• Music

    Various Artists – The Jewel Garden: Clarities

    May 9, 2024 - By 

    Absolute respect to the estimable Ernesto Diaz-Infante for telling me about this noble cause.  Foxy Digitalis has a nearly 3o-year track record, first as a xeroxed zine, and the in its current digital incarnatiom, of reviewing what I would rate as the absolute best of non-mainstream music.  This compilation, featuring Ernesto, Lawrence English, Yann Novak, zàke, Stephen Vitiello and a number of names who are new to me, but no less impressive, have contributed tracks for the purpose of helping to keep Foxy Digitalis up and running.  Do consider a donation.  The magazine, as I hope is the case with…

  • Music

    Rudy Adrian – Reflections On A Moonlit Lake

    March 22, 2024 - By 

    Rudy Adrian has been at the forefront of New Age music since the early 2000s, and shamefully, I lost contact with his releases.  It’s quite nice to catch up with him on his latest release, a collection of relaxing ambient music to soothe your mind a bit, but also to enjoy as proper electronic music.  Rudy remains a craftsman.

  • Music

    Steve Roach and Robert Rich – Waves of Now

    January 27, 2024 - By 

    From the legendary duo’s Bandcamp site: “We present this soulful 30 year reunion between two stalwarts of Ambient-Electronic music in its entirety, exactly as it occurred. Steve and Robert answered the urge for unification after a very long orbit and 40 year friendship, reuniting and engaging their collective creative process, fueled with decades of individual innovations, genre defining releases and worldwide concerts. Recorded live to a sold-out audience on December 5, 2023 at the Club Congress, Tucson Arizona. The set flowed through solo and duo passages, culminating in pieces from the classics Strata and Soma. The energy was electric throughout…

  • Music

    Dimitar Dodovski – D​é​rive

    September 4, 2023 - By 

    Norman Records does a far more in-depth job introducing the world to the music of North Macedonian composer Dimitar Dodovski a wee bit better than I could.  From their promo sheet: “”Dimitar Dodovski approaches his craft of granular synthesis from a melodic perspective at most definitely the warmer end of the drone spectrum. Opening track ‘I’ introduces, of all things, mallet-struck chimes amongst the digital layers. The mallets recur on the following track (‘II’), but only when you least expect them. Staccato synth rises from a mist-draped lake of sound, each milky chord change rung by a bell. Pixelated textures…

  • Music

    Shane Beck & Michael Brückner – Extended Sigh

    June 9, 2023 - By 

    There’s little I can add to my dear friend, the Last American Poet, Shane Beck, and heir to the Berlin-School throne, Michael Brückner, so I will let the gentlemen speak for themselves.  You can read further at this release’s Bandcamp site: In what turned out to be a spontaneous burst of inspiration, poet / lyricist / spoken word artist Shane Beck and electronica composer Michael Brückner created this circle of five pieces together that are based as much around the mystical splendor of nature as on the vast inner landscape of human longing for eternal love, spiritual transcendence and integration of…

  • Music - Qobuz

    Pekka Pohloja – Jokamies (Everyman)

    December 23, 2022 - By 

     Jokamies (‘Everyman’ in Finnish) is a collection of tracks for a television series of the same name composed by the Finnish bassist Pekka Pohjola.  After his work with the hard-rock/progressive outfit Wigwam, he ventured into jazz fusion (perhaps New Age as well) and made some of the most impressive albums in the genre during the 1970s and 1980s, culminating, in my estimation, in this album.

  • Music

    Irmán – Fü​r Eline

    September 10, 2022 - By 

    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.”

  • Music

    Valentina Goncharova – Ocean – Symphony for Electric Violin and other instruments in 10+ parts

    August 27, 2022 - By 

    Russian violinist Valentina Goncharova is having something of a renaissance these days.  She had an album come out earlier in the year which were unpublished (you can find Volume 1 here and Volume 2 here). Now, we have a full album of recordings last heard on Leo Records many years ago as part of a box set called Document – New Music From Russia – The 80’s, a pinnacle of Russian avant-garde music.  The recordings have been lovingly remastered, and the drony sound is magnificent.