Expand your taste in music. Based in Beijing, China.
What a tribute from Irmán, a composer from Portugal. From his Bandcamp website:
“Für Eline is a love song, a testimony to my relationship with my wife. We’ve been together for over 20 years, we have a beautiful daughter and we’ve been through many things, both good and bad. Since mid-2020 my wife has been a champion, guiding me and our house while I’m physically unable due to depression. This song is my gift to her.”
Robert Scott Thompson is yet another friend of our blog who has graced our pages with a new single. From his Bandcamp site:
An experimental track from the sessions for “From a Language of Light,” imagined for release near the close of 2022. Features Sarah Lock on vocals and percussion performed by Stuart Gerber.
As is noted on the page, “this is a special mix from the title track and will not be on the official CD release,” so this is a one-off with an elegant sound.
The legendary Habibi Funk will be releasing another scorching release on October 10, 2022. The release will feature a singer called Maha, who hails from Egypt and who worked with Salah Ragab’s Cairo Jazz Band as their main vocalist. There is an amazing backstory you can find on the release’s Bandcamp site, but the most important paragraphs can be read below:
Some years ago, we had released “Al Massrieen,” music which is the passion project of their composer, Hany Shenoda. Most of the music of this band was released by the Sout El Hob label and after our reissue they were happy with the extra visibility allowed us access to their back catalogue to assess whether there might be more projects we might be interested in. Maha’s “Orkos” was immediately a stand out album. A strong and energetic voice equally grounded in jazz as well as Egyptian vocal traditions, singing over instrumentals that offer a very wide range: from the funk sounds of “Law Laffeina El Ard” excursions into Latin music in “Orkos,” to the moody mellow sounds of “We Mesheet.” Nobody at the label really remembered much about the release or Maha herself. At the same time, we knew that this was an album we wanted to turn into a re-release.
While we could license the music from Sout El Hob, we didn’t want to commit to this project without the blessings and involvement by the woman who created it. We called her in late 2021 and she was clearly surprised to have someone call about music she recorded more than 40 years ago. But she also seemed interested in the idea to bring her music back to people’s attention and so the next time we were in Cairo we planned to meet. A few weeks later we were speaking with our friend Moataz, who runs the Disco Arabesquo project and showed him this great new album we found and to our surprise he knew the album, since having found a tape copy of it a year or two ago in Cairo. Thus, it was an obvious decision to team up for a collaboration for this project.
The avant-garde music scene lost an incredible talent in the form of Jaimie Branch, who passed away on August 22nd at the age of 39. The blog’s friend, Noël Akchoté offers a lovely tribute album by transcribing the trumpeter’s work into works for solo acoustic guitar. It’s a raw album even by improv standards.
This is a weird little gem. The three tracks on this album point not only to La Compagnia Digitale’s roots as an Italian progressive rock band, but there are even elements of the Berlin School which would make Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream proud. Think of this as a more Krautrock-infused Goblin.
Our friends at Fancy Music are releasing consistently good music in the contemporary classical, jazz and progressive rock fields. Ivan Grebenschikov composes music which manages to combine all three genres effortlessly, and adds in free jazz, rock and Latin American music into a fine stew.
Our dear friends at Unexplained Sounds Group in Italy continue to delight us at MYNTH! This is yet another collection of the best of ambient music from around the world – this time concentrating in Greece. Artists such as Costis Drygianakis, Savvas Metaxas and adarcah lead the way, but every artist in this comp contribute to avant-garde music mightily, and it is again that we thank our friend Raffaele Pezzella for bringing us such amazing and challenging music from all corners of the Earth.
Our friends at áMARXE Records out of Galicia in Spain have released a really heavy album influenced by Canterbury Music, Zappa and jazz-rock in general. There are so many twists and turns in Beat Love Oracle‘s album that it’s one I’d have trouble finding words to describe, so it is best to listen to the music directly and be amazed.
Hands down, this is my favorite Finnish progressive rock album. I was introduced to Pekka Pohjola early in life, and now that I am listening to this album in my middle age, I can hear how beautifully it aged. Pekka’s bass is at the forefront, of course, and his playing is masterful, but the whole crew balance progressive rock of the 1970s with jazz fusion and touches of art-rock. I can’t say enough good about this disc.