Dune 2022

The industry’s leading roto and paint tool is now packed with major features for compositing. Silhouette 2022 delivers 400+ nodes including premier plugins Sapphire, Mocha Pro, and Particle Illusion wrapped in one integrated node-based package. Silhouette has been integral to Hollywood’s biggest titles for over fifteen years and recently made its mark on Dune, Spiderman: No Way Home, Free Guy, and The Mandalorian. Designed by visual effects artists, Silhouette has been recognized with prestigious Academy and Emmy technical awards and is a member of the Netflix Production Technology Alliance.

The Expanding Universe is Martin Kennedy from All India Radio's new project. Exploring the hazier psychedelic side of ambient with references to Berlin school and a 1970s New Age aesthetic, The Expanding Universe debut album 'One' is a cosmic journey into inner space.

For his sixth collaboration with the [French] label Artalinna, Vestard Shimkus invites us to discover an eclectic selection of his works for solo piano.

Silva Screen Records will release a soundtrack album for the BBC natural history series Frozen Planet II.

Adding politically charged spoken-word lyrics to instrumental jazz needs to be done with care, because if sloganeering is tedious to listen to once, it becomes unbearable on repeated exposure. The record containing it drops off one's playlist. Counterproductive or what? The British saxophonist and rapper Soweto Kinch, however, has pulled the trick off many times. From Conversations With The Unseen (Dune, 2003) through to The Black Peril (Soweto Kinch Recordings, 2019), Kinch has made the combination work because of the poetic rather than agitprop nature of his words and also because he does not overload his music with them, letting his saxophone do much of the talking.

There’s something about the scenes outside of the capital cities that allows an additional spark of individualism and creativity to emerge.

Traveling the Roman Empire is a matchless grand tour covering an astonishing range of landscapes, cultures, and history. Even if you have explored many of these places before, Darius will give you fresh insights and a new appreciation for the remarkable achievements of a single-minded city on the Tiber that had the vision, discipline, and institutions to conquer the known world and make it prosper.

At the beginning of their career, Level 42 was squarely a jazz-funk fusion band, contemporaries of fellow Brit funk groups like Atmosfear, Light of the World, Incognito, and Beggar & Co. By the end of the '80s, however, the band – whose music was instantly recognizable from Mark King's thumb-slap bass technique and associate member Wally Badarou's synthesizer flourishes – had crossed over to the point where they were often classified as sophisti-pop and dance-rock, equally likely to be placed in the context of Sade and the Style Council as was any group that made polished, upbeat, danceable pop/rock.