Public Public Places

Steven Wilson’s new album The Future Bites is an exploration of how the human brain has evolved in the Internet era. As well as being Wilson’s phenomenal sixth album, The Future Bites is also an online portal to a world of high concept design custom built for the ultra-modern consumer. Where 2017’s To The Bone confronted the emerging global issues of post truth and fake news, The Future Bites places the listener in a world of 21st century addictions. It’s a place where on-going, very public experiments constantly take place into the affects of nascent technology on our lives. From out of control retail therapy, manipulative social media and the loss of individuality, The Future Bites is less a bleak vision of an approaching dystopia, more a curious reading of the here and now.

Terence Trent D'Arby had a difficult 1990s, the nadir of which was probably the desperate mating call Supermodel Sandwich with Cheese from his 1995 album Vibrator. But he has started the new century with a clean slate, changing his name to Sananda Maitreya and launching his own label. The artful blend of soul, rock and funk is reassuringly familiar, though. D'Arby/ Maitreya still exercises a Prince-like control over songwriting, arrangement and production, rendering it a one-man show, but that's no bad thing with an artist of his ability. Drivin' Me Crazy packs enough lust into three funky minutes to satiate his most ardent fans (or "lightbeings", as he calls them), and the outstanding Suga Free pairs dark balladry with an operatic choir. Even the banjo-plinking O Divina comes good in the end, swelling into a Motownesque chorus. A snazzy comeback.

While just about every critic and fan has a favorite Roches album that was inexplicably ignored, most will probably agree that Speak was the one that really should have gone gold. All of the ingredients for a huge album are here: emotional yet accessible songs, radio-friendly folk-pop arrangements, and the sisters' usual mind-blowing vocal pyrotechnics. True, the title cut does have harmonies and cadences that are more typical of Bulgarian music, but much of the rest of this album is radio-ready.

En 2019, les organisateurs – depuis toujours placés sous la direction artistique de René Martin, le fondateur de ce festival – ont choisi la continuité thématique. Après s’être tournés « Vers un monde nouveau » en 2018, ce sont en effet les « Carnets de voyage » qu’ils ont choisi de proposer au public de cette nouvelle édition.

The Armenian monk Soghomon Soghomonian, better known by his priest’s name of Komitas, collected hundreds of folksongs around 1900 during the course of his travels through the Armenian highlands between Van Lake, the Black Sea and the southern Caucasus. These songs, handed down orally over the centuries, express all the archaism of this ancient people’s unmistakeable culture – a culture than was nearly extinguished in the genocide of the Armenians during the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1917…

First album and a complete unknown from the public since it was released on the Concord album with only 100 copies printed, which makes it one of the more expensive albums around…