Mayhem

If Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Leon Redbone, Big Mama ThorThornton, Betty Boop & Bonnie and Clyde were in a band, this would be it, and this new album would be the story of their adventures in love & mayhem. All Original songs. Pure Swingin Fun!…

Lead guitarist Esa Holopainen and drummer Jan Rechberger formed the band Amorphis in Finland in 1990. To complete their lineup they recruited vocalist/guitarist Tomi Koivusaari and bassist Olli-Pekka Laine. They released a demo in 1991 called Disment of Soul. The demo was so successful in getting attention for the group that they acquired a record deal and released an EP the same year. They next released their first full-length album, The Karelian Isthmus, in 1992. The following year, their early demo recording session was released as Privilege of Evil…

Next month Depeche Mode will release Violator: The 12″ Singles, the seventh box set in the ongoing series which will showcases the remixes and B-sides across the four UK singles pulled from their 1990 album.

It has been said about HK Gruber that "throws off labels as fast as pundits can affix them. Neo-romantic, neo-tonal, neo-expressionistic, neo-Viennese: he isn’t any of these things, so much as a sentient composer who keeps responding to whatever musical stimulus, be it highbrow or lowbrow, 12-tone or 7-tone, bitter or sweet, that comes his way."

For more than two decades, the disciple that has most visibly carried on Sun Ra Arkestra’s legacy and sound is their musical director, alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, the iconic fire breather and life force that restored the Arkestra’s vitality in the massive vacuum left by Ra and John Gilmore’s death in the ‘90s. Allen turned 98 in 2022 and, as evidenced by Living Sky, his influence and leadership remain undiminished. Marking the Arkestra’s first new recording since their 2021 Grammy-nominated album Swirling, Living Sky was recorded on June 15, 2021 at Rittenhouse SoundWorks in Philadelphia and features a total of nineteen musicians, including a strings section. It was mixed and mastered by three-time Grammy winner Dave Darlington (Eddie Palmieri, Brian Lynch, Wayne Shorter).

This epic opera inspired by Shakespeare's tragic masterpiece was written in 1847, but did not receive its British premiere until 1938 when it was presented for the first time at Glyndebourne. The tragedy is a penetrating, concentrated, and harrowing study of the ambition of Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth. In the end both seem to verge on hallucination and madness as they recoil from the mayhem they have created around them. The production features an outstanding international cast, with the Greek baritone Kostas Paskalis in the title role and British star Josephine Barstow making an exciting debut as Lady Macbeth. Proceedings are conducted by the sympathetic baton of John Prithard.