Single Seat Wisdom

On her full-length debut Discussions With Myself, Soren Bryce builds a world all her own—a sprawling dreamscape set to lushly detailed alt-pop, constructed with a newfound sense of self-possession. With her ethereal yet commanding vocals, the Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist sings of paper dolls and plane crashes with equal intensity, infusing the album with moments of bruising honesty and fragile wisdom.

Blazing flames, rigorous persecution und bloody torture – “The Book Of Fire”, the eleventh studio album by Hamburg’s success-rockers MONO INC., will be released on January 24th, 2020, and takes you to the time of burning stakes, where scholars ran for their lives and many existences, as well as the knowledge of centuries, got erased systematically – the time of the inquisition. The new concept album of MONO INC. sheds light onto the story of the “Book Of Fire”, a mystical artefact, which contains the secret knowledge of centuries and chose a young healer to be its new owner in the dark middle-ages.

Chandos Records is delighted to present this new recording of Elgar’s choral masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius and the enduringly popular song cycle Sea Pictures. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus are conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, a peerless Elgarian who this year was awarded the prestigious Elgar Society Medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the composer’s music. In Gerontius the soloists are Stuart Skelton, David Soar and Sarah Connolly, who also sings in Sea Pictures. This recording was made in the days leading up to their triumphant live performance of Gerontius in April of this year in which Skelton was praised as ‘the ideal tenor for the role of Gerontius’, Soar described as ‘an implacable, dark sounding Priest’ and Connolly, ‘a consummately polished Angel’ (The Guardian).

For all its intellect and adrenaline, metal is not generally known for being music’s most emotionally moving genre. While many prog fans would certainly point to Anathema and Pain of Salvation as prime examples of bands who know how to balance the rapturous with the raucous, those with even a passing familiarity with their output would note that these two European ensembles do so while straying fairly far from their metal roots. Many metal devotees would, however, surely point to two unapologetically metal bands who reliably inspire both manic headbanging and cathartic weeping – Fates Warning and Redemption – and it doesn’t take a metal scholar to note that these two American bands have a very important trait in common.