First released in 1999, this well-played, superbly-recorded album makes a near-perfect single-disc introduction to the music of Einojuhanni Rautavaara (1928-2016), not only the most significant Finnish composer after Sibelius, but very probably among the finest of all later-twentieth century masters. Rautavaara is undoubtedly the greatest composer most people have never heard of, and that's a shame, though, one might hope, records such as this will go some way towards remedying so glaring an injustice.

One of most unusual Russian musicians, Arkady plays French horn, flugelhorn, alpenhorn and many more unusual wind instruments. A native of Moscow, at the age of six Arkady Shilkloper began playing brass instruments and studied flugelhorn at the Moscow Military Music Academy until 1974. From 1978 to 1985 he was a member of the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre and the "Bolshoi Brass Quintet". With this world-famous ensemble and as a member of the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra from 1985 to 1989 he undertook numerous worldwide concert tours. Alongside with that he started playing traditional jazz with double-bass player Mikhail Karetnikov and avant-garde jazz in saxophonist Sergei Letov's band Three O (1985-1990). Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union Shilkloper has worked independently both as a solo performer and, since 1991, with Alperin and Starostin in the Moscow Art Trio and in other formations…

When it comes to quality live material, there's never been a better time to be a King Crimson fan than the 2010s. In addition to the exhaustive 40th anniversary boxes, there have been multiple releases from the 2014-2015 seven-piece band culminating with Radical Action to Unseat the Hold of Monkey Mind, a set that features every song performed on the tour in excellent audio and video quality.
The vast majority of the set was recorded in Japan, with other shows filling in on the songs that weren't performed there. Every show was recorded in high-quality audio and video with a multi-camera shoot, so there's no difference in quality. While the band doesn't improvise as extensively as they have in the past, a comparison of the solos shows that they aren't phoning in their performances, either…

With his 9th studio album, Moonlight Love Affair, Austria's Parov Stelar returns to his exploration of the love affair between electronic dance music and organic elements. Moonlight Love Affair is meant to represent a relationship in which there are no boundaries. Longtime fans will find familiarity in tracks like "Candy Girl" or "Dirty Mariposa" with their retro-chic aesthetics, while vocalist Mani Hoffman (of Supermen Lovers fame) ignites "Better Believe" and "Black Bird." "Toxic Lover" revels in the use of a sample from the now-ubiquitous Shangri-Las' song "Remember (Walking in the Sand)." As with his last musical efforts, the artwork is done by Parov Stelar himself, this time with a captivating piece entitled "I Can See Music, I Can Hear Art." Moonlight Love Affair shows all facets of the artist: raw and unvarnished, thereby vulnerable, powerful and beautiful.

On Ravenchild, Maddy Prior teamed up again with keyboard player Nick Holland and multi-instrumentalist Troy Donockley, whose arsenal included Uilleann pipes and low whistle, as she had on her previous album, Flesh & Blood. The centerpiece of the album was a six song suite dubbed "In the Company of Ravens" (also the title of the first song), a series of Prior originals concerning the carrion birds who give the word "ravenous" its meaning. This was sometimes gritty stuff, as Prior described the birds' eating habits, though their mating habits were far more inspiring. The album also contained a three song suite, "With Napoleon in Russia," tracing that famous historical defeat. Then there was "Rigs of the Time," a condemnation of contemporary media culture set to a traditional melody, and the album concluded with what Prior herself described as the eerie traditional song "Great Silkie of Sules Skerry." The music and Prior's singing could be haunting, but Ravenchild was an album of disquieting material, whether the subject was aviary, historical, or contemporary.

On this recording of The Seven Words, the Rosamunde String Quartet offers a compelling rendition of one of Haydn's most complex compositions. The Seven Words was originally composed for a full orchestra as a series of seven adagios, which were meant to be interludes during a congregation's meditations on the last seven words of Christ on the Cross. Haydn struggled with a way to compose seven connected pieces of music that were solemn and yet varied enough to keep the listener from getting bored. The members of the Rosamunde Quartet are technically brilliant as they demonstrate the composer's solutions to this musical puzzle. Even though the tempo is slow, they never let the music become ponderous or oppressive. But to Haydn, The Seven Words was more than just an aural conundrum. He felt the composition was perhaps his most sacred work, and the quartet plays this music with reverence for the composer's spiritual intentions. This is a profound piece of music, and the Rosamunde does it justice on each of its many levels.

Bob Dylan and the Band both needed the celebrated reunion tour of 1974, since Dylan's fortunes had been floundering since Self Portrait and the Band stumbled with 1971's Cahoots. The tour, with its attendant publicity, definitely returned both artists to center stage, and it definitely succeeded, breaking box office records and earning great reviews. Before the Flood, a double-album souvenir of the tour, suggests that these were generally dynamic shows, but not because they were reveling in the past, but because Dylan was fighting the nostalgia of his audience - nostalgia, it must be noted, that was promoted as the very reason behind these shows. Yet that's what gives this music such kick - Dylan reworks, rearranges, reinterprets these songs in ways that are still disarming, years after its initial release…

A concept album exploring themes of broadcast communications, Radio-Activity marked Kraftwerk's return to more obtuse territory, extensively utilizing static, oscillators, and even Cage-like moments of silence to approximate the sense of radio transmission; a pivotal record in the group's continuing development, the title track – the first they ever recorded in English – is their most fully realized electro-pop effort to date, while "The Voice of Energy" precipitates the robot voice so crucial to their subsequent work.