Following the first two ECM Special albums from the Japanese Trio Records imprint, this subsequent volume is the series’ first proper compilation, drawing finished tracks from a handful of canonical albums in the label’s history under the subtitle New Music in Guitar. That phrase is already a small philosophical disturbance. Not new music for guitar, as one might expect, but in guitar, as though the instrument were an interior world all to itself. Across these selections, the guitar becomes a…
Richard Norris’ latest album is a collection of 12 tracks composed as scores for various home movies. Films that Norris sourced from folks via social media. Wonky, wobbly, out of focus, reels holding blurry but beloved memories, that give the set its title, “8mm“. In keeping with the concept, the production’s vibe aims for “Lo-Fi”. Keys and synths buzz with reverb and distortion, and everything possess a kind of broken beauty. Built from simple refrains, with complexity created by notes being…
Steve Martin, grey-haired at 33, is raised by a Black family in Mississippi (mom from Ganja & Hess, dad from Across 110th Street) until one day he hears white music on the radio and goes to St. Louis to find its source. He gets hired by Jackie Mason at a gas station until madman M. Emmet of Blood Simple chases him into a traveling circus, where he’s taken home by the daredevil (Catlin Adams, later a director who discovered Ben Affleck). He meets cornet player Bernadette Peters and they move out…
Ep #248 Live at React Miami with guests Jason Lengstorf, Kent C. Dodds, Tanner Linsley and Francesco Ciulla Robbie and I chat with 4 guests in 1 episode! Topics span things like Lambo's, MCP vs OpenClaw, agents building agents, polymorphic UI libraries, SDD + state machines, how Prolog is the most hated programming language, and whatnot. ⤷ whiskey.fm · youtube · spotify · apple Presented by GitKraken
A clear favorite. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize I’ve been after this one for a long time but never pulled the trigger on a copy. Circumstances be damned cause when this pristine copy showed up recently I had to get it, finally. We have Manne leading a group consisting of Coleman Hawkins on tenor and piano (on one tune for the first time ever), Hank Jones on…
A few months back Car Seat Headrest announced (and digitally released) a partially re-recorded and reshuffled version of their breakthrough album Teens of Denial (2016), to the fandom's collective "but why?" Now that reaction was largely on the back of the rumour mill behind the changes and the general uncertainty on why this album needed any re-recording to begin with, and it wasn't because of the mere idea of the group going back to retouch old favourites. After all, that's just part of what…
Reed studied with Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse; Schwartz started a Ph.D. in philosophy with Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard, though he didn’t finish it. Whitehead was a teacher of Bertand Russell, who taught Wittengstein.
JAZZ ON A HOT SUMMER’S DAY – Nothing as hot as the soul of jazz. The heatwaves around the world made me think about some hot tunes from soul jazz’s greatest. Might get you through the day and night. Here’s Brother Jack McDuff and Hot Barbecue with his band, the hottest organ combo ever, featuring George Benson, Red Holloway and Joe Dukes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-ZZW_qCzNs&list=RDM-ZZW_qCzNs&start_radio=1 George Braith (still out there!) and Hot Sauce, featuring Grant Green, Big John…
The temperature of 36.7C recorded at Merryfield, Somerset, represents a new June maximum record for the UK. It is also now the 7th= hottest day ever recorded, matching the 1911 record at Raunds, Northamptonshire, that stood for nearly 80 years as the UK’s hottest day. The top 10 list below shows the day. What sets it apart is that the Merryfield temperature, a site 119 miles SW of Kew Gardens, was some 5.1C hotter than Kew which recorded just 31.6C! Kew Gardens, and other London stations, are…
A friend just told me he can’t listen to Radiohead anymore over Palestine. As the death toll in Gaza climbed, the band stayed mostly quiet. And the guitarist, Jonny Greenwood — married to an Israeli artist — kept playing shows in Tel Aviv. There were calls to boycott the band’s tour; frontman Thom Yorke brushed them off as a “witch hunt”.Now, as a tactic, boycotting has a solid track record, and it makes sense to me. What doesn’t is its distant, poorer cousin: the reflex to shun artists we…
Jeff Parker ETA IVtet - Happy Today (album-length concert film)Since we talked about SML yesterday, let’s talk about that other band that saxophonist Josh Johnson and bassist Anna Butterss play in — the unbelievable ETA IVtet, led by guitarist extraordinaire Jeff Parker and rounded out beautifully by drummer Jay Bellerose. Ever since that first recording appeared on Eremite Records a few years back, I’ve been captivated by the IVtet’s radical grooves; the latest release, Happy Today, only…
I’m doing a show on 19th September at the Wardrobe Theatre in Bristol! I’ll be playing songs from my album Ridiculous Songs for Kids! and there will be participatory chaos and musical merriment aplenty :) More info and tickets available here!
Woooo I’ve made some Yoto cards of my kids album! Now your kids can get down whenever they flippin’ like! My kids have been absolutely rinsing it, which I’m chuffed about (while also growing sick of the sound of my own voice) 🤪 Limited number available exclusively on my bandcamp. Buy now on Bandcamp! Your browser does not support the video tag.
Me, on stage, referencing the fire alarm we had at the speaker hotel in the early morning (and sticking it to Niels Leenheer 😛) Back in April I went to Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf. I initially planned on going as an attendee, but when organizer Marc asked me to speak I couldn’t say no … ~ Table of Contents The Talk Slides Recording/Video Thanks! ~ # The Talk I initially planned on giving the talk “Supercharge Web UX with View Transitions” at Beyond Tellerrand as the crowd is a mix of…
Our family is on vacation in North Carolina for a week, spending some time at a pool, and they're playing a (weirdly short) loop of music. Listening to She's In Love With The Boy for the fourth time I was thinking about how it's an example of a common pattern in country music: a repeating motif, recolored by the verses. In this case it's a father saying a boy isn't good enough for his daughter (verses 1 and 2) until his wife reminds him that her own father said the same thing about him (verse…
Heute hab ich mal was ganz Spezielles für euch. Ein Track der momentan in aller Munde ist, nämlich „Gut genug“ von Kitschkrieg feat. Blumengarten & Shirin David. Also Boombap ist es auf keinen Fall, ich würde es aber schon Richtung Hip Hop verordnen. Shirin finde ich eine passable Rapperin und die Message des Tracks ist auch geil. Einen sehenswerten Bericht über Kitschkrieg, gibt es übrigens hier. Könnt ihr euch auch mal anschauen. Also schreibt mal in die Kommentare, ob das auf einem Boombap…
"Masters of War" by Eddie Vedder Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that represents rebellion or freedom to you. - Masters of War by Bob Dylan, performed by Eddie Vedder The lyrics are just as powerful 60 years on as they were in the cold war days when Dylan wrote this. "Let me ask you one question, Is your money that good, Will it buy you forgiveness, Do you think that it could, I think you will find, When your death takes its toll, All the…
The Three Stooges was a minigame collection that was developed by Incredible Technologies and published by Cinemaware starring the titular Stooges, Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard, with the aforementioned minigames being based off of the short films starring the Stooges (e.g. the Punch Drunks boxing minigame). The main plotline involves the Stooges trying to find ways to raise money for an orphanage to prevent the evil banker (modelled off the creator of the Stooges, Ted Healy) from…
It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns! It features new albums from Spacemoth, Some Velvet Sidewalk, and Unlettered, plus a split LP from Sea Moss and Miscomings, all of which are out tomorrow (June 26th). If you missed either of this week’s earlier posts (Monday’s featured Sun Kin, National Photo Committee, Wade Easy, and Chorus Truly, and on Tuesday we looked at the upcoming Emperor X album), check those out, too. If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what…
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align. Tracks are added to…
My wife and I went to see the band Foreigner yesterday. If you’re not familiar with the band…like…have you been living under a rock!?!?! I promise you that you could have gone to the concert and you would have recognized 90% of the songs, just from hearing them in movies, TV shows, on the radio, singing them back in school, whatever. Let me give you a selection: Urgent Juke Box Hero I wanna know what Love is Cold as Ice Waiting for a Girl like You Feels like the first time Trust me — you know…
So, this whole "to buy Coffee, or not to buy Coffee, that is the question"-thing got me thinking a bit more: In my original post on the topic I made a call to "normalize giving" and I've been thinking: are there more ways of doing that, other than the giving itself? And then I thought: hey, we got all these commonly used slash pages like Blogroll for blogs we recommend, Postroll for individual posts, we got Uses, Default and Carry for things people use on a regular basis, sometimes specifically…
This is a really interesting historical and technical background to the unique and sexy sound of Morphine, one of my dear departed favorite 90’s bands. I knew Mark Sandman played a heavily modified bass with two strings, but didn’t know he played everything with a slide—and the action on his strings so high. I also like how the host goes into the interplay between Sandman and Dana Colley’s baritone sax and how the latter complimented both the bass and vocal melodies in such a unique way.…
There are 5 tracks here from Canadian Serena Pasion aka Peach. Music inspired by trips to, and incorporating field recordings from, the Philippines and Vietnam, plus a “Soak” in a Tokyo sento. The latter providing the EP with its title. In line with that relaxing session in a city public bath, everything is pretty chilled. “Bathtime Bliss” is ethereal ambient built from ripples of new age-y textures. An otherworldly synergy of gentle circuitry and computerised woodwind sighs. The soundscape…
Returning to ECM’s formative years can feel like entering a chamber where the future has been stored in mineral form. The label’s early catalog still radiates that paradoxical condition of sounding both newly born and long remembered, and in the context of this rare Japanese compilation series, the effect deepens into something almost ceremonial. Following its 1973 predecessor, ECM Special II gathers fragments from separate iterations of the same dream, arranging them not as a set of nested…
The Action is off-balance sheet
A fantastic debut. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize A special album for several reasons. It’s Lacy’s first album as a leader. It’s a quartet and the soprano is the only horn. Can’t think of any other album in my collection when that’s the case. A special one for me personally as well, as it’s an album from the 50’s, and I haven’t bought one from that decade in…
Oh no, a cheap clickbait listacle! Fear not, however, I come with good intentions. Staying abreast of new material in 2026 feels like navigating a tiny dinghy through a great storm of biblical scale. All you can do is cling on and stay the course through the sensory overload. The annual AOTY roundup functioning more like a fond farewell to releases we mildly enjoyed before they are consigned to the dustbin of history more than an actual review of the year. Since starting this blog in 2017, I’ve…
My music-fan cup runneth over lately, in the best way. An abundance of good-to-great-to-unbelievable shows over the past month that have left me wondering what I did in a past life (or maybe this one) to deserve all this. My post-pandemic “never say no” philosophy is paying serious dividends. And there’s a lot more ahead. […]
