Mountain

Singer and songwriter Nina Nesbitt's mixture of pop-inspired melodies, part-acoustic instrumentation, and yearning relationship angst saw her cast as the female counterpart to Ed Sheeran when she was invited to open shows for him as a teen.

One of the first all digital (DDD) recordings ever produced, Mountain Dance was originally conceived as a “direct-to-disc” project for JVC that was later released on Grusin's own (GRP) label (very similar to the Sheffield Labs projects of the late 70's/early 80's).

Taos holds a special place in my heart and Taos is particularly beautiful in June, the month of this album’s original release. Yes, one can still anticipate the occasional out-of-season snow flurry, but the trees and flowers are in full bloom, the 350-year-old irrigation ditches are flowing with snowmelt from Taos Mountain and the blue skies and desert views stretch into infinity.

The spearheads of Israeli avantgarde and progressive oriental metal are back with their most diverse album yet!

Part travelogue, part response to the current, turbulent climate, "Do Right" gives voice to the deeply nested anxiety of modern times attempting to offer a balm. Nature, it seems, is where the band often goes to calibrate it's moral compass so frequently upended by the daily news-cycle. Sugar Candy Mountain invites you to join them on this journey singing "There's a quiet place I go when I need to find my way/ There's a quiet place inside/ Come on in just knock and a door will open". Musically, the band remains rooted in 60's and 70's rock, with their signature honey sweet vocals.

Chris Forbes' music has enriched the New York jazz and improvising scene for some time, gracing the ensembles and recordings of Jason Hwang and Matt Lavelle, among so many others. He is simultaneously iconoclast and iconodule. His musical world is vast, as is evident on this, his first entirely solo piano album Mountain Ocean Mirror Sky. Each piece is its own realm of beauty and meaning - yet one is astonished to discover that each piece is entirely improvised. These resplendent, fully realized compositions did not exist before Chris sat down to record.

When the Mountain Goats got together in March 2020, it was to make not one album, but two. The idea was to again work with Matt Ross-Spang, the dashing Memphis wunderkind. Matt pitched we spend a week at Sam Phillips Recording, his home base in Memphis, followed by another at the storied Fame Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a plan that dovetailed nicely with John’s notion of corralling these songs into two complementary batches: one light, one dark.

Austrian composer Thomas Larcher’s new album features premiere recordings of three strongly contrasting works. The Times has hailed Larcher’s music as a world “of haunting landscapes and dreams, stylistically disparate but fused by the composer’s astonishing ear and quizzical attitude to traditional forms”, a description borne out by the compositions here. The Living Mountain, for soprano and ensemble, draws upon the memoir of the Scottish poet and nature writer Nan Shepherd.

Maria Grenfell’s music has been described as ‘expansive, effusive and energetic’, ‘magic’, and ‘refreshingly groovy’. Her chamber music is played around the world. Her orchestral music has been commissioned and performed by all the major symphony orchestras in Australia and New Zealand; this album presents world premiere recordings of six of Grenfell’s best-loved orchestral works, exploring subjects as diverse as Maori legend, Tasmania’s natural beauty, the struggles of immigrant workers, and 18th-century explorer Matthew Flinders’ extraordinary cat Trim!