Air Band

For part of Air's Pocket Symphony tour, Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin played shows with only drummer Joey Waronker as support, forcing the band to strip its songs down to their essences. They stick with that lineup on Love 2, which delivers some of the most Air-like music to the band's name, and with good reason: this is the first time Dunckel and Godin have produced their own album. The duo tends to follow its more ambitious work with more accessible material and Love 2 is no exception, replacing Pocket Symphony's exotic, experimental bent with a renewed emphasis on the pair's quintessential sound. Godin and Dunckel dig deep into their arsenal of vintage electronic gear, topping those burbles, buzzes, and whooshes with some strings here and a few fuzzed-out guitars and basslines there…

Etran de L’Aïr (or “stars of the Aïr region”) welcomes you to Agadez, the capital city of Saharan rock. Playing for over 25 years, Etran has emerged as stars of the local wedding circuit. Beloved for their dynamic repertoire of hypnotic solos and sun schlazed melodies, Etran stakes out a place for Agadez guitar music. Playing a sound that invokes the desert metropolis, “Agadez” celebrates the sounds of all the dynamism of a hometown wedding.

Soft Machine - Bundles (1975) {Air Mail Japan MiniLP Blu-spec CD AIRAC-1667 rel 2012}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 259 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 99 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 320 Mb | 5% repair rar | 24-bit remaster
© 1975, 2012 Air Mail Recordings Japan / Harvest / Soft Machine | AIRAC-1667
Jazz / Jazz Rock / Canterbury Scene / Art Rock

Cardboard sleeve (mini LP) reissue from Soft Machine featuring the high-fidelity Blu-spec CD format (compatible with standard CD players) and 2012 24-bit remastering. The cardboard sleeve faithfully replicates the UK LP. Includes a booklet written in English and an inner bag. Part of a three-album Soft Machine Blu-spec CD cardboard sleeve reissue series featuring albums "Bundles," "Softs," and "Alive And Well Recorded In Paris." In the extensive discography of Soft Machine, albums from the band's mid- to late-'70s jazz-rock fusion period are generally afforded the least respect. Fans all have their favorite LPs representing a particular "classic" lineup – as well as opinions about other albums signifying that Soft Machine's best days were behind them. Some feel it was all over when Robert Wyatt left after Fourth (or stopped singing after Third), and it's probably even possible to find somebody somewhere who lost interest when Hugh Hopper replaced Kevin Ayers after Volume One.

Although there are those who nail their spirals to Vertigo as the prog label of choice, EMI’s Harvest certainly vies with it for pole position. With Harvest, the detail was everything. Loaded with the bizarre, striking and the strange, turns abounded like the Third Ear Band, Kevin Ayers and The Greatest Show On Earth. From the bad acid of Edgar Broughton’s There’s No Vibrations, But Wait through the squiffy majesty of Dave Mason’s You Shouldn’t Have Took More Than You Gave, to Be- Bop Deluxe’s future pop of Jet Silver and the Dolls Of Venus, this collection is impressive and nostalgic – its very lack of a house style providing its consistency.

Thomas Arne’s opera The Judgment of Paris (1742), a setting of William Congreve’s libretto of the same name, is known only from the printed score, but in this world premiere recording is performed with panache and authority by The Brook Street Band and a scintillating young cast led by sopranos Mary Bevan (Venus), Susanna Fairbairn (Pallas) and Gillian Ramm (Juno), with tenors Ed Lyon as the shepherd Paris and Anthony Gregory as Mercury, all under the expert direction of conductor John Andrews.

Bristol Archive Records have been telling the story of the incredibly diverse Bristol Music scene for many years now. The label has focused recently on the sub-culture of Mod, Modernism and Power Pop and recently gained considerable success with their release ‘The Bristol Mod Explosion 1979-1987’. They have also released albums from the same scene by The Reaction ‘Shapes of Things To Come’ and The Rimshots ‘A Way With Words 1980-1983’. Now we turn our attention to another undiscovered Bristol band, Thin Air who featured on the Mod Explosion and the song writing genius of a would be Paul Weller, John Lennon, Elvis Costello – Paul Sandrone.

The London Oboe Band have been around since the early 1980s yet this, remarkably, is their first recording. I dare say that ten years ago an ensemble of these potentially troublesome baroque wind instruments might not have been the happiest sound imaginable, but things have come a long way since then, and there is really no faulting the standard of playing on this disc. Led by one of the best baroque oboists around, the band plays with consistently accurate intonation, good blending and refinement of sound. Every one of their instruments is a modern copy, and if that means that the sheer exotic colouring of some of those wonderful old oboes is missing, the benefits in reliability are obvious right from the first notes.