Here is a portal to a vast and relatively unknown world, the Japanese cyber-occult underground media scene of the early 1990s; our guide is the late Henry Kawahara, a media artist and electronic music producer whose expansive and visionary conception of digital technology merged with a desire to break free of the constraints of mere rationality. This collection, the first-ever archival release of his work, is drawn from recordings released during the period 1991-1996, an exceptionally fertile time for Kawahara. Originally released on CD by a few Japanese independent labels including Hachiman Publishing, a cyber-occult/new-age book specialist, the releases were available mainly in book stores, so this sumptuous and prescient music has remained relatively unknown…
New Age Doom follows up its critically acclaimed 2020 drone metal opus Himalayan Dream Techno with a serendipitous LP featuring the dub legend Lee "Scratch" Perry as lead vocalist.
There are two ways to look at keyboardist Roger Powell's debut album, Cosmic Furnace. It is either a visionary work as one of the first rock albums recorded entirely on synthesizer, or it's a prog rock artifact for that very reason. The facts tend support the former – it is based on the ARP synthesizer, which was uncommon for 1973 – but the music itself tends to support the latter, since it's a bunch of spacy, vaguely spooky and mystical art-rock that functions primarily as atmosphere, not as structured compositions. Each of the six cuts establishes its mood immediately and then meanders for upward of eight minutes, never really going anywhere, but treading that same patch of ground rather effectively. In other words, it's not a lost classic – not even for devoted fans of Powell's later group Utopia – but for fans of synths and '70s art-rock, it's a reasonably interesting footnote to electronic rock history.
"Fearless was an album full of magic and curiosity, the bliss and devastation of youth. It was the diary of the adventures and explorations of a teenage girl who was learning tiny lessons with every new crack in the facade of the fairytale ending she'd been shown in the movies. I'm thrilled to tell you that my new version of Fearless is done and will be with you soon. It's called Fearless (Taylor's Version) and it includes 27 songs."
Way Down in the Rust Bucket is an upcoming live album and concert film from Canadian-American rock musician Neil Young and his band Crazy Horse, to be released on February 26, 2021. It is Volume 11.5 in the Performance Series of Neil Young Archives.