yx

Kohei Matsunaga aka NHK yx Koyxen will release his next album on DFA Records in October. Exit Entrance is the Japanese techno artist’s first record for the veteran New York label. According to a press release, the album’s eight tracks cover “elegant arrangements and crisp drum breaks”. The album closes with ‘Outset’, a “somber hushed techno tune” dedicated to the late Mika Vainio, who collaborated with Matsunaga on several records over the years.

Led Zeppelin returned from a nearly two-year hiatus in 1975 with the double-album Physical Graffiti, their most sprawling and ambitious work. Where Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy integrated influences on each song, the majority of the tracks on Physical Graffiti are individual stylistic workouts. The highlights are when Zeppelin incorporate influences and stretch out into new stylistic territory, most notably on the tense, Eastern-influenced "Kashmir." "Trampled Underfoot," with John Paul Jones' galloping keyboard, is their best funk-metal workout, while "Houses of the Holy" is their best attempt at pop, and "Down by the Seaside" is the closest they've come to country. Even the heavier blues - the 11-minute "In My Time of Dying," the tightly wound "Custard Pie," and the monstrous epic "The Rover" - are louder and more extended and textured than their previous work…

The patronage of elite Highland pipers collapsed after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Worried that the classical music of the Gaels would fade away, the English-speaking gentry offered prize money for scientific notations. By 1797, Colin Campbell had written 377 pages in a unique notation based on the vocables of Hebridean ‘mouth music’, but – unintelligible to the judges in Edinburgh – Campbell’s extraordinary work of preservation has remained overlooked or misunderstood until now.