This has been a nice music week for me. There’s been class prep, grading, and emailing which gave me time to enjoy some music while doing relatively lower brain power work. This week, I decided to celebrate the two classic 1966 Charles Lloyd albums: Dream Weaver and Forest Flower: Charles Lloyd at Monterey. The latter was recorded at the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 8, 1966. The former recorded in March of that year and released during the same summer. The albums featured Lloyd on sax…

I’m off to SmashingConf Freiburg! 🎉

Born from Culture travels the world and tells stories of culture, told through movement. As part of its global film series created by James Fenwick, it recently travelled to Georgia, where this video was made. It features the State Academic Song and Dance Ensemble “Apkhazeti” which is one of the most prominent folk ensembles associated with Abkhazia (part of Georgia, not part of Georgia – very much depends who you ask). The ensemble was founded in 1931 in Sukhumi and is dedicated to preserving…

From Kent, and an established member of the modern English folk scene, James Kerry is well known for his passionate, rhythmic playing rooted in folk dance tradition. Having begun his musical journey at a young age he quickly progressed and has since played extensively in the Morris and ceilidh circuits and performed with many bands and groups including Foot Down, and the Hilltop Ceilidh Band, both of which he is a founding member of. As was the case for so many of us, the Covid pandemic of…

If this track sounds familiar, it’s because it was released by the Swedish artist Kasbo in 2018.

Bob Fischer and Georgy Jamieson are back for a chat about the NEW SEASON and all the exciting shows coming to your TV this autumn. But where is The Kraken??

I bought a viola. It was time. My new viola A viola is like a violin, but the strings are tuned C, G, D, A, where a violin’s strings are G, D, A, E, making a viola a fifth lower. In a string ensemble, like a quartet or string orchestra, its function is that of the alt/contralto in a choir, the first voice "under" the soprano. Indeed, in Dutch, the instrument is called altviool. In German, it's called a bratsche, after the sound it makes when you accidentally sit on one. Its default key is…

What is a song that instantly energizes you? Thumping bass, catchy melody, quintessential dance music always gives me energy. It’s why club nights were such a highlight of my youth. These days, energising tracks are for things like exercising which brings a similar endorphin high to those club nights —without the come down— and there are few bands better than The Chemical Brothers. Seeing them live is always fun, and coupled with this track I can already feel my energy levels rising, ready to…

I wrote about personal music libraries on Day 2, but I'm just talking about music in general now. I think music is so commonplace and accessible that we often forget what a strange miracle it is. How would you explain music to a completely alien being that had no concept of it, if you were communicating over text and couldn't just play some for them? Would you talk about harmonics? Would you describe the mathematical rules that most music follows? Would you talk about the various cultural…

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all. ▰ Gorgeous dusky miasmas provide the two advance-listen tracks from Chris Herbert’s upcoming Grisaille, due out November 18 on Lawrence English’s Room 40 label. There are the full-on dark drones of “Uommibatto” (“Wombat” in Italian, I believe), and then there’s fantastic “Image Hunger,”…

Tokyo’s Form@ Records have just released their latest compilation, “Art Form 5”. The first 2 editions of this highly acclaimed series originally hit Japanese stores in the late 90s, and, due pressure from collectors, they were recently reissued, globally, by WRWTFWW. While Form@ initially ceased operations in 2003, the imprint began business again in 2020. “Art Form 3” then appeared in February of last year, followed by the fourth instalment in August. This, fifth, volume collects 12 fresh…

Melody Maker, 1982

Sam Fender & Olivia Dean taken from the “Rein Me In” video After several weeks of waiting in the wings, the gorgeous “Rein Me In” by English singer-songwriter Sam Fender and English singer-songwriter Olivia Dean (who won the Best New Artist Grammy earlier this year) ascends to the top of my chart. The song is a re-recorded duet version of the original from Fender’s third studio album People Watching. The original version of “Rein Me In” was released in June 2025 as the sixth single from the…

[1975]So these guys didn't always miss. This was their debut single and their one and only hit in America reaching #16. I mean it shoulda been number one for two weeks at least...Hooks galore in a crunchy power pop style with a great glam-y caveman beat and an undercurrent of chunky chugging boogie.Stunning infectious pure pop that outdoes Cheap Trick and Big Star at their own game...... doesn't get better than this!

Taking a short break from being spitting mad about AI, to just being sad about how it never needed to be like this

F.G. Rathbun, courtesy Rathbun-Rathbone-Rathburn Family Historian A brief one today, about a peripheral feature in early Virginia Glee Club history. Frederick G. Rathbun (1862–1903) conducted the Glee Club for a single season, but lived an unusually varied and rich life in music outside of his experience with the Glee Club. Rathbun was born in South Lee, Massachusetts, which is about a fifteen-minute drive from Tanglewood, in 1862, and attended New England Conservatory, making him one of only a…

I should have been at the Proms last night as well as tonight. Instead, we’ve gone to Winchester. Last night I should have been seeing a celebration of English music, but instead I was eating fried rice in Winchester. Tonight I’ve travelled from Winchester to see the world’s greatest living pianist, and I’m writing this on a delayed train back to Winchester that is going slower than a bicycle. It’s a problem with a broken train blocking the main track.Because I was perhaps the last person to…

Christian Medice No Hands The latest single by NYC-based and Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer Christian Medice, No Hands sees the artist weave a nostalgic course through layered instrumentation. Low bass and ethereal chords establish the scene before gentle guitars meander. Medice is no stranger to diverse genres, having featured as a co-writer on Pink’s album Beautiful Trauma, alongside production credits spanning pop, alternative, indie, and K-Pop. Here, on No Hands, there is…

It occurred to me that the telephone wires looked like the lines on a musical score.The magnificent clouds speak for themselves, of course. First Movement: Exposition First Movement: Development First Movement: Recapitulation Second Movement: Lyrical Third Movement: Dance Fourth Movement: Finale

Radiohead’s Creep is one of my favourite songs, so when a cover pops up in my feed, I feel obliged to give it a listen (even though that word seems to have been permanently excised from the song, which makes it lose half its power). Here’s another version by The Harvard-Radcliffe Veritones – it’s done a cappella and, well I’m not sure. You make up your own mind. I did enjoy it – I have to say, but perhaps it’s just a little too smooth for such an angsty song. There is no doubt that the…

Three more weeks at number one from 21st May 1988Well, this is an interesting case for chart pedants (and possibly nobody else). It might be tempting to treat “Blue Monday ‘88” as a new release, but it shared its catalogue number (FAC73) with the original single, so was treated by all chart compilers as a simple re-entry. Whether you went out and bought the original twelve-inch of this, or the new 7 inch version, or the CD Video single, or any other permeation of it, it was logged towards the…

Did you sing along to anything today? Describe the moment. My son, 4, has discovered the movie Madagascar. Which is fine because the endless repeats of Bluey (which I dearly love) are starting to grate a little. My memories of this song take me back to my early 20s, the local nightclub, the “everyone back to ours” culture (our flat was closest to the club), of waking up to discover who had fallen asleep on the living room floor. And hangovers. But mostly dancing, of buying into the repetition,…

How many times have contemporary bands in the underground been described with words like: cavernous, filthy, occult, ancient, rotten... I myself am guilty of the same descriptive action, and won't avoid it in future writings either. Artists orbiting around this anti-sphere are often competent at reproducing the necessary atmosphere implied by those adjectives, and fewer artists' output sometimes makes them feel inadequate. For the relatively short-lived Portland, Oregon outfit named Triumvir…

Djrum – “Psychic Video” Lechuga Zafiro – “Gnoca” Solitary Dancer – “De Profundis” The post New Hots Hots 30 first appeared on Palms Out Sounds.

Upon first listening, you could be forgiven for assuming that Jour D'été is an obscure, failed pop record from the mid-1960s that has been rediscovered and reissued by Germany's Soundflat Records. Everything from its psychedelic-tinged guitar lines to the artwork that adorns the release's cover evokes that golden age of European pop-rock. In reality, though, Fleur is firmly rooted in the 21st-century, albeit with a natural knack for imbuing her work with the enduring style and universal appeal…

29 August 2026 in Melbourne, supported by Gusto Gusto and Trickbox x Flash Poetry.Bit slow off the mark posting this one!We headed out to Thornbury to see (and meet for the first time) the infamous Eggs playing saxophone with the algebraically inelegant Ungus Ungus Ungus (a.k.a. 3Ungus). I didn't pay much attention to the support bands, which is not like me, but we were right up the back and busy chit-chatting. So I don't have anything to say about them.This was my first visit to Shotkickers…

At a moment when peace can feel less a condition than a distant country, Peace Anthems asks where the journey toward it might begin. Conceived by producer Sun Chung to mark the fifth anniversary of Red Hook Records, the album gathers artists from across the label’s community around that urgent question. Their answers offer no settled definition and make no claim to resolution. Instead, they open a field of possibilities in which peace becomes connection and reconciliation, transformation and…

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