Michael Chapman is often cited as one of the unsung heroes of the British folk music community, but that tends to shortchange the eclecticism of his approach. While the melodic sense of British folk plays a large part in Chapman's music, one can also hear much of the "American Primitive" sound pioneered by John Fahey, and like Fahey in his later years, Chapman has a strong taste for experimental sounds, and all of these elements make themselves heard on The Polar Bear, the third in a series of free-form releases Chapman has recorded for Blast First Petite.
David Gilmour sang about an endless river on "High Hopes," the last song on what appeared to be the last Pink Floyd album, 1994's Division Bell. Twenty years later, the same phrase became the title of The Endless River, an album designed as Pink Floyd's last. Assembled largely from Division Bell outtakes initially intended as an ambient project dubbed The Big Spliff, the record was sculpted into shape in 2014 by Gilmour, Youth, Andy Jackson, and Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera by adding guitar and Nick Mason's drums to original tapes that were laden with keyboards from the late Rick Wright. He's not the only missing member of Floyd, of course. Roger Waters is absent, as is the long-gone Syd Barrett, but their ghosts are present throughout the primarily instrumental The Endless River.
Familiars, the fourth album from Brooklyn-based indie/chamber/electronic trio Antlers, comes as a glacially slow step in the slow-moving progress that marked both their death-themed 2009 breakthrough album Hospice and its more electronica-leaning 2011 follow-up, Burst Apart. The nine songs here are sprawling pocket symphonies, longer songs brimming over with the horn arrangements that were just hinted at on previous work, if a little lighter on airy keyboards and Boards of Canada-influenced dreaminess.
Originally, this collection was put together in 1972 by Tony Stratton-Smith from outtakes of the Nice's early stay at Immediate Records, and issued (at least, in the U.S.) with no explanation and little annotation, making it a bit confusing to longtime fans of Keith Emerson and the trio. Its timing was also unfortunate, in that a huge cache of record club copies of the Nice's first three albums on Immediate, pressed by Columbia Special Products, had shown up in cut-out bins at just about the same time. One had to listen closely to see that everything here was an alternate take of material from the band's first two albums. Essentially, Autumn 1967/ Spring 1968 (aka Autumn to Spring) was an outtake version of the group's debut long-player, The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack, shorn of the two longest tracks from that album, "Rondo" and "War and Peace"…