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After the critical (and commercial) success of her debut two years earlier, Rickie Lee Jones had a lot riding on her sophomore album, Pirates. From the opening track, "We Belong Together," Jones served notice that she was willing to challenge herself and experiment with more unusual, complex song structures…

The London foursome Coldplay were early critics' darlings in their native U.K., showcasing melodic pop on a slew of EP releases and constant live shows just after the spark of the new millennium. Not as heavy as Radiohead or snobbish as Oasis, Coldplay were revealed on Parachutes as a band of young musicians still honing their sweet harmonies. Combining bits of distorted guitar riffs and swishing percussion, Parachutes was a delightful introduction and also quickly indicated the reason why this album earned Coldplay a Mercury Music Prize nomination in fall 2000. Frontman Chris Martin's lyrical wordplay is feminist in the manner of Geneva's Andrew Montgomery, but far more withered…

The Swedish death metal band HYPOCRISY was formed by Peter Tägtgren in 1990 upon his return to Sweden from Florida, where he had been inspired by the state's flourishing death metal scene (bands like Morbid Angel, Deicide, Death, and Obituary). In 1992 the band signed its first contract with Nuclear Blast Records and released its monumental debut “Penetralia”. It marks the only time that the band functioned as a five-piece. This album displays a strong influence from American Death Metal. The follow-up “Osculum Obscenum” (1993) marked another milestone in the history of crushing extreme death metal. This album is evil and dark Black/Death Metal the way it should be. When compared to other Death Metal albums of the same period, this absolutely kills nearly everything. Eerie guitar work, Hellish screams, epic riffs. Over the course of the release of HYPOCRISY’s overwhelmingly acclaimed new album “End Of Disclosure” on the 22th of March 2013, the decision was made to re-release these classic albums, remastered and enriched with extensive bonus material, as a Limited 2CD BOX

Alternate African Reality is a follow-up to several compilations I have published on Syrphe since 2007 (the first one, Beyond Ignorance and Borders included various artists from Africa and Asia), and even earlier on my defunct tape label in the 1990s (the last tape, Archives Humaines vol.1, was published in 1996 and included 25 artists from 25 countries, including non-Western ones : South Africa, Japan, Chile, Brazil).

This is the story of how hummingbirds became the ultimate creatures of the air. Hummingbirds live at the limits of what is possible. They have the highest metabolism – with a heart rate of 1,200 beats per minute – of any vertebrate. Their wings beat 50 times a second. They can hover on the spot, even fly backwards. To our eyes, they are just a blur.