Christophe Bailleau – Insight and Vision

Before I get to the promotional blurb on the website for Mahorka Records, I can give my thoughts on the album.  Christophe Bailleau’s Insight and Vision crosses so many genres that one would think, based on the description, that the music would be unlistenable.  Nothing could be further from the Continue Reading

Various Artists – Ostinato Records: Synthesizing the Silk Roads: Uzbek Disco, Tajik Folktronica, Uyghur Rock & Tatar Jazz from 1980s Soviet Central Asia

I know it must be troublesome to actually click on the link when you can read most of the review from the comfy confines of social media, but this time I implore you to actually click on the link and read the story of how this album came to be.  Continue Reading

The Brooklyn Sounds – Libre-Free

Though it has tones of underground and perhaps even a type of mafia culture (certainly the imagery of Hector Lavoe records could spread that misconception), salsa is fun music by its very nature.  It’s danceable, rather passionate at times, and full of horns.  The Brooklyn Sounds are a long-forgotten group Continue Reading

Various Artists – Staying: Leaving Records Aid to Artists Impacted by the Los Angeles Wildfires

2025 started with horrible fires in California.  From Staying’s Bandcamp site: “Everything has changed, and it is changing still. The early days of 2025 (an already baleful year, vis-a-vis America’s darkening political horizon) have wrought heretofore unimaginable destruction in the land we now call Los Angeles. The wildfires that began Continue Reading

Sverre Knut Johansen – Distant Shore (30th Anniversary Edition)

Thirty years is a very long time to manage missing the work of a critically acclaimed artist like Sverre Knut Johansen.  His work on this album sounds like a combination of the better aspects of New Age and early electronic music, a more relaxed version of progressive rock and a Continue Reading