Solid Age

Like 1998's Khmer, Solid Ether is an unusual addition to the ECM catalog, reflecting the Norwegian trumpeter's continued fascination with drum'n'bass, jungle, and other underground club genres. Molvaer's work in this idiom is indicative of a new wave sweeping Europe and Scandinavia, where boundaries between jazz and electronica are being creatively blurred by a growing number of forward-thinking artists.

In 1968, at age 14, he had learned how to play guitar, formed his own band and three years later released an album whom many still consider a psychedelic Krautrock classic. Not bad for a small-town German boy who is now producer, composer and music lecturer at Maintz University. He is Bernhard Rendel, founder of My Solid Ground; the other band members were keyboard player Ingo Werner, bassist Karl-Heinrich Dorfler and drummer Andreas Wursching. In 1970, at the Morfelden Studio in Frankfurt, they recorded a short track ("Flash") that won second place in an amateur competition hosted by Sudwestfunk (SWF) Radio. A year later, they released their album with nationwide success. Despite this, some of the band members started to quit and Rendel suddenly found himself with a totally new line-up…

Melodic, heavy, and eerie. Those are the words used to best describe Johannesburg based psych rock three-piece, Age Of Indica. Behind pounding drum beats, solid bass lines and hypnotic guitar riffs, lies something so much more than just music. Purely instrumental, each song off the band’s debut EP acts as beacon that leads the listener through the pathless woods, until they arrive at the crossroads where reality and the surreal meet.

Deep Forest awash in the Pacific. There is certainly the flavour of that region, with Polynesian chanting and rhythms. However, unlike their other releases, Pacifique is a soundtrack to a movie rather than a stand-alone album.
For Pacifique, they've collected percussion samples and vocals from Samoan and other island cultures. The raw components are fairly good. The sampled voices on Pacifique form a nice melodic and rhythmic counterpoint to underlying percussion. La Legende (Part 2) provides similarly well blended vocals with a solid, if unextraordinary, rhythm and melodic line. And Huaine Reggae is a nice upbeat piece to close the album.