Twilight Goddess

Angel in the Dark is a lovely recording featuring the graceful vocals and finely crafted songs that everyone expects from Laura Nyro. These sessions were completed in the summer of 1995 and represent the last music Nyro recorded. The title cut and "Sweet Dream Fade" mine the same soul terrain as her late '60s recordings, featuring horns and underlined by heavy guitar riffs. These upbeat pieces perfectly integrate voice, arrangements, and lyrics to create an organic whole, and are two of the best cuts on the album. Slower, piano-based songs like "Triple Goddess Twilight," "He Was Too Good to Me," and "Serious Playground" are mixed in-between these songs. These pieces are quieter and introspective, with Nyro's voice more intimate. It is almost as though she was sitting at the piano, late at night, and singing to herself. There are also several covers including "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" and "Let It Be Me." The first of these is over five minutes and has been slowed down so much that it drags. In fact, she slows down all of the covers as if to convert them into heartfelt ballads.

Dame Sarah Connolly’s exceptional nocturnally inspired recital spans over 120 years of British song from Stanford to Turnage, and includes world premieres of two songs by Benjamin Britten. Marking Sarah Connolly’s Proms recital debut, the centenary of Sir Hubert Parry’s death, and British composers in general, who studied or taught at the Royal College of Music, this album is an astonishing collection not to be missed.

There is some great ambient electronica on these 4 Discs. This collection was put out on the Jumpin' & Pumpin' label back in 1999. If you are a Jake Stephenson fan this is a very important collection, since it includes the whole of the Crystal Moon (Jake Stephenson and Matt Hillier) album 'Temple' which is otherwise a very expensive CD to pick up. All the tracks are here. There are also a number of other Jake Stephenson tracks, either under his own name (unusually), or under more of his pseudonyms (Alien Mutation, Curly Whirly Spirits). We also get some Matt Hillier tracks, and some rather good tunes by Dave Hendry (as O-Head, Hyperborea and Twilight Pilot).

Beneath The Veil (1997). Zingaia was coined by combining the word Zingari, a tribe of Greek gypsies, and the name of Gaia, the great mother Earth, which tells you a great deal about this music. One could call it goddess music because each seductively swaying song with its whispery singing and spoken word vocals evokes images of ancient goddesses. While recognizably a pawn of Enigma or Deep Forest and using stylistic elements of world music and ambient trance, this album has a distinctively original sound that is electronically modern and ancient tribal percussive at the same time. Its quality of direct-to-the-hear spirituality is not unlike Sacred Spirit Drums, and it's easy to recognize the influence of David and Steve Gordon as co-producers with Michael Breene, a member of the two-musician group…