Two Against Nature — Steely Dan's Grammy winner for Album of the Year! The brilliance of Steely Dan on Hybrid SACD from Analogue Productions! Newly remastered from the original analog tape by Bernie Grundman direct to DSD!

The Brilliance of Steely Dan on Hybrid SACD! Steely Dan's Last Studio Album with Founding Member Walter Becker! Newly Remastered from the Original Analog Tape by Bernie Grundman Direct to DSD!

Evgueni Galperine’s ECM New Series debut is one of the most strikingly original and evocative albums of the year. A composer of Russian and Ukrainian heritage, living in Paris since 1990, Galperine is working with sound, texture and dynamics in new and powerfully expressive ways. As he explains, the sound world of Theory of Becoming represents an “augmented reality of acoustic instruments, created from recordings made with real and virtual instruments. The numerous transformations the instruments undergo allow me to capture their acoustic nature while also adding techniques and colours impossible to produce in reality…” Galperine’s compositions address wide-ranging subjects: from the resilience of hope in the face of destruction to meditations on the journey of the soul, as well as travels through space and through the magical forests of Max Ernst’s paintings.

Sony Music Entertainment Canada/Columbia Records have released LOVE AGAIN (Soundtrack from The Motion Picture). The 14-track album features five new Celine Dion songs, including the title track, “Love Again,” and the latest song, “I’ll Be.”

This “short diary (of loss)”, as drummer Sebastian Rochford calls it, is offered as “a sonic memory, created with love, out of need for comfort.” It is dedicated to Rochford’s father, Aberdeen poet Gerard Rochford, 1932-2019, and to his family. Seb, one of ten siblings, wrote most of the music shortly after Gerard’s death and delivers it here, in performances of deep feeling and hymn-like clarity, together with pianist Kit Downes. The final wistful piece, “Even Now I Think Of Her” was composed by Gerard Rochford. Sebastian explains: “It’s a tune my dad had sung into his phone and sent me. I forwarded this to Kit. He listened, and then we started.”

Reto Bieri’s solo album Contrechant, released in 2011, was widely praised for the Swiss clarinettist’s beauty of tone and his uncommon expressiveness with extended instrumental techniques. Quasi Morendo begins with a new exploration of one of the pieces featured on Contrechant, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Let Me Die Before I Wake (1982), with its “whisper-quiet sound world of harmonics, multiphonics and tremolandos” (The Guardian). Bieri is then joined by Finnish string quartet Meta4 for a profound interpretation of Johannes Brahms’s Quintet op 115 (1891). Inspired by Brahms’s friendship with clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld the quintet sounds freer, and more idyllic, than the composer’s earlier chamber music, yet is one of his most meticulously constructed works. The album closes with Gérard Pesson’s Nebenstück (1998), a ghostly re-arrangement of Brahms’s Ballade, Op. 10 No. 4.

The recording of "Cell-0" followed a four-year break between albums that gave the band — Eicca Toppinen, Perttu Kivilaakso, Paavo Lötjönen and Mikko Sirén, all of whom are classically-trained musicians — a fresh perspective and affected the way they approached the new music. The album sees them return to their roots and is the quartet's first instrumental album in 17 years, finding APOCALYPTICA challenging themselves to discover new flavours and colors in their respective instruments.

A blend of myth and memoir, First There Were Feathers is an exciting album in which Wendy McNeill’s folk noir roots and passion for storytelling have grown to include elements of Jazz and World music as well as echoes of Beatles, early Bjork and Radiohead.

This album is an extraordinary example of how music from two continents can merge into a noble work where concepts of cross-continental understanding make sense to everyone on both sides. MILTON IN SWEDISH is a breathtakingly beautiful cross-cultural love child.

Gerald Cleaver’s newest album, 22/23, journeys through genre, exploring the future and recalling history, in his most place-based album yet. Born and raised in Detroit, Cleaver is a product of the Motor City’s rich musical history. Long the manufacturing capital of America, Detroit citizens have never been afraid of imagination: technological innovation, a strong labor movement, techno-utopianism or afrofuturism. This spirit of innovation is felt on Cleaver’s newest album, particularly on songs like ‘31 Julys’ which builds on dynamic house beats, or ‘Cake’ which employs saxophone to compose a careening jazz track.

Yuksek's fifth album expands the universe created with 'Nosso Ritmo' (2019). Carrying on his love affair with Brazil, playing with percussions, putting the finishing touch on a powerful dance mix combining flights of disco, explosions of punk-funk, and feverish italo-disco sounds, this homage to the filtered house label Roulé is full of malicious acid loops and nods to Metro Area or languidly Balearic beats.

A brand new exclusive compilation, a unique collection of songs recorded in 1971 and 1972, not all of which were released at the time. This set includes the hits “It Must Be Love”, “Watch Me” and “Crying Loving Laughing Lying” (covered by Madness, Greta Van Fleet, and Rod Stewart respectively) along with the non-album B-sides.

Say Laura is the follow-up to Slowly Paradise (2018) which landed Chenaux on the cover of The Wire among other accolades. The new record by Eric Chenaux is his most immaculate and pristine. Say Laura perfectly incarnates the counter-intuitive interplay of instrument and voice that Chenaux has been revealing and revelling in throughout the past decade: his gently unhinged juxtaposition of resplendently smooth, seductively assured singing and puckish, frazzled, thoroughly destabilized guitar could come from no other musician.

Steely Dan were finally hitting their stride with July 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy. After setting the SD sonic template with November 1972’s debut LP on ABC Records, Can’t Buy Thrill, they reshuffled some personnel — for one thing, original co-lead vocalist David Palmer departed (albeit providing some backing vocals here and there), while keyboard whiz kid Donald Fagen took over essentially all the lead vocals fulltime, from this point forward — and the five-piece collective worked out much of their sophomore album’s core material live onstage during 1973’s hectic tour schedule, all of which added to Countdown’s inherent interactive grit.

“MINUETTO” di MIA MARTINI compie 50 anni! Una delle più belle canzoni italiane, scritte da Dario Baldan Bembo e con le parole di Franco Califano e arrangiamento e direzione orchestrale del Maestro Natale Massara, il 25 maggio festeggia 50 anni dalla sua pubblicazione. Era il 1973 quando usciva per la Dischi Ricordi “IL GIORNO DOPO”, l’album che contiene il brano capolavoro di una delle artiste più rappresentative della storia della musica italiana.