Immediate Family

1989 had been a long hot summer, but 1990 felt longer and hotter. Since the house music explosion of 1987, Britain had had a whistle in its mouth, and it needed a lie down. February 1990 brought two records that were made to accompany the sunrise and would shape the immediate future: The KLF’s Chill Out was a continuous journey, a woozy, reverb-laden mix; and Andrew Weatherall’s drastic remix of a Primal Scream album track – ‘Loaded’ – slowed down the pace on the dancefloor itself, right down to 98 beats per minute.

Early champions of Country Music - The Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon, the Massey Family, Jimmie Rodgers and many more - have been painstakingly remastered using a mix of analog and digital technology for a hybrid sound that is simultaneously contemporary, immediate but still completely true-to-form.

AMERICAN EPIC, a film series produced by Allison McGourty, Duke Erikson and Director Bernard MacMahon, explores the pivotal recording journeys at the height of the Roaring Twenties, when music scouts armed with cutting-edge recording technology captured the breadth of American music and discovered the artists that would shape our world. The recordings they made of all the ethnic groups of America democratized the nation and gave a voice to everyone. Country singers in the Appalachians, Blues guitarists in the Mississippi Delta, Gospel preachers across the south, Cajun fiddlers in Louisiana, Tejano groups from the Texas Mexico border, Native American drummers in Arizona, and Hawaiian musicians were all recorded. It was the first time America heard itself.

The genre of progressive rock has a proud history, and many would agree that Pink Floyd is the band that helped break it into the mainstream. Fans can re-discover that feeling. To be honest, I was thoroughly surprised by this album.

It's all in the chord of voices. Right, "chord." The imprint the Roches brought to popular music when they issued their self-titled debut in 1979 was as three voices forming a chord rather than as a lead vocalist with backing. The emotional quality in the grain of that chord has been a trademark for the group, but more than this is the poetic unspeakable notion of how all of everyday life – with its losses, loves, noble aspirations, and petty resentments – exists in the space between those voices, resulting in an authenticity that is utterly seductive in its warmth, quark strangeness, and mysterious charm.

Fiona Apple defied categorization or any easy career path, almost running the pattern in reverse, opening her career as a highly touted and popular alternative singer/songwriter, then transitioning into a cult artist. Apple certainly benefited from the open-door policy of modern rock in the mid-’90s, following the path of crossover alt-rock piano-based songwriters like Tori Amos, but Apple was hardly an Amos copycat: she had a strong jazz undertow in her vocal phrasing and melodies, she had richer arrangements, she had a poppier bent to her songs. All these things helped her 1996 debut, Tidal, find a wide audience, one that increased considerably in the wake of the controversial video for the single “Criminal,” but Apple made it abundantly clear that she wasn’t an amateur provocateur with her sophomore album, When the Pawn Meets the King, an album that increased her critical reputation and cult, which would be pillars of support during her intense battles while making her third album, Extraordinary Machine. Collection includes: 'Tidal' (1996); 'When The Pawn…' (1999); 'Extraordinary Machine' (2005), and 'The Idler Wheel…' (2012).