Roger Hiemstra

Roger Waters, co-founder and principal songwriter of Pink Floyd, fuses the epic and the personal in Roger Waters The Wall, a concert film that goes well beyond the stage. Based on the groundbreaking concept album, Roger Waters The Wall could be called a concept film: it's a state-of-the-art show that dazzles the senses, combined with an intensely personal road trip that deals with the loss Roger has felt throughout his life due to war. On stage and now on film, Waters has channeled his convictions into his art and his music. With Roger Waters The Wall, Waters – together with his fellow musicians and his creative collaborators – brings audiences an exultant ride of a rock and roll concert, and delivers an unforgettable, deeply emotional experience.

War is Roger Waters' great muse, the impetus for so much of his work, including the semi-autobiographical 1979 opus The Wall. The Final Cut, his last album with Pink Floyd, functioned as an explicit sequel to The Wall, but 1992's Amused to Death acts as something of a coda, a work where Waters revisits his obsessions – both musical and lyrical – and ties them together with the masterful touch of a mature artist…

A sublime addition to Sean McCann’s Recital Program, This Floating World is Roger Eno’s first solo LP in a decade, following on from Anatomy [2008] and a split LP with Plumbline in 2013. Mostly solo piano expressions, but with a few intriguing embellishments of electronics in Garden, vocals on Empty Room, and sonorous chimes in Riddle, saving the detuned pearl of Out of Tune, Out of Time, Out of Here for dessert…

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.

Roger Glover, Ronnie James Dio, Jon Lord, David Coverdale, Tony Ashton, Glenn Hughes, Ray Fenwick, Eddie Hardin, John Lawton, and many many more… Deep Purple have always been known for their contributions to the hard rock genre. Despite this heavy reputation, the individual members have all worked outside the rock field from time to time on solo material or sessions, exploring different and often seemingly unlikely musical avenues. This two-disc set brings two such projects together for the first time. Butterfly Ball, masterminded by Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover shortly after he had left the band, forms the first half of the set and features appearances from many well known rock musicians. Glover also turns up on The Wizard's Convention, which forms the rest of this package. Eddie Hardin brought Glover together with the then current Deep Purple members Jon Lord, Glenn Hughes, David Coverdale and numerous other guests. Side by side this material forms a fascinating side line to the Deep Purple story.