Karen Gresham Nickell I Am Cosmic A Journey to Becoming (2013)

Hasretim (“My Longing”) is a multi-media exploration of musical roots, and a musical search for cultural identity. In 2009, Guitarist and composer Marc Sinan embarked on an unusual journey, its route leading from the Black Sea coast, where his grandparents lived, to the Armenian border. En route he located and filmed traditional musicians, players whose craft is dying today, capturing a music that speaks of restlessness and temperament, and bears the footprints of Anatolia’s cultural and ethnic diversity. In Hasretim, Marc Sinan’s musical findings are integrated into his own contemporary music for mixed ensemble (orchestrated and arranged by Andrea Molino) with Turkish and Armenian guests.

Singular "American Swamp Music" stylists The Black Tongued Bells perpetrate an accomplished, yet subtly hazardous, brand of Spiritual Mayhem. Working a sound imbued with Deep Blues menace, soul-stirring Gospel and hopped-up Rock & Roll desperation, The Bells' blend of musical vernacular perversion, offbeat expression and intoxicating atmospherics infects with a flash-bang fever from which there is no recovery.