Emigrés from the British underground hip-hop scene, Wiseguys Touché and Regal made some of the most intense productions in the world of upfront big-beat techno. Releasing their material on Wall of Sound Records.
Florent Schmitt was well known as a critic and composer during his lifetime, but his compositions fell into neglect after his death. Difficult to pigeonhole, he has been called everything from conservative to neo-romantic to revolutionary, and Dutilleux wrote of him that he ‘gave back to the French school certain notions of grandeur’. The three works on this CD are all remarkable in their own ways – for their rhythmic exuberance, their rich and varied orchestration, their imaginative use of traditional harmonies, and in the case of Le Palais hanté and La Tragédie de Salomé for their exploration of the dark side of humanity.
Portico Quartet announce Monument, the electronic driven follow-up to their acclaimed ambient-minimalist suite Terrain, presenting the band at their most direct.
Long before punk was relegated to slogans on a Hot Topic T-shirt or a watered down pop craze with the mall crowd, bands like the Sex Pistols represented themes of rising up from the underground, rebellion, and at times, all out anarchy. Though the act only released one proper studio project in the form of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, it's become a legendary slice of the genre as it was truly meant to be represented and once again takes the focal point of the current incarnation's latest DVD. There'll Always Be An England celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of that acclaimed album with John Lydon leading the aging (but still entertaining) pack on top of his game.
Drive-By Truckers’ 12th studio album and first new LP in more than three years – the longest gap between new DBT albums – The Unraveling was recorded at the legendary Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis, TN by GRAMMY® Award-winning engineer Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price) and longtime DBT producer David Barbe. Co-founding singer/songwriter/guitarists Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood both spent much of the time prior doing battle with deep pools of writer’s block. “How do you put these day to day things we’re all living through into the form of a song that we (much less anybody else) would ever want to listen to?” says Hood. “How do you write about the daily absurdities when you can’t even wrap your head around them in the first place? I think our response was to focus at the core emotional level. More heart and less cerebral perhaps.”
The Baltic countries, just a couple of decades old in their current incarnations, have emerged as hotbeds of contemporary music, resting on a triad of experimentalism, community music-making, and a few big stars committed to the growth of a distinctive homegrown scene. Among the latter group, violinist Gidon Kremer has made consistently successful recordings, artistically and commercially, with his handpicked group of young Latvian musicians, Kremerata Baltica. Many of these have displayed Kremer's knack for combining contemporary music, tango, and established repertory in compelling thematic combinations.