"Four top-league jazz musicians who just enjoy playing and who love good pop music," was how ZDF Heute Journal (German national TV news) introduced a feature about 4 Wheel Drive. “A jazz Olympics four," wrote the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The group’s studio album spent four months at the top of the official German jazz charts, and now a new live album is being released.
Here at Athens of the North you know we love Disco, what you might not know is that my friend David Haffner (not only the deepest of disco heads but a great D.J as well) helped us license many of the rare Disco 45s on the label. It is about time David gets the shine he deserves so we asked him to compile some of the songs he helped licence for the label alongside new songs which we have here‘Disco With A Feeling’. So what is ‘Disco With A Feeling’? It’s hard to quantify a sound, but our definition would include 70s Soul or Modern Soul 45s that fit into the disco sound, soulful and magical. The whole LP is straight up dance-floor fire, no matter who you are or where you’re from - a soul boy, disco lady, or a house head you are going to feel the heat of these club smashers.
The Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was known for his inventiveness in allowing music and other art forms to communicate with one another in his works. British philanthropist and art collector Richard Thomas was fascinated by this process of breaking down artistic boundaries. Therefore he came up with the idea of commissioning a work that would establish a dialogue between music and the visual arts, and he instantly thought of Jóhann Jóhannsson and Berlin-based painter Thilo Heinzmann. Over a period of four years, the two artists met up from time to time and engaged in a series of in-depth conversations about art, politics and their own lives. Working to, or rather with, a painting by Heinzmann, Jóhannsson composed a new work for string quartet, 12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann, recorded by Echo Collective, which has been released on September 20, 2019, the day after what would have been his 50th birthday.