Afterbach Matinee

Retrospective compilation offering tracks and excerpts from albums, unreleased and rare material.
Nouvelles Lectures Cosmopolites is a project of French composer Julien Ash, leader and only permanent member, helped by various artists. NLC combines Neo-Classical music with electronics for a unique example of modern chamber music. Piano is joined by violin, acoustic guitar, and acoustic bass plus ambient electronics and processed voices (singing and speaking).

Trumpeter Chris Botti's To Love Again: The Duets picks up where his stellar 2004 release When I Fall in Love leaves off, with more gorgeously lush and heartfelt orchestral jazz via the London Session Orchestra. This time showcasing guest vocalists – as well as a handful of instrumental tracks – Botti takes an even more classicist approach than before and once again brings to mind such iconic jazz albums as Clifford Brown with Strings and Miles Davis' Porgy and Bess. Largely known as a smooth jazz artist with a sweet trumpet tone, it wasn't until When I Fall in Love that Botti dropped the smooth jazz synthesizers and pop-oriented compositions in favor of Gil Evans-style jazz orchestrations and an acoustic backing quartet.

After two albums of inventive, unpredictable progressive hard rock, Stray kept chugging right along with their third album, Saturday Morning Pictures, which notably found guitarist and guiding force Del Bromham growing ever more obsessed with the latest synthesizer technology, although not to the point where gadgetry was crowding out his ever-dominant fretwork, or completely hijacking the band's analog roots. Rather, Bromham's ever-growing arsenal of synths and keyboards mostly added enriching nuances to some of the band's more adventurous material like "After the Storm," "Sister Mary," and "Move That Wigwam," featuring an odd mixture of country-fried harmonicas and Native American themes…

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Mark’s debut solo release Golden Heart in 1996, a new box set, Mark Knopfler - The Studio Albums 1996-2007, will be released on 1st October Worldwide, and 10th December in the US.
Gathering his first five post-Dire Straits solo albums (not counting film scores), and a bonus disc of B-sides titled The Gravy Train, this collection is as sleepy and nonchalant as an old friend’s affable shrug. Knopfler does what he does, blending folk, blues, country and rock into a tension-free take on Americana that’s faintly personal but more about delivering a carpet atmosphere of reflective rumination.
The audio of each album has been newly remastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios in London.

Alban Berg (1885 - 1935), along with Schoenberg and Webern, is considered as one of the pioneers of avant-garde movement that gave license to the hardcore advocates of serialism and the 12-tone chromaticism to rock around the house with their eclectic vibes that still reverberates to this day. So, with no further ado, I'm proud to present the daddy-o of the modern music.

peachfuzz