Art is often informed by the life experiences of the artist, and what happens to them can impact their work in any number of ways. In November 2018, the singer and songwriter Joe Henry was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and as he wrestled with the prospect of mortality and the physically and emotionally taxing process of treatment, he practiced his own form of self-care – he wrote songs, a bunch of them, and then set about recording them at the home studio of a friend and collaborator, recording engineer S. Husky Höskulds. The product of these sessions, 2019's The Gospel According to Water, in many respects sounds like an ordinary Joe Henry album, with his rich voice and smartly crafted lyrics front and center, but the feel is decidedly different.

To describe saxophonist Greg Ward's Touch My Beloved's Thought as his magnum opus is to impede his development as a composer. Let's just say for many a jazz artist, if this recording were included in their discography, it would be their signature piece. For Ward, it just represents the possibilities.

L’Ensemble Beatus, spécialiste de musique ancienne, nous invite à un voyage aux sources du chant sacré d’Orient et d’Occident sur le thème de la lumière. Partant du répertoire grégorien aquitain (répertoire de l’abbaye de Saint-Martial de Limoges), il nous conduit vers des temps encore plus anciens où, avec le chant vieux-romain et ambrosien, les traditions des églises grecques et latines cohabitaient et dialoguaient. Un dialogue qu’actualise l’Ensemble Beatus avec la participation d’un chantre byzantin (Liban) et qu’il élargit aussi à d’autres cultures avec un chanteur de tradition perse.

Presenting radio with one of the best rock ballads ever, Cornerstone gave Chicago's Styx their big break with the number one single "Babe," which held that spot for two weeks in October of 1979. "Babe" is a smooth, keyboard-pampered love song that finally credited Dennis De Young's textured vocals…

It isn’t uncommon for musicians to use literature as inspiration for their compositions. The methods by which musicians approach this task differ not only from the artist’s individual style but also that of the writer whose work they will aurally illustrate. On their new Sunnyside release, saxophonist Miguel Zenón and pianist Laurent Coq challenge themselves to capture the breadth of character, form and perspective of Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar’s masterwork, Rayuela.

Five years after recording the live album that earns the Grand Prix Charles Cros Award ((Live@the Duc des Lombard/Cristal Records), it was about time to document the evolution of this atypical band with this second album of the Blowing Trio, the sixth under my name.

Pure witchery: barely twelve full moons after the release of their third opus, Dance With The Devil, Burning Witches return steeled and superior with The Witch Of The North, their most fiery and thunderous work to date. An album equipped to become a modern metal classic, a work of reference for honest, true steel. It’s obvious: anyone who manages to deliver such a Witch Hammer after just one year has to have the magic touch. Black magic that is! But that’s exactly what this band have always possessed. For five years the Swiss witches have been putting their occult mark on the international metal world. Not only holding their ground in a male-dominated field, they are also initiating a desperately needed change of power. The triptych consisting of Burning Witches (2017), Hexenhammer (2018) and Dance With The Devil (2020) instantly brought them to festivals like Wacken Open Air, Summer Breeze and Rock Harz Open Air, and the battle cries of these three records are still ringing.

Grandview Drive is Steckel’s most complete album to date and really shows his maturation process as a songwriter. The album is well constructed and filled with wonderful songs, fat tones, and stellar playing. It’s even more impressive when everything recorded on Grandview Drive consists of just two people…

This Blu-ray box contains the international acclaimed Bruckner cycle of Christian Thielemann, a “magician of the Bruckner sound”(Kurier on Symphony No. 5) and the Staatskapelle Dresden, whose own Bruckner tradition dates back more than a century. Outstanding reviews emphasize the exceptionally high artistic quality of the concerts: “Once again Thielemann proved to be the unrestricted ruler on his ancestral territory, German Romantic repertoire” (Hamburger Abendblatt on Symphony No. 2). Christian Thielemann “displays the full musical maelstrom of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3” (Münchner Merkur). “Another Bruckner triumph for Dresden” (Sächsische Zeitung on Symphony No. 6). “… one would have to be hard-hearted not to be touched by this heartfelt music” (Der Tagesspiegel on Symphony No. 8).

"Splinter In The Eye" is a concept album based on a modern-day dystopian story. "The desire to realise something like this was always there" says Jens Lueck, alias Single Celled Organism. In his youth, influenced by some older friends, he was inspired by Genesis and Pink Floyd and from the beginning his bands were to be found in the segment of Progressive/Art Rock. In the course of time the journey took him through different music-projects that he was involved in, for example, Soundtrack, World Music, Electronic, Art-Pop, but always it had to be a bit special.
The project name Single Celled Organism describes very well the formation process of the album. Some (of Jens Lueck’s) old friends also perform in the recordings: the Electric guitar players, Ingo Salzmann and Jan Petersen (ex Sylvan), with whom Jens Lueck had worked already on many projects in the past, the acoustic-guitar player, Dieter Koch, the recorder player, Volker Kuinke (among others Eloy)…

Off the Shelf is an interesting package of different recordings Keith has collected from over the years. Most of these have been bootlegged before but here you get them in a cleaned up nicely mastered package…

Why this superb recording has not garnered more attention is amazing: it is one of the very finest selections and performances of lesser-known but brilliant works by Stravinsky. Recorded in the terrific acoustic of the Snape Maltings Concert Hall (the home of the Aldeburgh Festival) in 1988, these delights are performed by Stravinsky specialist pianist Paul Crossley with the firm support of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the London Sinfonietta.