Stone Harbour

Stone Harbour are two multi-instrumentalists creating a melancholic dreamlike state with songs fading in and out of the speakers, cavemen drums, primitive electronics and murky fuzz lurking in the background. The best tracks go into places no other albums reach…

Formed in 2019, award-winning violin and cello duo GAIA have rapidly won plaudits for their pioneering programming and bold and daring performances.Their debut album release features three works specially written for the duo, and also bears testimony to their championing of works by underrepresented and overlooked voices from classical music’s past.

Motion is an innovative new album by sound artists Toby Marks (Banco de Gaia) and Andrew Heath. Although the pair have collaborated on individual tracks and shows before, this is the first album they have worked on together. Toby and Andrew started making extensive field recordings on trips to the four corners of Britain during 2018. They went deep into Llechwedd Slate Caverns in Wales, explored Suttle Stone Quarries in Bournemouth, hopped on the Swanage Ferry to Poole Harbour, took to the air with the Yorkshire Gliding Club, floated down the Leeds & Liverpool Canal and rode the Bure Valley Railway in Norfolk. By the end they had a staggering hundred hours of audio in total, which they processed and transformed, blending piano, guitars and electronics, to produce a deeply meditative, endlessly unfolding collection…

It's been long time since Tom Waits recorded an album as saturated with tenderness as this one. The carny-barker noise merchant who has immersed himself in brokenness and reportage from life's seamy, even hideous underbelly for decades has created, along with songwriting and life partner Kathleen Brennan, a love song cycle so moving and poetic that it's almost unbearable to take in one sitting. Alice is alleged to be the "great lost Waits masterpiece." Waits and Brennan collaborated with Robert Wilson on a stage production loosely based on Alice Liddell, the young girl who was the obsession and muse of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books. The show ran in Europe for a time and the production's 15 songs were left unrecorded until now…

Although this was Bob Welch's last album with the band he had worked with since 1971, it sounds like he's at his peak. Pared down to a foursome for the first and (as of 2002) only time since the addition of Danny Kirwan, both Welch and Christine McVie contribute some of their finest songs. Bolstered by sympathetic self-production and imaginative, often aggressive arrangements that include brassy horns on the title track (a blatant but failed attempt at a hit single), the album is one of their most cohesive yet diverse…