops, sophisticated arranging skills, and adventurous compositional style. The grandson of the late jazz trumpeter Doc Cheatham and a graduate of Oberlin College, Croker is an accomplished musician with a deep musical reservoir to draw from. Working closely with Bridgewater, with whom he has been performing regularly since 2009, Croker delves into a sound heavily informed by '70s soul-jazz, but which touches upon groove-oriented Latin jazz ("It's Not You, It's Me [But You Didn't Help]"), gargantuan keyboard and electric guitar-heavy jazz-funk ("Realize"), and atmospheric, dream-inducing modal jazz ("Visions," with vibraphonist Stefon Harris)…