The Night Listener

It is a sound garden inspired by the night, nature and spirituality to represent safe spaces for a digitalised and a conflicted society. It provides a "breathing space" from the crowds and brings the listener on a journey through the different moods of the night being calm, meditative, mysterious and even of turmoil. The Night Garden is a metaphor of using music and art as a 'safe space' of self-expression and healing, promote happiness and well-being in society and the message of hope that suffering and darkness is temporal. It is about journeying through the darkness, confronting it and coming out a better person. Compositions from classical composers such as Saint-Saens, Tansmann, Koechlin, Hersant, Robert Ronnes are in the programme.

The Night Watch is a terrific live album capturing the third incarnation of King Crimson - featuring Robert Fripp, John Wetton, Bill Bruford, and David Cross - at the Amsterdam Covertgebouw on November 23, 1973. Some Crimson fans consider this lineup to be the most musically adept in the band's history, and the dense, yet dexterous, playing will tell any curious listener exactly why this is so. It remains an album that will primarily please the diehards, but for those fans, The Night Watch is an essential purchase.

On this recording, from 1985, multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus takes his listeners on a journey guided mainly by his incredible playing on a guitar that he disgned, custom-built by master luthier Manuel Diaz of Granada, Spain. It is a unique instrument that allows the player to customize the string array to suit his mood and the piece to be performed.
On this outing, Micus fits it with 10 single-course strings for the first half of the album, the title track 'East of the night'. He accompanies his guitar on this piece with two groups of shakuhaci (the Japanese bamboo flute used by Zen monks in meditation), a pair and a group of four. The effect is simply beautiful - the guitar is used as a base for the gentle, soaring melodies carried by the shakuhachi, making the piece a transporting tribute to the dawn (as another reviewer astutely related the title)…

After the fluke success of "Hey Saint Peter" made Flash and The Pan's first album into an international hit, this side project from Harry Vanda and George Young had to contend with a follow-up. Vanda and Young, best known as the core of 60's hit makers The Easybeats and producers to AC/DC (George Young is family to Malcom and Angus), were already no strangers to hit song-writing. The result was "Media Man" charting in several countries, and the album expanding on the band's cult audience. The formula remained pretty much the same. Heavy new wave synths paired to either dance-beats or down tempo gloominess, along with monotone, processed vocals. This doesn't click quite as often as it does on the debut album, and there's nothing here as memorable as "Hey St Peter" or "The Band Played On/Down Among The Dead Men." But more than half the album clicks, with "Media Man" being the dance-hit and the title track being the best of the bummers. It's also worth pointing out that, despite the minimalist trappings, these guys were pretty incredible musicians. Give a listen to the piano solo on "Welcome To The Universe" for proof on that one.

Adept and international specialist of bansoori (a bamboo flute among the Indians of North), Andreas Ludwig attempts to produce an ethnic music slightly tinged with electronic music and progressives. Our man in particular is helped by drummer Harald Grosskopf and guitarist-keyboardist Axel Manrico Heilhecker, the duo is Sunya Beat in full force! Recorded between 1993 and 1998, parts of "Callings Of The Night" looks like an imaginary film, which leads the listener to the depths of the mysteries of the orient. Very relaxed and a kind of New Age.