Looping.2016

Neil Cowley Trio - Spacebound Apes (2016) {Hide Inside Records HIDECD002}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 196 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 107 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 128 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2016 Hide Inside Records | HIDECD002
Jazz / Modern Jazz / Beyond Jazz / Progressive Jazz / Piano

The pop-aware UK jazz pianist Neil Cowley – frequently a thinker outside boxes – has not only spent three years developing this Arthur C Clarke-inspired concept album, but is releasing the results as a sheet-music “single”, an interactive website, a graphic novel and more. His hypnotic music has often resembled a soundtrack to visuals, but there’s more than enough distinction in this 11-piece tracklist to consider it a musical advance, not just a platform-extending conceptual one. Cowley and his regular jazz trio (assisted a little by Brian Eno FX artist Leo Abrahams), deliver a characteristic programme of sonorously looping song-hooks, pounding rock-piano patterns and baroque counterpoints, but this time in a more laid-back and low-lit manner.

Jerzy Antczak (as Georgius) made his career with Polish prog group Albion and kicked it up a notch with his first solo album "Ego, Georgius" released in 2014. This stellar opus was unanimously well received by the prog community, earning very high marks indeed and should have been album of the year in 2014. The critical praise was well deserved as the album was a total gem of atmospheric and modern prog, expertly created and performed by a tight crew of friends and colleagues. Jerzy's guitar mastery is never in doubt, a fluid and inspired conveyance of axe magic, but his use of synthesizers for maximum effect needs also to be admired.

Blending beautiful jazz guitar sensibilities with light jazz drumming and plenty of more spacious and dreamy atmospherics and textures, In-Dreamview’s music is at once ethereal but still plenty substantive and interesting enough to hold your attention. In particular, their most recent full-length, Reverie, feels like an aural equivalent of a gorgeous and comfortable patchwork quilt…

Just under a month after delivering their award-winning 2016 album Nonagon Infinity, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard took the stage at San Francisco’s The Independent for a set both wildly frenetic and meticulously executed. In one of their final club gigs before bursting onto the international scene—soon selling out amphitheaters and headlining festivals—the Melbourne septet laid down a breakneck performance that, in the words of SF Weekly, “made every organ ache just right.” Newly unearthed by ATO Records, Live in San Francisco ’16 captures an extraordinary moment in the band’s increasingly storied history, a 13-song spectacular likely to leave every listener awestruck and adrenalized.